(posted at 11:06PM GMT) 
I can sum up this week with one word.... interesting.
I guess Red Hat's budget has gone down somewhat since I did my initial RHCE exam in 2002; whereas I got a genuine 'Red Hat' fedora, it turns out that attendees to Red Hat courses only get a free pen.
Cheapskates!
Incidentally, I still have the free stuffed penguin that I got with the complimentary copy of SuSE Linux which I 'obtained' from their booth at CeBIT many many moons ago.
The 'interesting' part of the week turns out to be the discovery that the new intranet at Linkage will be a static-HTML entity that is generated by MS Frontpage on a semi-regular basis rather than the admittedly-rather-basic-and-poorly-implemented-but-I-was-on-a-deadline CMS which has been in use for the last couple of years.
There is talk of implementing their system on a box running IIS (really hoping that the reason is due to ease of authentication integration rather than one of 'would rather use this than Apache') but I feel it only fair to say that CMS packages which run on IIS/ASP are expensive and the only freebie that *may* work in that environment would be dotNetNuke - a straight port of phpNuke - a package well known for its' security holes.
Seeing as though I now know that the 'powers-that-be' actually read my journal, I'm going to go all out and say that although I totally disagree with exposing any kind of Windows box to the Internet (even the current installation of OWA is proxied behind Apache - saves a few hundred on purchasing MS Exchange Enterprise Edition and setting up a dedicated front-end OWA server), so, if you are going to do it anyway, I suggest that you at least stick it behind a separate interface on a Linux firewall and restrict traffic to a bare minimum between your interfaces appropriately.
(yes, the penguin sits next to Cuthbert, my pet Dalek - strangely, Cuthbert never threatens to exterminate him as I think he knows that his deskmate could easily kick his Dalek arse back to Skaro before he could say it!) | 
