I’ve just been looking over some of the new plugins I’ve installed for wordpress. You will notice a daily “twitter” update. I’ve added a plugin that will post those daily and also send out a twitter when I’ve written a new post. Jessica thinks it’s silly. It’s not that I really care about the whole world knowing what I say. But if I say it online, I want it to be heard. Maybe I’m being funny and just want someone to laugh. Maybe I’m frustrated and just want someone to say, “yeah, I know what you mean”. That’s kinda the point of all this, you want someone to read when you write. I certainly have no aspirations of being some super blogger known throughout the world (you should be able to tell by the frequency of my posts).  Anyways, please don’t misunderstand, I completely understand where she’s coming from.  It’s just that I’m a dude. I love to integrate and update and use the newest technology etc. It’s fun for me. I’m not a sports fan, I’m a tech fan.

I haven’t worked on my Linux course in a couple weeks. I’ve had plenty of things keeping me busy. I do plan on getting back into it though. I’m also hoping to find time soon to switch my security gateway or UTM (unified threat management), which ever you wanna call it. Currently I use Untangle and I want to switch to Astaro.

Untangle is great, I’m not saying I’m unhappy with it. I uses many of it’s great features. It’s open source and free for anyone to use. I’ve been glad to have it. I run this computer without any anti-virus (yeah, I use windows…don’t hate) and I’ve never had to worry. I run frequent virus scans just to see how things are going and I must say I’ve had no problems. I also use the VPN to connect my office computer to my home network and access my FreeNAS server. I also use that in order to backup my server daily to a hard drive at my office and to back up extremely important work files to my home servers as well. That way I always have 2 copies of every file and both copies are at different locations. So if my house burns down, I still have my files. If my office gets burglarized, I have my files backed up. Ok I won’t preach at you about the importance of backup files.

Astaro uses open source and non-open source software so it’s not free for commercial use. Astaro is free for home users though. You have to install it on your own hardware (which you also must do with Untangle). I’m not changing because I think Astaro is better, not at all. I’m changing to check out Astaro. The guys I know who have used it, swear by it.  Ok, I also won’t preach at you about the benefit of gateway security over local security. (update – if you are interested in reading more, go to Jet the Nerd.)

I thought I’d throw that at ya. Since I spent so much time fixing the problem with posting pictures on our blog, I had to post at least one picture. So remember, Don’t Panic.