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Archives For 30 November 2012

2012 in review: my blog was read by people from 165 different countries

31 December 2012 — Leave a comment

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys surprised me today with their 2012 annual report.

Here’s an excerpt:

My blog had 33,000 views in 2012. The busiest day of the year was September 4th with 644 views. The most popular post that day was How I replaced the CloudStack Virtual Router with my own physical Linux router that was featured on Linux Today.

Visitors came from 165 different countries.. wow! Most came from The United States, followed by The Netherlands and Germany. A lot of the visitors were searching on Google, some on Twitter, and found my blog that way.

Click here to see the complete report.

Thank you all and I wish you all the best in 2013!

See ya there 🙂

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First results in getting my Linux knowledge certified: LPIC-1 and CLA

28 December 2012 — 6 Comments

After passing my Bachelor of Computer Science I never took the time to take any specific Linux exam. But I’ve been working with Linux for about 14 years, so I know a lot about it. Now that I started my new job this month, I thought it was also time to get Linux certified.

I’ve been given the opportunity to get some training from SUSE (which is the distribution we use at work), and I’m really happy about that. Yes, I do have a nice employer 🙂

Let me tell you a bit about the different certification options for Linux. LPI is vendor neutral, whereas Red Hat and SUSE focus on their specific distributions of Linux. Still Linux, so the underlying knowledge is the same. The LPI Netherlands web site has a nice overview of all Linux certifications available (thanks!) that I’ve copied below:

linux_training_overview

lpic1_largeOne has to take the exams in the right order: start at the so called ‘Junior’-level, and work your way down. That’s why I decided to do some self-study and take the LPI-101 and LPI-102 exams to become LPIC-1 certified. I passed the first exam last week (730/800), and the second one today (700/800). As a bonus, I also received the Novell/SUSE Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) certificate. So this is a nice first step.

I’ll be taking the SUSE Certified Linux Professional (CLP) and SUSE Certified Linux Engineer (CLE) exams next month. Before that, I plan on doing some more self-study and take the LPIC-2 exams as well.

From what I’ve seen so far the LPI exams are nice and fill up some blanks in my knowledge. Especially LPIC-1 wasn’t too hard and I had fun going through the objectives. In fact, I already started looking at the LPI-201 exam and am looking forward to it. I come across most objectives in my day-to-day work; some more often than others of course. It’s nice to learn a new command or parameter and be able to use it from then on to do your job better. That is going forward!

I’ll keep you posted..

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Using Exchange services on a Linux Desktop with DavMail

11 December 2012 — Leave a comment

Since I started my new job last week, I no longer work on a Mac desktop. I now use Ubuntu instead. Our company has an Exchange server and uses Active Directory for authentication. Using a Linux desktop in a Windows environment can be a bit challenging. While you can use Thunderbird to use imap, features like calandar and global address book are not available. Of course there’s Terminal Services using RDP but this is not ideal. My new colleagues pointed me to a little tool called DavMail.

davmail-settingsDavMail is a Java program that makes an imap, pop, smtp, calandar and even ldap server available to localhost. It translates requests to the local server and points them to the OWA (Outlook Web Access url) provided by Exchange. This way, my Linux Desktop can use all the services normally not available on Linux. Mail (both incoming and outgoing), calandar and even auto completion of names and e-mail addresses of all of my colleagues work perfectly.

This rocks, thanks guys!

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