This week I’ve been doing some improvements in my business infrastructure.

Basically I’ve been upgrading to Windows 7, moving to Gmail and trying to get rid of my old general purpose server.

I’m very happy with all the changes.

First of all Windows 7 rocks! It works like a charm.

Second, my move to Gmail has been painless. Now I can handle all my email from one just place and one account. I’m no longer using Outlook, so one app less to install and configure. Besides this I can access my email from anywhere and by the way, the offline feature is working great too. This move is going to pay off in my next trip to Germany on September.

Finally I had an old P4 running Windows 2003 server. It was used as a file server, print server, FTP server, subversion server and it run a couple of VM). I setup this machine years ago and it has serve me well. But now that I have a WHS is kind of redundant. Not to mention is always on and it makes a lot of noise.

So I’ve been moving away each of its responsibilities one for one.

The file server is now my WHS. Nothing to change here except some network mappings.

I connected the printer to the WHS and install the drivers. No problems.

My code repositories are now hosted on the WHS machine. This was a little trickier but I managed to install the SVNSERVE service directly.

When I need to enable FTP connections I’ll do it on my machine. And the VM runs on my Quad-proc machine nicely when needed, especially now that I have 8 GB of RAM.