This week has been nothing short of an overload on my sensory nervous system from a technical standpoint.

The week started with a drive to Detroit, where I proceeded to reside for the remainder of the workweek. I was attending a VMware training course since my company is going to invest fairly heavily in virtualization this year. The class was an ‘advanced’ course with accelerated curriculum. Long story short, I had VMware jammed at me from 8a.m.-6p.m. 5 days straight. Normally a structure like this would be result in a distinct lack of sanity – however, with VMware the class was actually very enjoyable and interesting for me. The entire concept of virtualizing operating systems is fascinating to me, and it really is changing (or, has already changed) the entire IT industry.

In a sense, this course almost motivated me. The very second I got home on Friday evening I started to mess around with my own home network. Here I sit on Saturday evening with an upgraded Destkop computer (Ubuntu 8.04), a new Ubuntu 8.04 server running on a spare 2 ghz workstation we have, and a fairly cool home network.

I now have all my media and documents centralized on this Ubuntu server, and I’ve published that using NFS so the files are accessible from both my laptop and my desktop computers. It’s been a learning experience for me because I’ve worked with Windows server systems for so long, but it’s been really fun for me to tinker around with Ubuntu from a server OS perspective.

I went even further and also set the server up to take over DHCP and DNS (vs my netgear router giving out IPs and resolving names), installed apache web server, added a web based management front end called eBox, installed MediaWiki, and finally added a cool little “Chat with Eric” applet that I had noticed Google published for their Google talk service. (click on the About page, it’s there too)

A little odd for me to start on a tech bender like this, especially since I was over-loaded with tech info all week long.

Either way, it’s been fun.