Changes afoot

11Nov07

I’ve had wonderful success with Ubuntu over the last month. There have been no posts for nearly 3 weeks, because nothing exceptional or worth mentioning has happened. It just works.

Based on this success I’m planning the most drastic change to our local network that I’ve made for quite some time. We’ve essentially got 3 machines here: the Inspiron 9400 I do all my work on, a desktop machine running Ubuntu 7.04 (turned on and off as required) and a Windows Server 2003 machine that runs 24×7 to host a couple of things as well as all our files. It’s called “bitbucket” for a reason.

Anyway, bitbucket is getting turned off. The last Windows machine on the LAN is going. I plan to move all the files from bitbucket to the desktop Linux machine and use a mix of samba and nfs to access them from the 9400 and any other machines that occasionally see action on the LAN. That Linux desktop will then stay on 24×7.

The two services that bitbucket provides are FogBugz and SharePoint. They’re both going too.

FogBugz has been very good to me for a long time, but I’ve become quite frustrated with it over the last 12 months. The user experience definitely took a turn for the worse when version 5 was released with all the AJAX stuff in it. It was not their finest release. Version 6 looks interesting based on all the work that Fog Creek have put into the evidence based scheduling, but I’m so far behind in support it will cost a small fortune to get back up to date. I’m much more inclined to put that money into a JIRA installation. It’s what we use at work, and it’s a far superior product to FogBugz in so many ways. Also, given that evidence based scheduling and Agile are completely different approaches, and that we’re much more aligned with the Agile way of thinking, EBS is of questionable value.

SharePoint has worked reasonably well too, but I’ve never quite liked it. We had a wiki a long time ago for lots of the collaborative work we were doing, and I moved away from that because (a) it was degrading into a big ball of mud, as wiki’s often do, and (b) some of the other collaborators preferred a document sharing model. I found they were often using local MS Word documents to compose things and then pasting the content into the wiki. I suggested SharePoint, we went with that (it was part of the Win2K3 installation anyway) and had some success, but I’ve always preferred the wiki way. I’m likely to push back in that direction again. The only real challenge will be keeping it organised. I have some ideas about how to do that based on what I do with the wiki we run at work: have an administrator create the structure and framework of the pages that you’re working with, and collaborators simply fill in the text. We have a pretty narrow problem domain that we’re tackling in terms of software development, so that won’t be too hard.

The only other thing that bitbucket does is host the subversion repository. Moving that to the Linux desktop should be trivial.

Once this is all done I might even consider running asterisk on the Linux desktop and routing my Engin VOIP connection through it. Maybe. We’ll see.

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