Server And Workstation In One Box

My dad purchased a new Dell desktop system a few weeks back and I thought I would be so clever and install a linux distro and use VMware to provide his old windows desktop. I will describe the different issues I went through in this article.

TBD

As it turnes out there was a major issue with iTunes running on a Windows XP guest. It would not recognize the iPod device. This was discussed at great length on the VMware discussion groups. I believe it was due to some attempts by Apple to restrict access to their iPod devices by non-Apple and non-Windows systems, i.e. Linux and BSD variants.

One of the most infuriating applications to work with are Symantec products. They are as a necessity, extremely intertwined in Windows and are therefore extremely finicky. My dad had two products, their anti-virus and anti-spam products installed in his Windows system. Recently he was prompted to update his subscription to the anti-virus definitions. I did that for him and was presented with a key that would not work in the version installed. He eventually got a hold of a support person and was sent a newer version of the anti-virus product. When installing it, the install application directed us to uninstall the anti-spam product. I did so thinking I could download a newer version of it later. Much to my chegrin it no longer is available as a separate product. I couldn't tell from the other product descriptions if the functionality is even available. So I decidecd to provide the spam filtering function using the linux system.

The path that he uses for e-mail is to use Thunderbird to connect to a pop server and download his mail. The new path would be to have the linux server fetch the mail, applying the spamassassin filter to it, then have Thunderbird pop the mail.

Messages fall into one of four states: ham (no extra handling), spam (no extra handling), false positive (needs to be taught as ham, added markings removed), false negatives (needs to be reprocessed as spam).