I was bored and intrigued at the same time, so I decided to switch my blog back to mediatemple, I previously canceled them three months ago due to poor performance. However I have been following them pretty close and watching the updates to the service they make on their blog and decided to give them a second chance and here are my first impressions after just a few days.

I am running a simple blog using wordpress nothing else to resource intensive.

Performance:  I am actually very surprised the performance seems to have improved 100% on both site accessibility and disk performance. Previously simple tasks such as using tar to create and extract small archives under 50k would take a lot of time (5 minutes+).
Performance Rating: 8/10

Control Panel: The control panel has some new improved layouts and features such as the mysql containers and a few other odds and ends. One of the pet peaves is the lack of “true multi domain” hosting. Everything is still shared with the main account, IE no sub accounts.
Control Panel Rating: 7/10

Signup Process: Simple and very easy to follow, my account was active within 5 minutes.
Signup Process Rating: 10/10

Overall I am pretty happy with the performance of my mediatemple account, I hope it stays this way and I will continue to migrate my personal sites over and continue to use my dedicated servers for development etc.

I was just sitting here thinking about the five applications I use most when logged into OS X on my macbook pro so I thought I would share.

1. Adium - This a must have instant messenger application that supports all the favorites services.
2. Firefox - A great alternative to browsing when safari just doesn’t cut it.
3. Coda - One of the best text editing and programming applications available.
4. iTunes - Need I say more.
5. Xtorrent - A great bit torrent client.

Recently I have had the pleasure to work with Microsoft active directory. The goal is to get CentOS 4.4 to authenticate from active directory for ssh/mail/telnet etc. Below is a quick “howto” of sorts that deals with setting up the Linux side to authenticate from active directory.

Much to my surprise I found this process really simple and pretty effective, I’ve collected some thoughts as to advantages and disadvantages in using kerberos on the Linux side to connect to active directory.

Advantages:
1. Streamlined authentication process
2. Easily maintenance (two config files)
3. Fall back to /etc/passwd
4. Apache has a krb5/ldap module to-do authentication that works against AD
5. No need for LDAP or two/one way syncing
6. Simple maintenance and setup

Disadvantages:
1. Requires user to be in /etc/passwd (no password needed)
2. User shell/uid/gid are maintained from the Unix side
3. If a user is removed from AD the user will need to be removed from the Linux side as well

Read more »

That was quick!

I guess the network over at canonical is down affecting all the ubuntu related sites including the ubuntu forums. Complete bummer, I hope it’s now down to long.