My new G5 arrived last week. This machine replaces (supplements) my old TiBook, which was really showing signs of age even with Panther. It is an understatement to say the G5 is a fast machine, and it makes programming a joy again.
Of all the machines in my office now, the new G5 most resembles another machine I got just a few months ago: an old Power Mac 9600. That machine was a monster in its day too. As a Linux server, it does the job quite nicely. I finally finished migrated this site and email to it last night. (If you’re wondering why I would move this site to such an old machine, I should point out that this site used to run on a Power Mac 7600, even more ancient and running an extremely old Linux Kernel. Both run Yellow Dog Linux.)
In the process I learned something valuable: Webmin is your friend. I had heard of this web-based unix administration suite years ago, but finally tried it yesterday. I configured a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know how to touch before now. I like the power of the command line, but using Webmin probably shaved two hours off of what I was doing. The only real problem I ran into was with Postfix, and I had to do a little troubleshooting with netstat and friends. Overall the migration went very well.
