I've learnt alot over the last couple of days. I've had my first hands-on experience with some Sun kit, (cheers Jim) I think it was a V240 server. I learnt a bit about Solaris, and about how good their 17" CRT's are (out of my price range.) I've also learned a bit more about different failovers for different servers. For example top end Sun machine's have no single point of failure (When set in RAID 1) and anything that can fail, can be replaced whilst the server is running. That's something you certainly do not get with Dell - but they are a whole lot cheaper, and - listen to this - it's cheaper to buy a Dell machine than it is to build your own!

I have also learnt about Software RAID and ye olde versions of Linux (RedHat 8) I run RH9 at home, use RHES at work, and really like Fedora! I suppose all this exposure will be good for my final year - although there seems to be no explicit Unix and Linux modules.

One thing I was suprised at today was the ease in which I server could blow another server completly off the network - with no warning! It all happened about 3.30 today. I was sitting in on another server build but this time it was Windows 2003. My colleague gave the server a supposidly free ip address to it. The server took the IP address no problem- no arguments nothing. But as I paid more attention I realised that it was the same ip address as a server running RHES. We ran to its console (We didn't really we just chose it from a list on the KVM) and sure enough this server had just relinquished its ip address - no questions asked!

I suppose there is a need out there to be able to monitor this activity to be able to prevent hostile "in house" threats. Perhaps it was the domain's doing? Thinking that this Windows box is far more important than this Linux one? Does anyone know any product out there to stop this from happening?

On another note, I have a summer WWW related project, which will hopefully get me up to speed with technologies I wish to use for my project. My partner in crime for this is Peter Trickey - my house mate from last year, and my house mate for next year, and Aston Villa buddy!