(posted at 10:14PM GMT) 
After playing with a few OSS toys for the last couple of months, I have been considering how I can re-engineer certain procedures within Spilsby Internet Solutions to make things a little bit more efficient for customers and allow me to spend more time working on developing some of the newer services I have in the pipeline.
I am now 'eating my own dog food' - the install of Asterisk which serves the business now answers with an automated and reasonably helpful IVR menu that also ties in with the ticketing system.
On the development side of things, I have nearly finished building the alpha version of the self-installing, centrally-managed Asterisk software solution in a box; the only problem I'm running into is the fact that CentOS 4.4 doesn't really support some of the newer motherboards on the market (especially the stuff which uses an Intel 965 chipset) and CentOS 5 will be out at some indeterminate time after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which is pencilled in for a release on 28th February 2007.
I could base it on Fedora Core 6 - indeed, this is what the alpha version is currently running on - mainly because it is 'close enough' to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
On a more humourous note, I had the misfortune of encountering a Checkpoint FireWall-1 NG box - it has been many years since I had to admin one of these but while I have forgotten relatively little about the things since I left Centrinet, the memories of all the little things that come together to make one really broken firewalling product quickly came back to me when the stupid thing wouldn't unload its' security policy.
While I sing the praises of OpenBSD's pf with Linux's netfilter coming a very very close second, it still amazes me that one former employer sticks by Checkpoint through thick and thin while my previous employer seems to be of the belief that the 'S' in Microsoft's ISA Server actually stands for 'Security' (it does but would you ever associate the word 'security' with Microsoft ?).
Getting back to current events though, I think I've finally licked AJAX... it is definitely one of those things that can puzzle and perplex for hours... then in less than ten seconds, your brain finally clicks and it all makes perfect sense. | 
