The Seagate 120G drive in my firewall machine died at the very young age of 8 months. I sent it in to Seagate via the RMA procedure and got a new one back within about 3 days, which I did find quite impressive. In the mean time, I started using a cheap-assed hardware firewall/router/modem thingy, which means I have a machine to play with.
Ubuntu went on there without a hitch and I must say I’m VERY impressed. It’s Debian-based, but without all the crap that so sours the otherwise healthy Debian experience. It also has a *much* shorter release cycle. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African who’s rich beyond belief but uses his money for really groovy things like being a space tourist and sponsoring deserving open source projects and whatnot, seems to be inspiration behind the whole project. I’m definitely convinced.
I’m slowly migrating my website over to Drupal. After having installed the navigation module and solving a REALLY mysterious problem with FollowSymlinks breaking everything, it’s starting to look better and better.