The Geek Blog

I’ve never been one to give a shit about what of “me” is online.  I have blog(s), am on Twitter and many other social networking services.  Up until now, I’ve pretty much said my mind and didn’t care about the audience.  I made a judgment call error a while back on Twitter, and now I’m correcting the issue.

The question comes to be, how does one split yourself from your professional life online from your personal life?  To be honest, it’s fairly difficult if not impossible if you’re trying to keep your identity at all the same between the two.  For instance, I originally signed up with Twitter to broadcast things to my friends.  A friend of mine got interested as well, and we started following each other.  Then, I started working for the same employer and soon coworkers found my profile through my friend.  I have always tried to keep some level of anonymity but when my real picture was plastered on my twitter profile, it was hard to hide the fact it was me.

4000 updates later on Twitter, I’ve realized I can’t just say what I want any more.  See this article about a consulting firm of FedEx became angered when someone they were paying to help them made defaming remarks of the shit hole city they’re based in.

So now, I’ve gone private on Twitter, removed a number of followers I don’t know, and have returned to using it as a communication tool with people close to me.  No more bitching at the free world, no more possibly embarassing myself.  It sucks it had to come to this, but I need to realize I’m representing more than just myself online.  Since I’m associated with my coworkers, I’m therefore a voice for my employer.

I’m a fan of Unix operating systems in general.  That’s what got me interested in switching to Mac OS X because it’s Unix-based.  It was inevitable that I would eventually get a server-class machine again that wasn’t Mac-based.  The new Dell machine that I have running has Ubuntu 8.10 – a Debian-based machine which is something I’m new too.

I wanted to set up the Ubuntu machine to share files with the Macs on my network but not by using the crappy Samba protocol or even NFS.  I know both are troublesome and not as speedy on a Mac.  My only other choice was to get AFP working on the Ubuntu server and to my delight, packages exist for this.  Netatalk is an Appletalk daemon and Avahi is a Bonjour zeroconf equivalent.  Installing those packages and starting the services didn’t do it for me.  Leopard was having issues with the cleartext passwords being passed to AFPD so I went nowhere.

I did some digging and realized that OpenSSL isn’t GNU and therefore support for it in netatalk isn’t compiled in.  Not being super familar with how Debian packaging works, I looked for a guide to help me with recompiling and installing the updated netatalk package.

I found it and boy it’s an awesome guide.

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

Take a look, try it out.  It worked perfectly me for on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10).