September 2006


This summer, after coming back from a funeral, I took a job with a construction company, whose name will remain anonymous, in Sterling. I was offered the job before we left for the funeral, but took some time to think about it. Initially, my plan was to reject the offer, and I should have listened to my instincts. I ended up accepting the offer and started immediately after I returned back from my trip. The first week of training went very well, I thought. By mid-week of the second week, I felt that I understood the process and began to work independent. When I got into the bookkeeping part of the job, I realized very quickly that this company was very much in financial trouble. The payables were so overdue. Vendors were calling on a daily basis and at times make threats because they wanted their payments. My boss was very short and rude at times and seemed to so willingly put the blame on me for things that happened before I began my employment with them. I know that I did my best for them and worked diligently, however, you can only take so much of it. After being with them for almost three months, I began to experience things that I didn’t make me feel comfortable. My last Friday on the job, was payday Friday. I was reconciling the bank account and the balance in the checkbook was very negative. I went to cash my check on Saturday, and the bank wouldn’t cash my check. They told me I had to wait until Monday. That weekend, my husband and I decided that it was time for me to give notice. Needless to say, my employment was terminated and things worked out to my favor. All I can say is that it was the worst job ever and I would never recommend anybody to them.

I moved my web and mail server to a new provider, Jaguar PC. Nothing like building a server from scratch, it can be a real time sink. It took about a week just to get the mail server up. The server itself is using Virtuozzo to setup a virtual server. This is just like running a physical server and once you are on the box you really can’t tell that it is just a small part of a larger server.

The server runs Postfix for mail, Courier-IMAP for imap, MySQL for the database, and Apache for the web server. The biggest problem that I had was with building Courier-IMAP. I took me a long while to find the right rpms for this install. Since I needed mysql support, getting the right authlib files were the biggest problem. Another problem was with the famd support. I had to build that from scratch.

Once I got the mail server done, everything else just fell into place. I hope I don’t have to move this server for a while.