Colophon

We thought you might find it interesting to understand how this book "got done."

The goal was for Jeremy and Tom to write both together and separately. We needed a way to enable this.

First, Jeremy granted Tom VPN access to Jeremy's internal network.

Then, we used virtual machine technology to craft the various machines mentioned in this book on one physical machine. We started with a Dual-Processor AMD 1Ghz machine with 1.5GB of RAM, running Windows Server 2003. We then installed VMware GSX server. This enabled us to create many, many guest virtual machinesboth Windows and Linux. By the time the book was completed, we had a grand total of 16 test virtual machines. We worked primarily with Fedora Core 3, Windows 2003 and Windows XP but also tested Knoppix and Red Hat Enterprise Server. It was not uncommon to have 57 active virtual machines at any given point.

VMWare's Virtual Machine Console / remote-access software was indispensable for creating new virtual machines. Once a machine was up and running, though, Tom found that remote access via VPN was more responsive with VNC (for accessing Linux machines) or Remote Desktop (for accessing Windows machines).

Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server served as our document management system, allowing easy collaboration. Thanks to Sharepoint, "Who owns this Word document right now?" was not a question we had to worry about.

About twice a month, Tom joined Jeremy in his office to work together in person and hammer out the thorniest issues facing us in any particular chapter.

Our snacks of choice were takeout Chinese food (Stir Fried Tofu for Tom, General Tso's Chicken for Jeremy) and approximately two boxes of Wheat Thins (original) per visit. Roughly fifteen boxes were devoured during the nine-month writing process. We're hoping to get back to our pre- pregnancy weights any day now.