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+Linux:At the Office
+===================
+:author: Aaron Ball
+:email: nullspoon@iohq.net
+
+
+== {doctitle}
+
+I have been running Linux on my laptop at home for the last four-ish years now
+and it's given me very little trouble. Mostly it's just been the growing pains
+of each of the projects. I just recently started running Linux on my laptop at
+work as well (if you manage Linux servers, why not use Linux to do it).
+Inevitably, the question has been asked numerous times "what open source Linux
+software out there can do this thing I need to do?" Usually when I start
+researching that though, I find myself wishing to know what everyone else uses
+and there just doesn't seem to be a lot of blog posts on that. That said, here
+we go.
+
+The things I do in my day usually entail the following
+
+
+[[email]]
+== Email
+
+Awwww yeah. This one is everyone's favorite topic I'm pretty sure. I recently
+read an article about how one of the greatest deficiencies of Linux is its lack
+of really solid mail clients. This is true to a certain extent. While Linux has
+a couple of pretty solid mail clients,
+http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/[Evolution] and
+http://www.kde.org/applications/internet/kmail/[KMail], they both still lack
+reliable Exchange support. Evolution has an Exchange mapi plugin, but it was
+pretty buggy for me. It also has support for Exchange EWS, but your exchange
+web services need to be set up correctly for that to work.
+
+The solution I found here, after an unfortunate amount of time hunting around,
+is called http://davmail.sourceforge.net/[DavMail]. I have to say that this
+little piece of software is really great. Exchange basically provides three
+main pieces of functionality: email, calendar syncing, and Active Directory
+address book searching and syncing. All three of these pieces have open source
+equivelants: IMAP+, CalDav, and CardDav. What DavMail does is connect to the
+Exchange server and provide a local server for each of these services. With
+this you need not make any wonky changes to your mail client or use any
+unstable plugins. You simply use what's already tried and true (and open source
+if that's important to you): IMAP, CalDav, and CardDav.
+
+
+[[vpn]]
+== VPN
+
+My company uses two VPNs at present because we are <span
+style="text-decoration:line-through">stuck</span> in the middle of a transition
+from one to the other. That unfortunately means that I need two VPN clients.
+Thankfully though, the open source folks have come through on yet another
+awesome competitor to a proprietary alternative.  The first VPN client I use is
+called http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/[vpnc]. This one is for
+Cisco's standard VPN server. The other client I use is called
+http://www.infradead.org/openconnect/[openconnect]. This one is for interfacing
+with Cisco's AnyConnect.
+
+
+[[internet-browsing]]
+== Internet Browsing
+
+This one took me a little bit to get sorted out. Don't get me wrong - I like
+Firefox. It's just a really heavy browser. It takes a very long time to come up
+from a cold boot and also takes a lot of RAM while it's running. Understandably
+so though, that browser does just about everything. To sum it up now so you
+don't have to read the rest of my ramblings on this particular topic, I ended
+up using https://mozilla.org[Firefox].
+
+Now, to cover the reason why... I really like the
+http://surf.suckless.org/[surf] browser (this browser is so tiny you can easily
+count its size using kilobytes) as well as http://midori-browser.org/[Midori]
+(a clean and small apparent [from the ui] fork of chromium), but they both lack
+something one really needs working in a big corporation - Microsoft's NTLM
+authentication. If I try to log in to any SharePoint site, I am immediately
+sent to a 401 error page (not authorized) without even being presented with a
+login box.  Firefox, however, has NTLM built in so that's the one I use now.
+
+
+[[programmingdevelopment-environment]]
+== Programming/Development Environment
+
+Almost every day I'm writing a script or program of some sort in Perl, C\+\+,
+PHP, bash, or ksh. All of this programming occurs in http://www.vim.org/[vim].
+I won't lie, I heart vim. There's not much more to say here.
+
+If you don't know vim but are interested in learning, I highly recommend it. If
+you think keyboard shortcuts aren't worth the time they can save you, just move
+along. If however you are in that group but are still interested in command
+line editing (it does have its perks after all),
+http://www.nano-editor.org/[Nano] is a good option for you. Otherwise in the
+realms of guis, I'd say http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html[Bluefish] is a
+good option and http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/[Leafpad] is a good one
+(albeit very basic) for you minimalist folks.
+
+
+[[general-office-authoring]]
+== General Office Authoring
+
+This means Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. I use
+http://www.libreoffice.org/[LibreOffice] for this. In this category, we've got
+some pros, but we definitely have some cons.
+
+The pros are all pretty obvious here. A mostly fully functional office
+authoring suite, nearly equivelant to a multi-hundred dollar suite of software
+is a pretty big pro, especially since it works almost flawlessly with
+Microsoft's formats. However, on the side of the cons (Kaaahhhhhnnnn!!!), we've
+got a few. Some of the more advanced and less used features of MS Word are not
+yet implemented, or not implemented in the same way in LibreOffice Writer. The
+biggest impact for me though is LibreOffice Calc. It's biggest defficiency in
+my experience is macros.  It turns out that it uses a completely different
+macro language/syntax than MS Excel. This means that chances are, those
+drop-down cells that change your spreadsheet won't work at all. This is very
+problematic when your company publishes metrics using fancy Excel spreadsheets
+with hundreds of kilobytes of macros.
+
+
+[[documentation]]
+== Documentation
+
+I use two products, one because of superiority (in my opinion), and one out of
+necessity. The necessity is LibreOffice Writer, which is required because every
+big company seems to use SharePoint shared documents to do documentation,
+despite it's poor design, hungry indexer, and a versioning system that's less
+functional than adding the modification date to the document filename.
+
+Out of superiority though (again, my opinion), I use a wiki for documentation.
+Specifically http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki[MediaWiki], though there
+are many other solutions out there. This enables my team to work
+collaboratively on their documentation. It's easily indexed and searched as it
+is stored in plain text. The markup is easy, and you don't have to fight with a
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG[wysiwyg] editor wrongly auto-formatting
+much of what you do. For a bigger compare and contrast of SharePoint and
+MediaWiki, I wrote link:MediaWiki_vs_SharePoint[a post] about this a ways back.
+
+
+[[versioning-work]]
+== Versioning Work
+
+This one isn't really something that's super applicable for most people I
+suspect. For versioning my files though, I have lots and lots of git repos. I
+have one for versioning all the documents I write/modify [because SharePoint's
+versioning is awful], and I have one repo per script that I write with all of
+my remotes pointing to bare repos sitting on one of our backed up servers. I
+readily admit this isn't the easiest way to do it for most folks, but for me, a
+git fanboy and engineer, git is by far the best [that I know of] and most fun
+way to do this for me. If I didn't have to do Word documents for documentation
+though, I would happily rely on MediaWiki's versioning functionality for all of
+my documentation needs (sounds a little like a commercial).
+
+
+[[bmc-remedy]]
+== BMC Remedy
+
+Nope, not going to link to it - it's not worth that much dignity.  However, if
+you are unfortunate enough to have to deal with this software, it installs
+nicely in wine and in fact runs better on Linux than on Windows (oddly).
+
+Going back to the insult I just threw BMC's way, don't get me wrong, this
+software is neat. It does a good job tracking piles of metadata for ticket
+tracking. However, I have several reasons for disliking it so much. It's a
+super huge bandwidth sucker (go ahead, turn on tcpdump and watch what it does
+when you perform any action). It's also unbelievably slow (here's the bandwidth
+thing again) and is completely dependant on Internet Explorer 6 or greater,
+rather than being its own piece of independant software. Additionally, it's
+buggy and it's missing all kinds of interface conveniences that one would
+expect in something so robust and expensive. Here's to Service Now being a
+better product than its predecessor (I hope).
+
+
+[[connecting-to-windowssmb-shares]]
+== Connecting to Windows/SMB Shares
+
+I've had problems with this in the past in Linux land. For whatever reason, SMB
+share integration into file managers (thunar, nautilus, etc) has been pretty
+slow and buggy. However, if you have root access to your laptop, you can use
+http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/mount.cifs.8.html[mount.cifs] to
+mount the SMB share locally and that has yet to fail me. It's fast and stable,
+AND you can add it to your system's fstab. If you want to try SMB shares in
+your file manager though, install your distro's _gvfs_ and _gvfs-smb_ packags
+and close all of your file managers to reload things.
+
+
+[[transferring-files-from-nix-to-nix]]
+== Transferring Files From Nix to Nix
+
+This one is one of my favorites. The people surrounding the openssh project are
+truly geniuses in my mind. A lot of people transfer files from one Linux system
+to another by using scp to download the file to their local machine, and then
+use SCP to transfer that file from their local machine to the destination
+server. Depending on how things are set up, you may be able to scp files
+straight from server to server.
+
+There's this really neat thing out there called
+http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html[sshfs]. Sshfs allows you to mount a
+remote filesystem locally...over SSH. There is no additional software
+installation or configuration required on your server other than having ssh
+installed and running. You can mount these filesystems and drag and drop files
+all over the place. It's a pretty great piece of sofware I do say so myself,
+and very stable too.
+
+Now, I typically use scp to transfer my files anyway. Where sshfs really comes
+in handy is when I need to work on remote files such as Word documents or Excel
+spreadsheets that are stored on the remote system.  With sshfs I can mount the
+remote share locally and work "directly" on the files without having to scp
+them locally, work on it, save changes, and scp it back to the server.
+
+
+[[microsoft-office-communicator]]
+== Microsoft Office Communicator
+
+This one is a sensitive topic for a lot of people. Most of the people I know
+don't like MOC. Granted, most of the time that's because it's not set up right,
+not because the product itself is bad.
+
+To connect to a MOC server from Linux land, we need
+http://www.pidgin.im/[Pidgin] and a plugin for it called
+http://sipe.sourceforge.net/[Sipe]. With these two, you should be able to
+connect to the communicator server, send and receive messages, send and receive
+files, share desktops, and search Active Directory for users. It's a pleasantly
+functional plugin.
+
+
+Category:Linux
+
+
+// vim: set syntax=asciidoc: