Hi guys,
maybe some of you were wondering that I’ve written something about Mac OS X Server yesterday. Well, the truth is, that with the 30″ Cinema HD Display, I’ve also ordered a Mac mini Snow Leopard Server. Planned as Media-Station & Server-mixture in the living room, it turned out, that this will not work as expected. But… let me start at the beginning…
Good evening,
after some days of silence, I think it makes sense to explain what happend.
First of all: I’ve launched my business “dennisklein.eu” successfully on Monday 
So – great to be back to my own business.
But let me scroll back a few days. The last time, I’ve told you, that I’ve moved to a new ISP, called VirtualBots. They had a nice offer to testdrive the vServer for 30 days. I was impressed, grabbed one package and asked them if it’s possible to upgrade with a managed software. They wanted to do the management and installed Confixx (by Parallels) for me. This thing worked smooth and nice, with some rough corners. For example the security of the Apache was not as I hoped, I could not even install phpSysInfo (and who knows me KNOWS that I love phpSysInfo!). I was nearly finished moving most of my websites to the new server (which now costed 60€ instead of 19€ monthly, which is a fair price) – the main server dropped off. Nothing. Silence. OF COURSE, my old webserver decided to do the same at this morning. So – nothing worked. No mail, no website. I was able to restart my olden goldie webserver at Server4You with a remote hard-reset. And it was back. Of course – broken and need to be replaced pretty soon.
Hi there,
Friday was the last day at aap3 @Cisco. I went to the office in Düsseldorf, did some last work like adding a new podcast to the Cisco.de and sorting out the last stuff I had in my mailbox. At the end of the day, I sent out a “good bye” eMail to all the guys I worked with over the last 20 months inside and outside of Cisco. I also wanted to share this eMail with you, my loyal readers.
today is my last day here at aap3/Cisco. I don’t want to write down a long story about the up and downs I had here at Cisco. It was mostly a great time and I will really miss the work with you.
What I wanted to do is to say: Thank you! Thank you for including me into this company and letting me work in a working area that felt more like a family than working with colleagues. Even if I sometimes had other ideas of some things
If you want to stay in contact with me, feel free to contact me on my private messenger
[...]
Or simply drop me a mail to my eMail address. If you are ever in need of a webdesign or something different, feel free to contact me and visit my website on www.dennisklein.eu
Ciao
Dennis
[...]
Giving back my ThinkPad T60, that I used all those months, was not that easy, but in the end, we sorted that out as well. Leaving this position was not initiated from my site, so it was in one way hard to leave – giving back all the stuff like my personal badge and the key for the parking lot. When I drove home in the (like everytime) overcrowded and jammed highway, I resumed the last months. It’s a good point to leave this (mostly) behind me and start into my new life. Cisco was everytime a good name in my CV, but with their decision to move the services that we provided to a new near-shore team in Poland, I should loose my loyality to Cisco, but for my surprise I don’t. The decision was made in the HQ in San Jose, CA, and nearly noone there knows us personally (just a hand full), so it was not personal. As written in my eMail, I will miss a lot of those guys and I hope I well keep in touch with them. The web is full of options for doing this
The next chapter is now to prepare everything for my own company, that I will start up in February next year. I don’t want to give details at this time, but it really looks promising.
With the jump into a new life and company, I wanted to get rid of my long term “in-head-fights” regarding the right OS (I’d blogged a lot in the past about that topic). After some weeks of creating draws of high-end workstations for PCs, creating great and reliable servers on the paper and calculating costs for the new licences, I wanted to do it better this time. Yes – I worked very good with the Windows XP on my ThinkPad, but what I did for Cisco was nothing that I would call really creative work – just minor things in Photoshop and mostly content management. That was – by the way – one of my painpoints with the job at aap3 @Cisco.
So – wenting back into creative things, I decided yesterday to NOT go the way using Windows. It’s not against Windows, I’ve got my package of Windows 7 Home Premium a few weeks ago and used it since that date. I simply don’t like the workflow, the GUI (yeah – crazy – but for me it is important to feel happy with my OS and the optic it delivers) and the price of their server stuff. I was about to get a new Mac Pro with 8 Cores (2x Xeon 5520 CPUs), but – I also could really need a new display. Hmm.. I’m still very happy with my MacBook that I’ve got in spring this year, so glossy is not a pro, but a thing I (hopefully can live with). The new computer on my desk will be an iMac 27″ Core i7 with (in the end) 16GB of RAM. Nice machine with 8 “virtual” cores, so it will be also fine to render my stuff with, fast enough to do Final Cut stuff and of course great for Photoshop 
But wait a second. Server for Windows was planned and now I jump off the bandwagon by just getting a simply All-in-one-computer? Well – not really. The new Mac mini Server is also on my list to get, even if I will wait with that order until my company launches in spring in 2010. The iMac will be ordered tomorrow at my fav. dealer TryTec! in Bochum. The waiting period is a long one – 2-3 weeks 
. Damn Apple… create more of them . Until that time, I will work with my MacBook and Hackintosh (oops! 
).
The Mac mini Server will contain 2x 500GB HDDs which I will be put into a RAID1 (mirror), to have my stuff save. The server will mainly be a communication server for eMails, addresses and events, but also share my files to the iMac and the MacBook. I have overall 9x 1TB HDDs here, but I will just use 4 of them for the server. I will get one of those things:
This “Hydra” called device allows me to create a hardware RAID5 internally and share this with the Mac mini Server and from there to the network. 3.8TB will be available. If needed, I could get another one. It has Firewire 800 connections, so it’s stackable and nice fast.
Yeah, I’ve also thought about a Drobo, but there are too many reports about data loss, and that’s something that I don’t want to risk.
So – that’s it for know. I will keep you updated on news regarding my business as this private blog will turn into my business-blog aswell over the next few months (which does not mean, that I will stop blogging stuff as before).
Have a great 1st advent!
Ciao
Dennis
