AL&Z Advertising
AL&Z Advertising, founded in 1993, is a full-service advertising agency and web services provider located in Palm Desert, California. The combination of AL&Z's traditional agency capabilities and web expertise provide its clients with one-source marketing solutions for all mediums. AL&Z applies its creative and marketing expertise to the Web, where their offerings include website design, development, and custom e-commerce solutions.

As Alan Schmidt states, AL&Z has "rescued [computers] from the workstation graveyard, so it's pretty un-sexy. We've replaced an aging MacOS-based email server (per-seat licensing...ick) with a Macintosh 9500 with YDL, sendmail and UW's IMAP."

On the web services side, the company has a pre-existing investment in an NT server. With PHP installed on the NT box, and a Macintosh 6360 running YDL and MySQL, the combination becomes usable for designing sites which will eventually live on Linux boxes.

Alan continues, "We took our first few baby steps toward migrating to Yellow Dog Linux with non-essential services: time and secondary DNS, where it would do some good if it succeeded, but do no real harm if it didn't. The machine was a Macintosh 7200/120, PC-compatible, the slowest Linux-capable machine from the Macintosh graveyard, but with an oversized (considering when it was new) hard drive. I named it, not so originally, "Houdini".

Except that Houdini didn't run slow.

It was meant to be a learning experience, and not any kind of replacement to our existing products. Who cares if it was slow? Except that Houdini didn't run slow. In fact, it seemed pretty snappy. I remembered the days when a 7200 was considered fast. Of course, I wasn't running under any real load. Maybe I could add one or two services.

Our aging Quarterdeck mail server needed restarting once a day, and struggled to deliver Internet mail. Houdini became the "smart" outgoing SMTP host and the Quarterdeck mail server crashed less. Houdini didn't seem to slow down any. Hmm ...

When spam started to become a real problem, Houdini started handling incoming mail, too. Strictly as a filter/forwarder, and then, merely as the preferred MX record in our DNS zone. Total retreat was still available with a few keystrokes. As a side effect, the Quarterdeck mail server--now a little more insulated from traffic--started behaving itself.

Houdini, on the other hand, now under load, still didn't stutter or complain. Ever. I was finally convinced. My little toy was more suited to the task of mail server that our so-called professional product (which had per-seat licensing, no less).

I began my plans to migrate away from Quarterdeck Mail altogether, and toward a Linux-based solution, for speed and stability reasons alone. The fact that it was also cheaper was just icing on the cake. I'd need a few more services to make it a complete solution, though, so instead of the slowest machine in the graveyard, I chose the fastest: A Macintosh 9500. I installed bind, ntpd, sendmail, slapd and UW's IMAP. This one, I named Buffy.

Like Houdini before it, Buffy remains rock-stable, and even with all these responsibilities, remains lightning-fast. The latest addition to my little fleet of Yellow Dog Linux servers is Willow, a Performa 6360 which serves as a development platform for PHP- and PHP/MySQL-driven web sites.

Installing Yellow Dog Linux saved the company money on software, while increasing our capabilities. Of course that's important. But that's honestly just happenstance. It also turned out to be incredibly satisfying to put those old machines to use again."

Alan Schmidt

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