LISA Conference

I am headed to Dallas TX for the USENIX - LISA conference. I am not staying the entire week, just through Tuesday. I will be attending High Capacity Email System Design, and Tuesday I am going to the Postfix Configuration and Administration. I am excited about both of them. We are currently using Sopho's PureMessage for Unix which I have been very happy with. I deployed it 18 months ago on a Sun 280R with 2-900Mhz procs and 2 Gig of Ram. 6 months ago I upgraded it to 8 Gig of Ram. It is currently way past capacity. I have configured it to quit scanning email when the load gets high enough so that it can catch up. I am replacing it with 3 servers each with 2 - Quad Core 2.0 Ghz Xeon processors and 8 Gig of Ram. That should keep us spam free for a while. I am also going to be adding either Mailman or Majordomo for a list serve. I am currently using LDAP groups for this, and I am starting to need a more robust solution.

I would also like to offer our users the ability to to SMTAUTH via TLS. Sophos includes a version of either Sendmail or Postfix, but neither are compiled with very many options.

First Weeks with MacBook Pro

Well it happened, much like I knew it would. There was one major reason that I ordered the MacBook Pro over the MacBook. I wanted to be able to upgrade past 2gig of memory. I was also hesitant to pull the trigger on the order because I knew as soon as I did that Mac would announce an increase in horsepower in the Pro line. Sure enough both things happened. You can now get a MacBook that is capable of handling up to 4gig of memory and my 2.4ghz Pro can now be ordered as a 2.6ghz. I know that technology changes fast and that as soon as you buy something it is obsolete. I also know that I will never notice the difference between a 2.4 and a 2.6. It is just the principle of the thing. I guess I should have known that Leopard would not have been enough of a boost for holiday sales, that Mac would have to do something else to boost their Christmas sales.

All that being said I am still loving the Mac. I am finding more and more software replacements that I can run natively on my Mac, and I am having to boot up my virtual Windows OS less and less often. Now if anyone can just point me in the direction for a good LDAP Administrator that comes even close to replacing this ONE, I would be most grateful.