Linux vs NT

I was recently just pondering server OSes. I currently own 7 computer systems running every major windows OS and Red Hat Linux. I was most excited when I originally got my Win2k server operational. It was easy to set up and was relatively simple to manage. Linux, in contrast, was a headache to set up and configure. It took me multiple months to finally get the system set up the way I wanted. At the time, my only aspirations were to use the server as a mail server. Here I am one year later and I have to say that I find my Linux server much more useful and exciting. Why? It is about the software. There is so much amazing stuff for Linux available for free. Take this site for example, MovableType is an open source Blog system, and is running on apache with PHP and using MySQL on the backend. All of these are free open source applications. It is amazing. Unfortunately, there is not nearly the variety of open source apps for NT. Thus NT is just stuck running basic apps such as IIS and other stuff. I am considering switching my NT server over to Linux. The only downside is that I lose active server pages. Hmmm, maybe I can find an ASP engine for Linux.

XBox Online

Mike S. in CA just purchased an XBox and so he and I have been playing online a bunch in the last few days. I forget how fun but also how annoying playing the XBox online is. I was having more problems yesterday playing. We start these games and the pings would like fine and then all of a sudden they would sky rocket and we woudl get horrible lag. Sometimes it was me and other times it was other people. There has to be a better way. I am hoping that XBox live works as promised. Online gaming is a blast when it works, but man what a head ache when it doesn’t. I can’t help but wonder how Microsoft is going to effectively manage the bandwidth and overall connectivity to prevent these
kinds of things from happening. The addition of voice in Live will make bandwidth management even more important. I am really very curious and looking forward to the public release of Live in November. I am still hoping to get in on the Beta test, but it is currently unclear about whether that will happen.

IP Woes

I am fortunate in that I have a DSL account that comes with two fixed IPs. One is being used by this Linux server while the other is being used by home LAN and NT server. The problem is that there is a chance that I might move in the next few months. I am trying to develop a contingency plan to figure out how to handle this situation. I have a second server ready to go, but curiously, none of my friends have fixed IPs. This a troubling situation as I cannot have my server go down because it handles all of my email as well as that for a few friends and also a number of important mailing lists. I am hoping to figure out a solution to this problem and would love to hear anyone’s thoughts. Does anyone using an ISP that does offer fixed IPs?