Or, how to be the biggest network geek you can in only 1 square foot of space. Starting last year after reading Ward Mundy's How-To Bonanza, I knew I needed to use the Mac Mini as the core hardware component for my home network. Mostly because it looks good and small form fits easily on my desk. Good as that might be, the Mac Minis do have drawbacks and, if you're serious about your hosting choices, these do have to be overcome; this is what my post is all about.

One of my few New Year's resolutions was to blog often in the year 2006, in fact, I promised myself I was going to write at least one post every day. Well it's been two weeks since my last update and the world has missed some pretty good brain dumps from yours truly (sorry about that) but I have been keeping good notes and I do have great news about today!

Over the past few weeks I have been cooking up a storm in my digital kitchen with one of the best content management systems around, Drupal. This is the same CMS that runs the metaskills.net site and it has a good history for not just being a Blog or Forum software but an entire community platform, thus Drupal's tag line, Community Plumbing.

After being exposed to using TextMate for all my normal text editing needs, I soon began to do more things than just simple GREP-based search and replace functions. I actually started to look at code more often. Within a few short months, I had gone away from my established norm of the happenstantial viewing of simple CSS, HTML and PlainText files to a ful-time lookey lou of languages such as Ruby, XML, PHP, SQL or any number of configuration files for Apache, PHP, Postfix, Bind, and so on. It's been an exciting time for me over the past 6 months and it feels like open hunting season on any hard to find UNIX application files that are deep in the brush of my Mac OS X. Belive me, treasure are rich once you start digging.

About a year ago a fellow co-worker of mine was raving that I should learn VIM from the command line interface (CLI) so that I could use it for all my text editing needs. My co-worker at the time was (and probably still is) the Systems Administrator and Lead Application Developer for a company that sold cheap discount software. During my tenure there I served as the Marketing Manager and as such, many of my projects to completely overhaul their search engine and online marketing strategies called for aligning their internal tools and processes. While doing said technical revamps and specification writing, I guess I was exposed as more of a geek than your typical marketer. Hence the recommendation to go further down the rabbit hole. DISCLAIMER: before I go any further -- I would like to say, yes, that link up there is a shameless plug and is meant only to help in the organic search strategies for PlanetCDROM.com. OK, I feel better.

Lately, I've been loving all things that can be solved by using RsyncX. It's my de facto backup utility and I just keep finding more and more tasks for it as each day goes by. It has become the hammer for all my system's needs. So when it came time for me to implement a nice little backup routine for the MySQL databases hosted here at ActionMoniker.com, it was the first tool I considered. My requirements were simple, I needed a SQL script of selected databases in logically named folders for each DB with time-stamps in the file name. Then step and repeat on a regular basis.