Hi mperry. It sounds like you've arrived at a crossroads in your life and I wish you the best in your future endeavours.

Your diary entry yesterday was most tantalising and I find myself wondering how much of the change in your life is related to unstoppable events at work.

Will Linuxcare implode on itself like a dying star? Almost no news comes out of that company these days. Once upon a time, people would dread the poison pen of Maureen O'Gara as she sought to trash Linuxcare and all other Linux companies. These days, Linuxcare isn't even important enough to be worthy of her bile.

It's true what they say: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Anyway, I successfully migrated all services from my old machine in Amsterdam and now have everything running on a new machine in my apartment, down here in Palo Alto.

The last few weeks have seen me fine-tuning the configuration of Postfix and BIND, as well as nailing down the security of my network as tightly as possible.

I've now got IPSec based access into Google, which is very convenient when I'm on-call.

I also installed an excellent Web based e-mail client for family and friends to use to access their e-mail account. I didn't want to be offering either POP or IMAP over the Internet, so SquirrelMail provided an excellent alternative.

Future projects will see incremental improvements in the network here. I require more flexible logging, which I'll get from either msyslog or syslog-ng.

Then I'll need a more secure FTP daemon, for which I'll probably go with vsftpd. Another worthy project is monitoring, where I'll probably use mon, since that has served me well in the past. Somewhere down the road, I also want to install a news server to gate some of the mailing lists I'm on to newsgroups.

In short, projects aplenty. The only issue, as always, is finding the time.

I dropped Sarah off at San Jose airport this morning. I felt as nervous as hell while she was in the air. I'm flying out to the east coast Friday night and I'm not worried for my own safety at all, but it was awful knowing that the person I care most about in the world was in what has been exposed as an extremely vulnerable position. To my great relief, she arrived safe and sound.