Hey everybody! Let's have some fun and trot out an old chestnut.

The president of my company suddenly thinks... hey Exchange online and Office365 is way too expensive.

My reply was "yes, let's just NOT do E/O and watch the riots start.

So, just because we are in need of a good time....

Let's just say.. I agree with him (blunt force trauma often gets me seeing things in a logical manner),

No more Exchange server
No more Office (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook)

So we go with.....

Gmail Hosted Email paired with LibreOffice?
Rackspace Email paired with Thunderbird?

Sauteed Chilean sea bass... potatoes au gratin... asparagus....paired with ...Rum Raisin?

Go on, lets just push this Bric-à-brac cabinet down a flight of stairs. See what we end up with.

Don't you love theoretical party games?

Most Kind Regards,

Paul "put a cherry tomato back together after it was in the blender" Luciano, MCSE

@Breffni-Potter only if it's under your desk at home.... No no, no reason to have a UPS or daily backup. That just adds to the cost per month.

I bought a brand new server with 12 HDD at 10k RPM and 900 GB each. The plan is to create an ESXi embedded server (with ESXi on the SD Card). Might people weigh in with their thoughts on the best HDD config? I could go RAID 10 or RAID 6. I suppose I could go other. I have the server still wrapped in foam, so I can make the final decision BEFORE I fire it up, configure it, sigh and then rebuild it. I would prefer to get as much HDD space after formatting as possible. I don't really have any VMs that would require 15k RPM drives (no High Performance SQL server, no Exchange Server, etc.), so I look for the balance between speed and reliability since apparently RAID 5 is the sin of sins.

So much to learn since I started this job.

I'd offer HP and BA, but I don't Mango Lassi is into that sort of thing. You can get a hearty handshake or a good swift kick in the @$$. I'll deliver either personally.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Paul Luciano, MCSE

The multi-year quest continues.

My challenge (to myself) is to find a linux distro that I can set up to run on a USB stick. I have an old Lenovo laptop this runs ok, but I wanted to have it boot/run off a USB stick, not a HDD. The DVD player has been removed, so has the HDD.

I have worked with Puppy Linux and some variants of it. I love the "do you want to have PL save changes to the USB Stick (aka Persistant?)" feature. This allows me to have the USB stick work/act like a HDD.

What is awful is the WiFi connection tools. In some cases it wants me to manually enter data like the security protocol and related data.

None of my other devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) or brand new laptop using w7 or w10 have this issue.

At the suggestion of Jason while at MangoCon: The Search for Justice, I tried Tails. Not bad, but I ran into roadblocks trying to get any RDP app to download/install.

Lubuntu failed to install on my usb sticks (note the "S" - because I tried it on several sticks... yes name brand, as I know sometimes the knock offs don't initialize properly).

Anyone know of a Linux Distro that is light (not Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux) that has persistence set up within the OS for running on a USB stick?

Need to run Firefox or Chromium web browser, RDP (rdesktop is fine) and have a solid/stable WiFi connecting tool.

Thoughts from the hive mind?

Thank you.

Regards,

Paul "buzz I say.. buzz" Luciano, MCSE