Worst Blog Ever

I work for a very small not-for-profit organisation in Wellington, New Zealand. I was originally hired on as a Microsoft Access developer, but my role very rapidly expanded to virtually all aspects of IT not long after being hired. I have a pretty strong background using Microsoft products including various Windows operating systems as well as productivity applications; both as an advanced user and more on the technical side of things. All of which I have taught myself over the years.

Now, as the title of this post would indicate, I am very new to Linux, and until fairly recently, I had always dismissed Linux as an operating system for hobbyists, or uber-geeks; what with its hundreds of different distributions, and derivations, its command line interfaces, etc. That is until our office needed to upgrade from a peer-to-peer Windows network to a real server. As our office staff was increasing, the stress on the peer-to-peer network was getting out of control. There wasn't a day that would go by where staff wouldn't lose connectivity and we'd have to reboot the host machine. Things were getting pretty bad, pretty quickly. Being a very small not-for-profit however, we simply didn't have the funds required to purchase a new server and the requisite site licenses for Microsoft Small Business Server. Add to that is the fact that I have heard, from a true network administrator friend of mine, that administration of SBS could be quite tricky. This meant that we'd also have to get into a service agreement...again, something we couldn't afford.  So in desperation, I started looking into various low-cost options: Virtually hosted server, cloud services, various jury rigged solutions that required glue and duct tape, etc.  Through my search for a low cost solution to our problem is how I dove head long into Linux.

Without going into too much detail about the decision making process and all the products that I was testing, I'll simply say that we settled on a Linux Server distribution called Zentyal (formerly eBox). Zentyal was the answer to all of our problems, AND it was incredibly easy to set-up and administer! And I say this as a first time network-administrator! After my experience setting up a server using Linux, I thought:

Thus my journey into Linux Mint had begun.