Lots of new technology, lots of projects on the horizon: Trango, Canopy, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, backups...

...need I continue. Anywhere Technology has a good number of new projects on the horizon that I'm hoping to document with this weblog. One of my last projects was to get bacula up and running to finally take care of those nagging late night rememberings that I forgot to run my weekly backups. I had intended to document that project but found so many resources on the web that described how to install and configure bacula that I gave up trying to document it. One word to any aspiring administrators: never forget to document what you have done to create or install a new process that you depend on. What I have fooled myself into thinking (more times than I can count) is that if the documents exist now, they will exist when I need them again. The problem is that every new server/daemon I have put into service is tweaked to fit the needs of the system on which I am installing it. The fact is that if you are good enough and are capable of following directions (obscure as they may be), it is likely that you won't have to go back to do any work on what you implemented for some time. By the time your return to your project for maintenance or major upgrades, you have forgotten much of what makes your installation work for you. So, one of my new New Year's resolutions is to actually document what I do.
With the growth in the ISP portion of Anywhere Technology, I have a number of very difficult decisions to make. Now I better understand many of the difficult choices my Dad had to make all the years nurturing the business at Tankcraft. While it is relatively easy or straightforward to run a small business, the difficulty is twofold. One, if you are small, it is difficult to make things work financially - to support the ongoing costs of doing business and try to cut a paycheck for yourself. Two, if the opportunity presents itself to grow the business, you have the tough choice to give less attention to your current customers and go after new ones. In my situation, it seems like the timing is good to go after new territory because current customers are relatively quiet. I won't forget what my Dad told me early on that it is easy to get new customers, but it is difficult to keep them. That phrase rings loud in my head when I contemplate moving ahead. Once the decision is made, we find ourself with yet more decisions. See the routine? Decisons, decisions, decisions...
What does the future hold? Right now I am working on our new tower design. I am trying to decide whether to dump my current manufacturer, Trango and go with Motorola's Canopy system. I'm not totally unhappy with Trango, but there are nagging issues of which I don't see any move towards resolution (ahem - fixing the SNMP monitoring of bandwidth usage on the M900S SU's that we were told would come some months ago - to name one). I also like the outlook that Motorola paints for its Canopy product. I've been burned by Moto before (not directly), but I think that they have resolved some of their management issues that created the problems in the past. Hopefully I will hear from some current Canopy users tomorrow or at least by Thursday to help make my decision.
Hopefully I'll have time to talk more about my experiences with my current equipment... In the mean time, I'll go to bed so I can get some more work done tomorrow.