rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:
FreeBSD 6.2
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

For the past couple of week, I am trying to refresh my Linux skills, I abandoned Linux as the server platform of choice in favor of FreeBSD, but recently unfortunately FreeBSD isn’t supported as Linux, and sometimes Linux have this weired feature that isn’t available in FreeBSD, e.g. DRDB.

I am big FreeBSD fan, and I loved it even more when I worked with Linux, Ubuntu, the Linux distribution I use, is really impressive as a desktop OS, but if you want to hack the system, and play with its internal it doesn’t give much room, and this the exact reason I switched from Windows to Linux 10 years ago.

Two weeks ago I visited Jeddah city for the first time since 1990, yes 17 years since my last visit!

I made my flight reservation on Saudi Airlines, and the only return flight I found was on Friday 7am, and since the flight is so early it will ruin my Thursday too, I decided to try the new economical air lines, Sama or Nas.

I visited the two sites, and I made my decision on how good the website was.

Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management

Chose Storage. Then chose Disk Management. And now you can play with the partition sizes.

After spending 6 years at SAUDI NET, Abdullah Aldosari has left us and joined Mobily.

Abdullah was our system architect, with large arsenal of skills talents, we have working very tightly all these years. SAUDI NET sure lost a very valuable team member.

Abdullah it has been a pleasure and honor to work with you.

Warning: It is the same design converted to CSS.

After 5 weeks of development and testing, Alriyadh.com is now converted to CSS based design, it still not 100% complete.

You can view the design by using this URL:
www2.alriyadh.com

Some benefits of moving to CSS:

• Fonts look the same a cross browsers: I am using Yahoo! User Interface Library fonts file to guarantee that font have the same size a cross browsers.
• Page are bit smaller: because many presentation tags are now removed from the HMTL and put in the CSS.
• Printer friendly by default: we now have have separate CSS file for printing, so no need for printer friendly page since all page are automatically are.
• PDA friendly by default: same as printer CSS, not implemented yet.
• Rendering is faster.
• It will simplify future redesign. (since we are talking about redesign, suggestion are welcomed 🙂 )

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.

Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.

In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere 🙂

Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.

Ubuntu Linux is really easy OS with many interesting features, one of the best sites to help you with your Ubuntu experince is Ubuntu Guide, the site has many useful tips on how to do thing in Ubuntu.

One of the tips is how to install Internet Explorer under Ubuntu, I saw Fahad AlShenaifi do it, he is our Ubuntu expert since he is using it exclusively for the past year or so.

CentOS is a freely available Linux distribution which is based on Red Hat’s commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product. This rebuild project strives to be 100% binary compatible with the upstream product, and within its mainline and updates, to not vary from that goal. Additional software archives hold later versions of such packages, along with other Free and Open Source Software RPM based packagings. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Dovecot version 1.0.0 finally released, after almost 5 years of development.

Dovecot is IMAP and POP3 server, it is one of the best and easiest servers I ever worked with, easy enough for home environment, and flexible and powerful enough for service providers.

I’ve tested it earlier before and hopefully we will migrate to it later this year.

Dovecot integrate very well with Postfix mail server (Postfix handle SMTP, Dovecot handle POP3+IMAP), and can easily support virtual hosting.