Since it’s a new year and everything I find it natural that I do something noone would ever believe I would do, so I went off and installed VMware ESXi on one of my servers, created myself a virtual server and installed Microsoft Windows 2008 trail version. My goal is to setup a fully functional Active Directory Domain without any prior experience in Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory is one of few thing I’m really curious about when it comes to Microsoft products, it’s so integrated in the system with single sign-on in difference to UNIX/Linux that I’m used to.

My first experience was that everything was very easy to install and all information I needed to configure the basics were provided in the configuration dialog. Everything went really smooth and easy until I had installed the Active Directory Service and Windows asked me to reboot. I did reboot and afterwards my Administrator password didn’t work, only solution: re-install…

After a nights sleep I’m back in the game with a new installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. I’m doing pretty much the same thing as yesterday with the difference that I’m not deadly tired this time. After the installation and configuration of Active Directory is done I restart my server and to my surprise everything works and after solving a minor DNS-issue my virtualized Microsoft Windows XP is now a part of the Active Directory Domain.

Microsoft Active Directory is easy to use and so simple to install that it could be done even for the smallest office that needs to centralize documents and/or programs. Why Linux/UNIX is so far behind when it comes to these kind of feature is a question and I believe it’s important that open source community do something about this in order to get Linux onto the desktops in offices world-wide.

It was barely a year since I said it last time: We still have a lot to learn from Microsoft and it’s not all about marketing.

2008 has come to an end and as usual in the end of a year you think back on what and where it brought you. For me 2008 begun at the top, I had a new job since a few months and during the first three months of the year I managed to get interviewed in Computer Sweden not only once, but twice. There was a lot more stress on my new job and in May when it was time for the anual meeting in Svenska Linuxföreningen (The Linux Society of Sweden) I decided that I had to resign as chairman in favor for someone that acctually had the time.

I was working all summer and this is when I got introduced to a CMS named Escenic that has become something I work with on almost a daily basis. In the early summer I attended Nordic Nagios Meet in Stockholm, Sweden where I got amazed by RRDtools and meet some interesting people at the dinner reception and drinks in the evening.

In the middle of the summer, all unexpected, I met Mr. Right and it didn’t take many months before he moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm to live with me. Despite the feeling of new love the autumn has been rough and utterly exhausting. After a stressful summer my body told me it had enough and I had to realize that even I had a limit for how much I could work and how much responsibility I could take upon my shoulders. It was a very unpleasant, but still a very enlightening experience and a valuable lesson for the future.

In September I attended Sec-T, the first security event for a technical audience in Sweden. It was a pure frightening experience and I really don’t want my computers hooked up to the Internet, but for what use would they be if they wasn’t? Most frightening was Sockstress which most likely is the security hole of the year. It’s pretty much like a DoS attack, but with only a small amount of traffic you can put down a remote target in a matter of minutes. Who’s vulnerable for this attack? Only everyone using TCP/IP…

In the end of the year I thought that maybe I need something else to do besides working and thinking about work so I decided it was time for me to work on fulfilling my next dream. Said and done I joined Data3, an organisation for AS/400 and iSeries professionals, to see what the community around these computers that caugh my interest could offer. I’ve had my own AS/400 since 2006, but it’s very old and different from the new iSeries. I begun my hunt for an iSeries once again to finaly being able to combine what impress me with the AS/400 with my experience in Linux. Maybe it really is time for me to fulfill this dream in 2009 because it finaly seems like a company is willing to lend me one. :)

I spent Christmas at home together with my boyfriend and both of us had on-call duty during the holidays. At least we got ourselves a nice christmas present, a PlayStation 3, so now we finaly have a decent processor architecture in the living room. ;)

Being on-call duty is also how I’m going to end 2008 and begin 2009. Hopefully I will have a calm evening and night so I’ll have time to celebrate the new year and everything it will bring with a glass of champagne.

Happy New Year and let 2009 be the year when you fulfill one of your dreams.

From a cold Stockholm with about half a centimeter of snow I would like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas!

Myself I spend Christmas at home in Stockholm together with my boyfriend this year as we both are on-call duty during Christmas. So far so good, but we never know where we end up celebrating this Christmas… For now we’re both still at home, but we might end up where it’s dry weather, ~25C with slight breezes and it’s not the Canarie Islands… ;)