You ever have an old car that you refuse to relinquish because it continues to get 10 miles to the gallon and you've had so many memories with it? Sure, you've seen the commercials for those fancy cars that are more environment friendly, safer to drive, and have a built-in GPS, but you still refuse to surrender old "Eleanor" for some new technology. Until recently, I've been on that same bus only my car was Subversion. I've been using Subversion for the past two years as my Source Code Management (SCM) system of choice. Just recently, I spent over three hours dealing with a corrupt Subversion repository. This single event was the straw that broke the camel's back, in fact, it didn't just break the back, it smashed the camel into a little pancake. Therefore, I decided to 'Git' rid of Subversion and give Git a shot at the title.

As many of you may remember from my last upgrade, things usually don't go all that well for me, especially when I'm gambling with technology. A friend of mine at work has been encouraging me to upgrade to the latest flavor of Ubuntu, but given my past history, I've shyed away from the early adopter philosophy when it comes to Ubuntu server upgrades. Now that it has been over a month since the release of Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS, I decided to cross my fingers and dive head first into an upgrade on a Friday night.

For those Ubuntu users out there, you are likely aware of the latest release, Gutsy Gibbon.Some of my buddies at work were wondering if I had upgraded the cluster o' servers in my office yet. The answer, at least until about 10pm tonight was no. In fact, after the last upgrade to Feisty Fawn, I was somewhat hesitant to ever upgrade again.

Floyd Mayweather may be the pound-for-pound best fighter in boxing, but my apartment is likely the bit-for-byte champ when it comes to having the most electronically decorated dwelling space within my complex. With a staggering amount of electricity flowing through the veins that power this little corner of my world, it's no surprise that I have to occasionally make some sacrifices to keep things working. Sometimes it's trying out new things, other times I roll the dice and break something, and more frequently than not, I find myself just purchasing new toys. When it comes to these activities, it's always a game of chance and sometimes like a boxing match between me and my digital opponents in the other room. Sometimes I'm the recipient of that right hook, other times I'm the deliverer.

A few weeks ago I was reading an article in Inc.com magazine that talked about a company called Backcountry. They are an online retailer of high end gear for outdoor enthusiasts. In one section of the article, the owner of the company mentions that they have grown to adopt open-source solutions as a cost-effective means to conduct business. Although not very surprising, what sparked my interest in the article the most was the mention of enterprise solution they selected for email, a product called Zimbra. How could it be that I had never heard of this software? Egads, I must know more about it and so my adventure begins.

Alright, so no network would be complete if someone didn't use pine or otherwise configure SSH in a way that did some type of port forwarding. As it turns out, I have been using SSH for quite some time for a number of reasons including website management, email, and system administration. Although it's a convenient way to tasks remotely, it's certainly not intuitive nor does it provide the level of simplicity and convenience I wanted. I literally wanted to point and click my way to having secure remote access to my home network from anywhere in the world.

A long time ago in a distant galaxy I wrote a few firewall rules for iptables. At the time, they were more than sufficient to protect my lonely router from the filthy internet. My network gradually grew over the course of many years and since that time these firewall rules have been mangled, munged, and otherwise become unparseable to all but the most adept Linux operating system. Over the past two weeks, I set forth on a journey to take what was a lagoon full of random packet filtering rules and organize them in such a way that they actually made sense to a human.