The Tech Teapot

VLOOKUP Quirks

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 13:55:56 +0200

Comparing Microsoft Copilot vs Google Gemini Pro for installing Nagios using Ansible

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First 10 Years of My Reading Log

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My 2023 Reading Log

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(An End to) VAR Life

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My 2022 Reading Log

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My Worst Nightmare Revisited

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How to Mass Convert Hugo Posts to Post Bundles

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:49:46 +0100

Guide to SNMP

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:22:36 +0100

Manual vs automated process

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My 2021 Reading Log

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My 2020 Reading Log

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Handy scripts for testing your Hugo website

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:09:19 +0000

Npcap picks up where WinPcap left off

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo in Action book review

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A new dawn for The Tech Teapot

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A reminder of the power of the internet, again

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My 2019 Reading Log

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My 2018 Reading Log

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My 2017 Reading Log

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

My 2016 Reading Log

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My 2015 Reading Log

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 16:52:37 +0000

Network Configuration Management Introduction

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Network Mapping Introduction

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Network Simulation Introduction

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Why do People Write Open Source Software?

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Tools to lesson the WPF pain

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 14:18:02 +0000

I’m back writing GUI code at the moment. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I hate writing GUIs. But, there’s nobody else to do it, so it has to be me.

It’s not just that I am doing GUI code though that makes my current project tough, it is that I am learning WPF at the same time. The last time I had to write a reasonable sized GUI I was using MFC and C++, circa 2002.

A reminder of the power of the internet

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:12:17 +0000

It is very easy to become jaded about technology, I had a reminder this week of just how wonderful it can be.

Last Thursday I started a beginners astronomy class at the local secondary school. I was more than a little surprised to learn that you can subscribe for a mere £3 per month and have access to three telescopes situated on top of a mountain in Tenerife through the Bradford Robotic Telescope.

A retrospective on Dyna Project version 0.1

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 15:46:49 +0000

Whilst version 0.1 of the Dyna Project isn’t quite finished, I thought it would make sense to take stock before work starts on version 0.2.

Your business model is not a software feature

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 11:21:00 +0000

I created a product a few years ago and whilst it is doing fine on new sales it is really bad at monetising the existing customer base. The reason it is doing so badly at monetising our existing customers is because I assumed that the business model could be plugged in later, like any other software feature.

I was 100% wrong.

Why didn’t I build the business model in from the start? Patience. Or rather my lack of patience.

Scam of the week

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 08:00:35 +0000

Last week we had to fend off a scam attempt. The scam worked like this:

Ask for a quote for one or more products;
Order a product and arrange to pay by bank transfer;
Go to a bank and manually pay a counterfeit cheque into the company account. The cheque has no chance of clearing and was not a bank printed cheque. The cheque looked like it had been printed on a dot matrix printer so I was surprised the bank accepted it. This is where the con comes into play, the amount of the payment was 10x higher than the amount due. So it looks like a simple transcription error;
Ring up and say that the bill has been paid by bank transfer. Apologise for paying too much and say it was a clerical error. Ask for a refund of the difference to be sent by bank transfer to another account;
Profit!
Disappear without trace.

The con was very professional and well executed and the only thing that saved us was that cash flow was tight and we didn’t have enough money to pay. So we waited until cash flow improved. Fortunately, before we had enough money, the bank contacted us about the cheque not being valid.

Why lone software projects fail

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 11:50:09 +0000

I have an awful lot of failed software projects. Most programmers do. It comes with the territory.

Most of the failures have been the result of running out of steam one way or another. Your early enthusiasm slowly wanes until the mere thought of carrying on makes you feel a little sick.

It is easy to forget that programming is an intensely psychological activity. Your attitude is central to the success or otherwise of your project.

Tech Support would be a lot easier if...

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 12:19:15 +0000

…customers didn’t start the conversation with their own fault diagnosis.

Quite often the hardest part of the conversation is trying to coax the customer back a step to the original problem. And then working forward from the problem to a diagnosis.

Providing good remote tech support is one of the hardest jobs in the tech industry. You are at the end of a phone or email, cannot see the users set up and only have the highly edited highlights of what the customer is willing to tell you.

A recovering "wunderkind"

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 12:30:42 +0000

If there is anything the IT industry loves above anything else it is youth.

I used to work in a company with an engineer who’d been programming since the early 1970s, who’d implemented operating systems on mainframes in assembly language, wrote OSI (up to session layer) and TCP/IP comms stacks from scratch on DOS based machines and made them all work together in the background. He wasn’t the only one either. There were a number of very talented, mature engineers at the company at the time. And yet, the guys the company held up on a pedestal were the snot nosed kids just out of college who hadn’t done anything even slightly comparable.

If you haven't made it by the time you reach age X, you never will

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 14:19:04 +0000

I forget where I read that, but for a while it made me very unhappy. I was approaching X at the time and I most certainly had not made it.

Still haven’t.

Probably never will by my definition when aged X. And you know, it doesn’t bother me one bit now.

One of the nicer things about getting older is that your definition of making it changes. In my twenties it was about money for the most part. But, it is hard not to be sucked into thinking about your position at work.

Observations on 8 Issues of C# Weekly

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:10:23 +0000

At the end of 2013 I thought it would be interesting to create a C# focused weekly newsletter. I registered the domain and created a website and hooked it up to the excellent MailChimp email service. The site went live (or at least Google Analytics was added to the site) on the 18th December 2013.

And then I kind of forgot about it for a year or so.

In the mean time the website was getting subscribers. Not many but enough to suggest that there’s an appetite for a weekly C# focused newsletter.

The evils of the dashboard merry-go-round

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 15:26:31 +0000

What is the first thing you do when you get to the office? Check your email probably. Then what? I bet you go through the same routine of checking your dashboards to see what’s happened overnight.

That is exactly what I do every single morning at work.

And I keep checking those dashboards throughout the day. Sometimes I manage to get myself in a loop, continuing around and around the same set of dashboards.

New AVTECH Room Alert 3W Box Opening

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 14:49:57 +0000

AVTECH have finally released the WiFi version of the AVTECH Room Alert 3E.

A cloudy solar eclipse

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 13:29:51 +0000

The partial solar eclipse taken from Otley, West Yorkshire.

Things I Wished I'd Known Before Developing Xsensior Live

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 09:00:18 +0000

One of the best features of Xsensior Lite is the ability to view your sensor data and alerts anywhere you have web access. The website that provides the ability to see your sensor data is called Xsensior Live. Just log-in and your sensor data is displayed in pretty graphs with 24 hour highs / lows as well as any alerts that have been triggered. The feature was launched just over two years ago.

New domain and last chance to subscribe via email

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 13:31:03 +0000

If you receive The Tech Teapot via email, this is your last chance to continue doing so. From now The Tech Teapot is moving over to use MailChimp instead of Google Feedburner for delivering email with the latest posts.

Feedburner has been withering on the vine since being taken over by Google. The reason that this is your final chance is because Google doesn’t manage the email list. Of the 500+ email subscribers, not a single one has been removed from the list due to email bouncing. I find it hard to believe that no subscriber has moved jobs in the last 8 years. Consequently, the Feedburner list is full of invalid, out of date email addresses. As a consequence, MailChimp will not import the Feedburner list.

Top 3 Cable Tracing Technologies

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 17:39:57 +0000

Firstly, why would you need to trace network cabling? In a perfect world you wouldn’t need to, but even if a network begins life properly labelled, things have a habit of changing. Documentation and cable labelling don’t always keep up when changes are made.

A jumble of network cables in a network cabinet.

When you need to re-arrange the cabling in your patch panel, can you be 100% certain that the label is correct? You can be reasonably certain if you installed and maintain the network yourself, but what if others are involved. Are they as fastidious as you are in keeping the network documentation up to date?

My 2014 Reading Log

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:43:22 +0000

New Aviosys IP Power 9858 Box Opening

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 07:00:30 +0000

A series of box opening photos of the new Aviosys IP Power 9858 4 port network power switch. This model will in due course replace the Aviosys IP Power 9258 series of power switches. The 9258 series is still available in the mean time though, so don’t worry.

Back to Basics

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 12:57:15 +0000

After a while things stop being new. Things that really used to excite you, stop exciting you. Things that you were passionate about, you stop being passionate about. That’s just how things work.

I wrote my very first computer program 26 years ago this month. It was in college, using a Perkin Elmer mini computer running Berkeley BSD 4.2 on a VT220 terminal (with a really good keyboard.) The program was written in Pascal. Pascal was the educational programming language of the time. Every time I went near the terminal, I approached with a sense of wonder. It felt like the possibilities were endless.

Good Introduction to SSL

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 15:51:35 +0000

A very good introduction to SSL in light of Google’s recent changes to their ranking system…

Software the old fashioned way

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 07:00:51 +0000

I was clearing out my old bedroom after many years nagging by my parents when I came across two of my old floppy disk boxes. Contained within is a small snapshot of my personal computing starting from 1990 through until late 1992. Everything before and after those dates doesn’t survive I’m afraid.

Early 1990s Software Development Tools for Microsoft Windows

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 10:59:58 +0000

The early 1990s were an interesting time for software developers. Many of the tools that are taken for granted today made their debut for a mass market audience.

New Aviosys IP Power 9820 Box Opening

Tue, 13 May 2014 09:36:31 +0000

A series of box opening photos of the newly released Aviosys IP Power 9820 8 port rack-mountable power switch which arrived in the office this morning. This new model replaces the older IP Power Switch 9258-PRO model.

I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more

Thu, 01 May 2014 14:43:30 +0000

I was researching a follow up to how will cloud computing change network management post and I came across something rather odd I’d like to share with you.

Below are a series of graphs culled from Google Trends showing the relative search levels of various network management related keywords.

What is the most significant feature of them? What struck me is the downward decline with various degrees of steepness. The searches don’t just represent commercial network management tools, there are open source projects and open core products there too. I even put searches for network management protocols like SNMP and NetFlow in too. They all show declines.

Stack Overflow Driven Development

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 12:53:52 +0000

The rise of Stack Overflow has certainly changed how many programmers go about their trade.

I have recently been learning some new client side web skills because I need them for a new project. I have noticed that the way I go about learning is quite different from the way I used to learn pre-web.

I used to have a standard technique. I’d go through back issues of magazines I’d bought (I used to have hundreds of back issues) and read any articles related to the new technology. Then I’d purchase a book about the topic, read it and start a simple starter project. Whilst doing the starter project, I’d likely pick up a couple of extra books and skim them to find techniques I needed for the project. This method worked pretty well, I’d be working idiomatically, without a manual in anywhere from a month to three months.

Capturing loopback traffic without a loopback interface

Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:37:01 +0000

Wireshark is a wonderful tool, no doubt about it. But, on Microsoft Windows, there is one thing it isn’t so good at.

Microsoft decided to remove the local loopback interface in Windows 7. So capturing loopback traffic is rather difficult without modifying your system. Something I try to avoid if at all possible.

There are ways to install the loopback interface if you want, as documented here. There are also other means to achieve the same effect, also documented in the previous link.

Where does a failure manifest itself first

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 10:38:16 +0000

A network monitoring tool periodically makes a request to a system end point and records the result in a database of some kind.

Whether the polling interval is every few seconds, one minute or ten minutes or longer there is an awful lot of time when the network monitor has nothing meaningful to say about the state of the end point.

The network monitor is unlikely to be the first system to spot a problem. If the network monitor won’t be the first to spot a problem, what will?

The Last of the Savages

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 10:21:19 +0000

Ray Kurzweil has a history of making accurate future forecasts. One of them is that the 3D printer is coming and the current ones are but a small hint of what is to come.

That got me thinking. We are quite possibly the last generation to have a direct connection between taking raw materials and making an end product.

Imagine your far distant relatives ordering a steak from their Acme Wondermatic 5000 3D printer.

Oodles of disk space, just not in the right place

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:47:20 +0000

Over the last few months we’ve been having some email troubles. For a few months the emails would start to back up with our backup email provider and then almost immediately begin to flow normally again. More recently the periods when email was backing up come around faster and lasted longer.

Intermittent problems are a nightmare to diagnose. Was the problem our broadband, the router, our network, the email server or, the old favourite, DNS?

Open source, open conflict?

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 12:54:07 +0000

I am currently messing around in the pits of .NET e-commerce. I thought it would be the last place I’d find open source inspired disharmony. But no, even here it is to be found. 😉

OK, a bit of background.

NOP Commerce is an ecommerce platform based on Microsoft’s open source ASP.NET platform. The project has been around for five or six years or so. Gets very good reviews too. Last year SmartStore.NET forked NOP. Nothing wrong with that, NOP is GPL’ed. That would be fine except for a clause in NOPs license which states that you must keep a link in your website footer to the project website unless you pay a small $60 waiver fee.

Software delivery with even less friction

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 09:00:34 +0000

I’ve talked before about the joys of continuous software delivery before.

Well, I’ve been building a couple of micro sites recently and thought it would be nice to try out a few new technologies and techniques.

Firstly, I’ve built them with HTML5 and the ~~Twitter~~ Bootstrap framework, there’s a very good tutorial here. Bootstrap provides a combination of CSS and Javascript to make building a clean, responsive site without having to worry about cross browser compatibility.

Social animals

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:29:12 +0000

I volunteered for a rabbit sanctuary a few weeks ago. I stumbled onto Cample Nibble’s website and saw the advert for volunteers to help with packing groceries in a supermarket.

Looking back on it, my abiding memory is the social difficulty a lot of people had when dealing with a charity bag packer.

Is it really so difficult just to say no?

I packed groceries for a couple of hours and I noticed that each person’s decision whether to accept or decline assistance was often dictated by the decision of the person before them.

Top 5 Open Source Event Correlation Tools

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 14:18:26 +0000

Networks create lots of events. Sometimes thousands per minute.

Events can be SNMP traps generated by a server rebooting, syslog messages, Microsoft Windows event logs etc.

How do you know which events are important? The ones telling you something important?

That is where event correlation tools come in handy. You feed all of the events into the tool, as well as a description of the structure of your systems, and its job is to flag up the important ones.

Everything Works as Expected but Doesn't Work How I Want

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:49:05 +0000

At the end of last week one of our sites barfed.

Nothing particularly unusual in that. The database process went rogue and stopped responding to queries.

Once the problem was detected, restarting the process solved the problem very easily.

The rather unfortunate side effect was that Elmah sent 10,844 emails to UserVoice, which then created the corresponding number of issues.

That’s not very helpful.

What is interesting is how dumb all of the tools actually are in the chain. Elmah detects a problem so it sends an email to our UserVoice account. UserVoice receives the email and creates an issue for each one.

Free Tools to Police your "no wireless" Policy

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 13:33:16 +0000

If you don’t have a wireless network and you do not need to validate that you don’t have a wireless network, you can blithely ignore what I’m going to say here.

However, if you don’t have a wireless network, and you need to ensure that you don’t, then this post may be of some interest to you.

There are a number of reasons why you have a no wireless policy, from worries about security to compliance issues.

Adding anything external to your software will triple support

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 14:41:55 +0000

Top 5 Open Source NetFlow Analyzers

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:39:42 +0000

NetFlow is a standard from Cisco for transferring of network analysis data across a network. The last thing you want to do with your routers and switches is give them the burden of analyzing network traffic, so Cisco came up with NetFlow so that you can offload the analysis to less CPU bound devices.

NTop: a traffic analyser that runs on most UNIX variants and Microsoft Windows. In addition, ntop includes Cisco NetFlow and sFlow support. For an introduction to NTop, please see this introduction to NTop video;
Flow-tools: a library and a collection of programs used to collect, send, process, and generate reports from NetFlow data;
FlowScan: FlowScan processes IP flows recorded in cflowd format raw flow files and reports on what it finds. JKFlow is a XML-configurable Flowscan perl module for reading / analyzing your NetFlow data;
EHNT: or Extreme Happy NetFlow Tool, turns streams of Netflow data into something useful and human-readable;
BPFT: The BPFT daemon builds on top of libpcap and uses the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) mechanism for capturing IP traffic.

For an exhaustive list of open source and commercial NetFlow analyzers, you could do a lot worse than the FloMA: Pointers and Software collection.

Google Reader is dead, long live feedly

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 09:51:41 +0000

Google Reader is being shutdown on 1st July 2013. ~~If you haven’t already done so, you need to move your feeds somewhere else in the next 5 days~~. Too late, it has gone.

I just moved my 342 feeds over to feedly in literally one click. Didn’t even need to create an account on feedly, it imported my Google account for me automatically. Doesn’t get any easier than that. So far I’m loving it… 😄

Sometimes the open core functionality ceiling gets lower

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 12:27:04 +0000

First of all a little bit of background will make the post a little bit more understandable to non I.T. folks.

A bit of background

Zenoss is a network management software vendor with an open source core product, called Zenoss Core, and a closed source product called Zenoss Enterprise.

Zenoss is written in the Python programming language and uses the Zope web application framework.

Relstorage is a Zope add-on for saving data to a relational database. Relstorage allows Zenoss to use a relational database as its storage backend, with all of the scaling out benefits that entails.

Network management's new wave six years on

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:02:15 +0000

How time flies.

It has been six years since I wrote about Network management’s “new wave” and thought it would be interesting to go back and see what has happened. We are now at the outer envelope of the VC funding cycle so things should be sorting themselves out one way or another.

The new wave was Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork Open Source VC funded, open source network management companies.

Open source wasn’t new to the network management scene in 2007, there had been well known projects, like Nagios, MRTG and OpenNMS, around for a number of years prior to that.

Why Monitoring Sucks

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:36:26 +0000

Found an interesting old post by John E. Vincent, Why Monitoring Sucks tweeted by MonkChips. What is interesting is what John did next. He created a GitHub account so that he could collaborate with people to rectify the problem.

The most interesting part (to me anyway) is the tools-repos repository in which all of the different monitoring tools are listed.

Enjoy! 😄

PS: as a counter point, read this post entitled #monitoringlove - a true story by Ulf MÃ¥nsson.

Continuous delivery every single day

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:41:40 +0000

It has taken 20 years as a professional programmer to get to this point, but I have finally taken the final step to continuous delivery.

We’ve been practising continuous integration for well over a year now. It seemed a logical step to deploy the software automatically. When a process is done manually you tend to make a lot of mistakes. I did anyway. I’d run the database upgrade script before the new one had been installed and of course I would take a long time performing the upgrade. The machine is able to do the upgrade in a matter of a few seconds, I used to take several heart thumping minutes to do the same job.

TimeTag fork away!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:09:37 +0000

I finally got around to posting the TimeTag source code up on ~~Google Code~~ GitHub this afternoon. You can find the project here.

Whilst I’ve no intention of working on TimeTag, I figured that it would be useful for people learning PowerShell development to have a reasonably large sample available, and useful for someone to have a help up if they wanted to implement something similar and don’t fancy starting from scratch.

Feel free to fork…

Automated install comes to open source .NET projects

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:49:07 +0000

One of the nice things about Linux is the ability to install apps (and dependencies) very easily using apt-get or similar. Windows users have been missing a similar tool for a long time. Never fear, the Scottish Alt.Net group have written Hornget, a tool for installing open source .NET projects.

Quite a few projects are supported, though most are of interest only to programmers. It would be nice to see a lot more user oriented tools like games and the like.

Musings upon the open core functionality ceiling

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:37:55 +0000

An exploration of open core licensing in network management

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:18:52 +0000

Review of the Quicktest 500 ADSL Tester

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:58:51 +0000

Front of the Vonaq Quicktest 500

The Quicktest 500 is reviewed by Brendan Mulvaney of Halcyon IT.

For a busy technician out in the field the Quicktest 500 is a great tool for the quick and detailed testing of adsl lines. Without resorting to a laptop with adsl modem attached you can use it to get the results that really matter - is the adsl service in a healthy state?

Cool video graphically showing the development of Wireshark

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:22:34 +0000

Loris Degioanni over at CACE Technologies has produced an uber geeky animation showing the 11 year history of the Wireshark project.

The video was produced with the aid of Codeswarm.

Technology lag

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:31:37 +0000

I was interested to see a blog post discussing the benefits of the new 4G wireless standards currently in development. It struck me just how long it really takes for a technology to be in use by the majority of people. Here we are at the dawn of the 4G world and yet 3G isn’t widely deployed. The 3G licences were auctioned in the UK around ten years ago.

I’ve had an Apple iPhone 3G for a few months now and I am able to use a 3G signal for a small fraction of the time. In fact, outside of major cities, you’ve very little chance of getting a decent 3G signal. Most of the time I’m stuck on GPRS speeds or worse. If 3G hasn’t spread outside of the main metropolitan areas ten years after the original spectrum auctions, then it seems likely that there is no business case for ever doing so. If it isn’t commercially viable to implement 3G then what hope is there for 4G?

Ipswitch acquires Dorian Software Creations Inc

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:05:11 +0000

Ipswitch, the people responsible for creating What’s Up Gold, have acquired Dorian Software Creations. Dorian Software are publishers of event log management software.

Dorian’s event log management solutions for Windows and Syslog environments include:

Event Archiver for automated collection, centralization and secure storage of log data;
Event Analyst for event examination, correlation and comprehensive reporting for audit and compliance;
Event Alarm for monitoring, alerting and notification on key defined events;
Event Rover for on-the-fly forensics and log data mining.

Dorian products are scheduled to be available from Ipswitch in March.

Lessons learnt from the failure of TimeTag

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:02:40 +0000

I have a confession to make: I’ve developed a failed open source project! There I’ve said it, it’s now public knowledge and I can hang my head in shame… lead me to the village stocks so you can all throw rotting vegetables at me.

Happily, I don’t feel like that. Failure is, well, no big deal. Of course it does sting a little bit that I wasted an awful lot of time developing the software. What could I have done with the time had I not written the 11,184 lines of code Ohloh says I wrote? Well, I’ll never know, but…

The state of Wi-Fi security in 2009

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:00:38 +0000

Wireless networks, as we all know, are everywhere today. All the way back in 2004 Denis did a wardriving exercise to check how widespread the use of encryption and other security measures were in wireless networks deployed in and around Leeds.

The arrival of the new JDSU ValidatorPRO-NT NT1155, which includes a wireless detection module (including 802.11n networks), gave me the opportunity to repeat the exercise and see how the situation has changed over the intervening period.

Open source network management buzz comparison 2009

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:05:14 +0000

I did a comparison of the buzz for the leading open source network management tools in 2008 so I thought it would be interesting to do the same comparison for 2009 and see what’s changed.

As I did last year, I’ve compared the number of searches for the project name using Google Trends. As always, this post is not intended to be indicative of the usefulness of a particular tool to your requirements.

JDSU ValidatorPRO-NT NT1155 Box Opening

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:46:22 +0000

A series of box opening photos of the recently released JDSU ValidatorPRO-NT NT1155 all-in-one copper, fibre and wireless tester with active network features.

The Tech Teapot Three Today

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:50:01 +0000

The Tech Teapot is three years old today. Well, if you want to be pedantic, it was three years old last Thursday but I forgot all about it!

A selection of my favourite posts from the last year:

It has been a thin blogging year, mainly because my time has been squeezed by a combination of my regular work and TimeTag.

Network Computing rates PRTG #1

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:14:05 +0000

The German magazine Network Computing has done a comparison of four well known network monitoring packages: PRTG 7.2, What’s Up Gold 14, Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Manager 9.5 and ManageEngine OpManager 8.

From all these points of view we can only advise those who are looking for a good >monitoring product to write PRTG Network Monitor right at the top of the list of products >to look at. For Network Computing this product is, as previously, still the reference

The talibanisation of software

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:52:21 +0000

Why is software becoming so political? Sometimes it feels like the tech industry is being infiltrated by a “software taliban” determined to root out all non-believers in the one true path.

A great example of the talibanisation of software is the reaction of parts of the open source community towards the Mono project. Why does Mono get the goat of the software taliban? Well, Mono is an open source implementation of a standard originally developed by the great satan Microsoft.

BUG now available in Europe

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:27:52 +0000

Great news for gadget fans in Europe. Bug Labs have announced the availability of their amazing gadget making kit in Europe with all of the appropriate approvals like RoHS and CE.

In addition Bug Labs have announced the availability of a WiFi and Bluetooth base module called BUGbase WiFi.

All you need is a Windows, Linux or Mac PC with the DragonFly SDK installed and buy a Bugbase module, which can now have WiFi and Bluetooth on board, and then choose the add-on modules you need like BUGbee, BUGsound, BUGvonHippel, BUGview, BUGlocate and BUGmotion.

The problem with the implicit contract in open source

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:50:56 +0000

One of the things I’ve found very interesting about being involved in open source, and indeed business for that matter, is customer expectations.

Just because you give something away does not mean that you or your offering will be judged more kindly as a consequence. It does not mean that there will be a lower expectation of your support either.

Take this exchange on the Hyperic support forum. HyperMike plainly has an expectation that Hyperic offer technical support via their forum for free. Something you only guarantee if you buy the enterprise version of Hyperc HQ.

Drupal 6 book recommendations

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:31:08 +0000

As we’ve just delivered a big lump of functionality onto our website using Drupal, in fact everything is now managed through Drupal except this blog, I thought that you might appreciate a heads up on the books we used during the development process. Getting hold of the right books early in your project will make things a lot easier.

Whenever I’m taking on a new programming language or some other technology it always seems to take three books to really get a good handle on it. Drupal is no exception, you will need a more user oriented book outlining the basic concepts, a more development oriented book to let you look underneath the covers, and finally a book for modifying the look of your site.

RiverMuse has arrived

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:58:15 +0000

After a protracted wait, RiverMuse has finally released its open source fault management system. Binaries for Fedora Core 9 are available for immediate download. More technical details when the source code download link works.

Update: oops, bit early on this, RiverMuse isn’t officially released until 5pm today, 28 July 2009.

Rivermuse release iminent?

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:15:29 +0000

Looks like RiverMuse may just be coming close to a release next week after a considerable delay (around six months) if the latest RiverMuse tweet is authoritative.

RiverMuse is supposed to be a next-generation systems management tool that just happens to be open source as well. With the people involved in RiverMuse, including such network management luminaries like Philip Tee, Predrag Mutavdzic, and Mike Silvey, we can expect big things from them.

Seen the Apollo anniversary on TV? Now read the source code...

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:08:51 +0000

If you want to see some excellent assembly language programming, you can do a lot worse than read NASA’s newly released source code for the Apollo program.

[via ComputerWorldUK]

Open source questions...

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:50:59 +0000

A great set of questions by Jacob Kaplan-Moss about the General Public License with some great answers in the comments…

The lowdown on writing a technical book

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:40:50 +0000

If you’ve ever hankered after writing a technical book then Michael Foord has some advice for you garnered from writing IronPython in Action.

Sounds like a shed load of work for no money… something I seem to be specialising in at the moment. 😉

Update: Michael has done a post detailing his first quarter earning from IronPython in Action. Not a lot of money for two years work… the only thing worse paid than writing a book is writing open source software. 😉

Google Chrome OS from a sys admin perspective

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:33:26 +0000

What does Google’s recent announcement that it is getting into the operating system business tell us from a sys admin perspective?

For a start whatever effects it will have are some way off. Chrome OS isn’t due to be released until the second half of next year. It is amazing how much fuss a company like Google can generate with a single press release. Chrome OS doesn’t exist yet, and won’t exist for another year and yet here we are all talking about it like we’ve never seen a Linux based NetBook OS before.

My server uptime

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:09:47 +0000

I was messing around inside top trying to diagnose a server slowdown and I noticed that my server has been up for 463 days. The server runs Linux Centos 4.4.

Want to share your server uptime? 😉

Update October 2022: I do now realise that this is perhaps the dumbest post on this entire blog.

Sourceforge open source awards 2009

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:15:51 +0000

Looking at the entrants for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards 2009 I am struck by the wide range of applications, but also the quality of the finalists.

In the network management space, Nagios is a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins and OpenNMS is a finalist in the Best Project for the Enterprise.

You have until 20th July to register your vote.

Windows based dynamic systems management update

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:55:08 +0000

As a follow up to the Windows based structured systems management post, I have found a network monitor that does have some dynamic abilities.

PolyMon is an open source network monitor written for the .NET environment. Steven Murawski has written PoSHMon, a series of PowerShell cmdlets for interacting with PolyMon dynamically. Whilst neither PolyMon or PoShMon are particularly full featured or mature, they do at least show what is possible.

If anybody knows of any commercial network management tools with PowerShell support for dynamic structured systems management, I’d love to hear about it. 😉

Windows based structured systems management

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:27:32 +0000

Found a post whilst reading a post by the Standalone Sysadmin… and it is a beauty. Michael Janke has a post comparing ad-hoc versus structured systems management.

One of the items that Michael says is essential for structuring your systems management is automation. As Matt Simmons says:

Remember, if you can script it, script it. If you can’t script it, make a checklist

In the Windows world automation has been a pretty tough ask until Windows PowerShell came onto the scene. Whilst it was possible to script Windows with VBScript, it wasn’t easy or quick. If it isn’t easy and quick it probably won’t happen.

Interesting comparison of WMI performance...

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:58:27 +0000

… between various flavours of Windows. Not sure what Microsoft have done on Vista and Server 2008 but it hasn’t half slowed down WMI performance. Thankfully the latest release candidate of Windows 7 has much improved performance.

Oops!

Introducing easy network simulation

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:05:36 +0000

Paessler have introduced a new product called Multi Server Simulator, currently available as a pre-release version, that creates a simulated network of devices and switches.

The main use for network simulators is for testing network management software. However, network simulators do have plenty of uses outside of software development.

If you are evaluating network monitoring software you may not want to unleash it on your live network. Network simulators like Multi Server Simulator allow you to create a test lab completely separated from your live network. There isn’t much point in subjecting your network to a piece of software if it can’t scale up to the job.

Open source network management activity comparison

Wed, 27 May 2009 13:04:46 +0000

The recent controversy over the ICINGA Nagios fork brought into focus the relative activity of the various network management projects.

One of the main complaints aimed at Nagios was the slow speed of development. The following graphs, taken from the open source directory ohloh, show the number of committers and the number of commits over the last three years for Nagios, OpenNMS and Wireshark. I can’t vouch for how accurate the stats are but I think they do provide some insight into the development processes of the respective projects.

A real world example of the problems with open core software

Thu, 21 May 2009 10:42:32 +0000

A real world example of what Tarus Balog from OpenNMS has been banging on about recently with his critique of open core or fauxpen source as Tarus calls it.

A product manager who has an open product and a closed product plainly has a decision to make over which features go into which product. Give too much away and the value add of the closed enterprise product is insufficient to warrant the licence fees. Put too many features into the enterprise product and the open source offering becomes useless.

First ICINGA beta is released

Wed, 20 May 2009 12:46:54 +0000

The first ICINGA beta has been released with a new GUI written in PHP 5 utilising the Agavi MVC framework. A project roadmap is available so you can see where the project is headed.

Naguino: an Arduino-based LCD monitor for Nagios

Tue, 12 May 2009 14:05:41 +0000

Naguino: an Arduino-based LCD monitor for Nagios and Icinga

If you’ve ever wanted to know the status of your Nagios installation without having to open a browser, you may find Naguino a fun and useful addition to your monitoring toolkit.

All you need is the Arduino board, an ethernet board, a LCD screen and some software.

Ethan Galstad speaks out

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:46:21 +0000

Ethan Galstad, the Nagios founder, has responded to recent criticisms of Nagios and to the recent ICINGA fork. It does seem a little ironic that, although the ICINGA founders claim one of the drivers behind the fork was a lack of communication, Ethan Galstad claims they didn’t communicate their dissatisfaction to him.

Trademarks and open source software

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:04:20 +0000

Open source is a term used to cover permissive licenses for software. Generally speaking, if software is covered by an open source license, you have a right to the source code for that software, as well as the ability to modify that software and distribute your changes to others.

What are Trademarks?

“A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a recognizable sign, design or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others.”

Nagios responds to the ICINGA fork

Fri, 08 May 2009 11:06:23 +0000

Matt Asay over at The Open Road commented recently that forks are a sign of strength in open source. I’m sure he’s right, but they are not necessarily a sign of strength for the project being forked. The one positive thing is that it makes the community sit up and review the root cause of the fork.

As Andreas Ericsson says in his post The future of Nagios, recent events have demonstrated weaknesses in the structure of the Nagios project, specifically that Ethan Galstad is the only committer of fixes and enhancements to Nagios. A single committer is fine until the committer doesn’t have sufficient time to work on the project as might be required to keep up with community submitted fixes and enhancements. Understandably, individual contributors are going to get frustrated that their patches and enhancements are not being incorporated into the project.

Nagios begets ICINGA

Wed, 06 May 2009 16:21:08 +0000

Nagios is probably the best known open source network management tool. Ethan Galstad created NetSaint, the tool that eventually became Nagios, many years ago at the very dawn of using open source tools in network management.

Things are not going well. A number of people from the Nagios community, including a couple from the Nagios Community Advisory Board have decided to create a fork of Nagios under the ICINGA project. The reason? The founders of the ICINGA project charge Nagios with stifling the development of the project.

Hyperic joins SpringSource

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:32:27 +0000

Congrats to Hyperic for the purchase by SpringSource. If you’d bet me which of the new wave were going to be bought first I would have bet on Hyperic every time.

What is most gratifying about the purchase is that it is an open source company doing the buying. Whilst I think it unlikely, one of the concerns many people have about the new wave is: what happens if they get swallowed up by some proprietary software company with absolutely no clue about open source.

The joy of content plagiarism

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:55:54 +0000

One of the nice side effects of our new content management system is that you can leave comments on our articles. We received one rather intriguing comment this week effectively accusing us of plagiarising an article. That came as a bit of a surprise given that I know Denis wrote the article in question several years ago.

Things are complicated slightly because the article is hosted by an article submission site. So, the people who ripped off the article aren’t hosting it on their own site. This does make things more complex because the people who ripped off the article may not be in a position to remove it.

Blekko cluster live visualisation station

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:56:34 +0000

Rich Skrenta has done a post about the Blekko cluster health visualisation console. Very neat!

The cloud application shortcut key conundrum

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:00:41 +0000

One of the more annoying things about using the new, all singing, all dancing web interface on Apple’s MobileMe email service is the hijacking of my much used Firefox shortcut ^N (create a new browser window.)

When using a browser, I expect ^N to create me a new browser window, which it duly does most of the time. When inside the MobileMe email web application, ^N creates a new email message window. To say the least this is a little bit annoying because I have to start thinking about context when I want a new browser window. Not ideal.

Servers you can cook with

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:30:10 +0000

Everybody knows that one of the biggest consumers of electricity in data centre is the air conditioning system. There are two main avenues for reducing the cost of air conditioning, either make the air conditioning system more efficient so that it consumes less electricity, or remove the requirement to use so much air conditioning in the first place by running your data centre hotter.

It looks like running the data centre hotter is gaining some ground. The Rackable CloudRack C2 is a new server that can run safely at temperatures around 40°C rather than the more normal range of 20 to 23°C.

Choosing a content management system redux

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:27:30 +0000

I blogged about choosing a content management system and we’ve finally managed to deploy the resulting system. It would be fair to say that choosing a content management system is a nightmare. And, anybody else’s experience probably won’t help you very much unless you share the same set of requirements.

Our requirement was largely shaped by the e-commerce system we run on our main website. It is a big blob of a Java system running under JBoss all front ended by Apache.

Blog hiatus

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:28:09 +0000

My posting activity has been a little light of late… and there is a very good reason for that, I’ve been busy writing some software. Writing software is kinda like the powerful spell in Rincewind’s mind in Terry Pratchett’s book The Colour of Magic, it will prevent everything else from occupying your brain.

Anyway, the software in question is PowerTime. It is now nearing completion and should be available as a first beta real soon. I need to complete some more unit tests, mainly to test use in a multi-threaded environment, and complete and test the installer.

OpenNMS conference in Europe

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:17:15 +0000

… now all of you OpenNMS fans and people who’d like to know more about how OpenNMS can help you manage your network for less, have the opportunity to meet lots of influential OpenNMS people, without the need to hop onto a plane to the good ol’ U.S. of A.

The first ever OpenNMS user conference will be held in Frankfurt, Germany on the 14th March 2009. Cost will be around 200 euros.

RiverMuse FreeCool slipped until late Jan/early Feb

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:00:10 +0000

… at least the public release anyway. I expect if you work somewhere interesting, then it may be worthwhile contacting them in the meantime.

RiverMuse are aiming their offerings solidly at Tivoli, Micromuse and OpenView event correlation users. RiverMuse are going to be using an open cor**e strategy, so far blazed by Zenoss and Hyperic, in the network management space. The open core product is RiverMuse FreeCool and the feature added, for sale product, will be RiverMuse ProCool.

Tivoli vs open source netwo2010rk management buzz 2008

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:19:28 +0000

As suggested by Jane Curry in her comment on the Open source network management buzz comparison 2008 post I’ve compared Tivoli related keywords and selected open source projects. Tivoli covers a lot of ground so comparing it on its own doesn’t really tell you very much.

Tivoli vs Open Source Network Management Systems

Both Tivoli Monitoring and NetView have been pretty consistent throughout 2008 unlike OpenView which fell substantially. It is odd that Tivoli Monitoring fell off a cliff in December. Presumably, that is just a really heavy seasonal decline rather than anything more fundamental. Maybe Tivoli people get very generous Christmas breaks. 😉

Ethereal.com website back up

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:00:21 +0000

I’ve noticed that the old Ethereal website is back up again after being offline for well over a year. The original Ethereal crew, including Gerald Combs the founder, disappeared over to Wireshark, where they created a fork due to problems with trademarks.

Not sure what’s going on. The website hasn’t been updated since 2007. The last version of Ethereal advertised on the site was 0.99.0 from 24th April 2006.

Is somebody planning on keeping the Ethereal brand going?

Open source network management buzz comparison 2008

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:24:30 +0000

As it’s the start of a new year I thought it would be an ideal time to look back over the year just gone. I have used Google Trends to compare the number of searches during 2008 of various open source and proprietary network management tools.

Whilst search volume is an interesting metric for network management tools, it is not intended to be in any way indicative of the usefulness of a particular tool. If you want to choose a tool, start from your own requirements first and select a tool from that.

Signing off for 2008

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:43:01 +0000

I’d like to thank all of you, my loyal readers, for sticking around throughout the last year. It looks like 2009 may prove to be even more interesting than this year… but probably not in a good way.

Expect to see a more tightly focused Tech Teapot in the new year. Also, a move over to a new home and a spring clean of the design too.

PowerTime, a time series database written specifically for .NET and PowerShell, has also recently taken some significant baby steps to production quality. I had a mental block for the last couple of months on how to do the database locking. Things have worked out well and I’m pleased with the result. I’ve created an ever faithful unit test to keep me on the straight and narrow. Expect more news in the first quarter of 2009 as the project moves towards its first beta.

Introducing Pandora FMS

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:00:12 +0000

The open source systems management space sure is hotting up. Pandora FMS looks like a good emerging open source systems management tool.

Pandora FMS has been developed by Ãrtica, a Spanish company founded in 2005. A VMWare image is available for download, so checking Pandora FMS out is a breeze.

From a technical perspective, Pandora FMS is written in Perl & PHP with MySQL as the backend database. The software is split into two main components, the server and the console.

Hyperic hyperbole

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:02:27 +0000

I was researching a post when I was amused to come across the Hyperic advert in the image below. Even by marketing department standards, to claim Hyperic is the world’s most popular systems monitoring software does seem a teeny, weeny bit over the top. 😄

Hyperic claim to be the world's most popular systems monitoring software

Centreon - Nagios remixed

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:33:37 +0000

One of the problems with Nagios is that initial set up & configuration can be intimidating to the new user. There are a number of methods for easing the initial installation problems, but you are still left with an intimidating configuration process.

One option is to use Centreon, a (relatively) new front end for Nagios with a more accessible web front end for configuration. Centreon is fully open source and is supported by Merethis, a French company, who also sponsor development of the project.

Wordpress 5 minute install...

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:00:59 +0000

… used to be a category leader in ease of installation. It isn’t now. You can install very powerful CMS software like SilverStripe in under a minute. By comparison, five minutes seems like an eternity.

The SilverStripe installer does away with any database and config file messing around. Just run the install script and bob’s your uncle it creates the database and creates the necessary config files for you.

Just shows how you can’t rest on your laurels in this industry…what was once industry leading is now behind the curve. A five minute install is wonderful til somebody else comes up with a one minute install.

Google account security

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:45:56 +0000

Here at Teapot Towers we are pretty paranoid about security. One of the things we’ve done to improve our security is lock down our web sites with a nice phat firewall.

Outside of the firewall, you just get to see the standard web & incoming email ports. Internally, from the company network, we bypass the firewall meaning we can see everything, most notably the SSH service for doing all of the nice server admin work.

TWiki begets Foswiki

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:00:56 +0000

At the end of October I mentioned a project called Twiki that was in the process of being forked because the project creator wanted to take the project down the commercial open source route.

The community behind TWiki wasn’t too pleased about this. Consequently, they have forked the TWiki code and have founded the Foswiki project in order to continue development.

Firefox RSS subscription bug

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:00:16 +0000

I’ve recently noticed a bug in Firefox 3. If you subscribe to a lot of blogs you’ve probably noticed the RSS symbol on the right hand side inside your Firefox address bar.

The RSS signup button in the address bar

The feature is very useful because, when you go to a blog or a news page, you can quickly and easily subscribe via your feed reader.

It's usually the firewall/anti-virus software

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:54:35 +0000

A good case in point today. Software ran just fine on Windows XP but the move to Vista stops the software working.

First conclusion: the software mustn’t be compatible with Vista. Wrong! It was nothing to do with Vista. It was the anti-virus software running on top of Vista that was causing the problem.

For reasons best known to BitDefender, it thinks the protocol used by Sensatronics for retrieving the temperature readings looks like the Yahoo messenger protocol. The only thing the two have in common is that both use XML over HTTP.

Off Topic: A few pictures from Otley on a snowy day

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:06:09 +0000

A few pictures from around Otley, West Yorkshire on a snowy day in December 2008.

A WEEE farce

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:21:18 +0000

Over the last couple of years we’ve donated around £2,000 in order to be Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) registered.

In the same period how much toxic electrical waste have we saved from landfill? None. Not a single solitary chip or board.

Why don’t we all just admit it: WEEE is just another tax and a dumb tax at that.

The popularity contest widget has moved...

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:52:43 +0000

…to be hosted with all of its brothers and sisters over at wordpress.org. The new hosting facility over at Wordpress provides a much better environment for the widget where it can be version controlled properly.

A perspective on open source network monitoring tools...

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:28:48 +0000

…by Grig Gheorghiu over on the Agile Testing blog: The sad state of open source monitoring tools.

I wish there was a standard nomenclature for this stuff, as well as a standard way for these tools to inter-operate. As it is, you have to learn each tool and train your brain to ignore all the weirdness that it encounters.

One of the problems with I.T. is the absence of a standard terminology. It would make things a lot easier if everybody used a standard set of terminology. Kinda hard to see how this can be imposed though. I guess over time a standard terminology will just evolve after the industry has matured a little more.

The Tech Teapot two today!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:00:11 +0000

The Tech Teapot is two years old today. Now we’ve got 13 categories, 334 posts & 412 comments.

A selection of some of my favourite posts from the last year:

Thanks to Chris Garrett for his advice and for co-founding the local Wordpress in the North group. Also thanks to Alan over at The Open Sourcerer, Matt Simmons and John M Willis for commenting here and for putting up with my comments on your blogs.

Subscribing to blogs the easy way

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:00:02 +0000

One of the things that has surprised me about running this blog has been the number of people who subscribe via email.

Off Topic: The recession according to Google Trends...

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:17:09 +0000

John Naughton has created a great post outlining the development of the recession in Google Trends. My suspicion is that Google Trends will also show the upturn before anything else too. I wonder which searches will be diagnostic of the upturn?

What to do if you're newly qualified and can't get your first job

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:30:25 +0000

In the early nineties I managed to time my emergence from college to exactly coincide with the beginning of the last recession.

It wasn’t a nice time. Jobs were in short supply and the jobs that were advertised were usually deluged with applicants.

Newly qualified people are bound to feel a downturn the hardest. You don’t have a track record, your skill set may not exactly match what is required by industry. In addition, people with work experience, who’ve been made redundant, start applying for entry level jobs.

RiverMuse: open source enterprise fault management system

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:51:08 +0000

John Willis on his excellent CloudDroplets #7 podcast mentioned a very interesting development in the enterprise open source network management space.

RiverMuse is an open source enterprise fault management system designed to replicate the functionality of IBM Tivoli & HP OpenView. RiverMuse has been developed by the original founding team of both Micromuse and RiverSoft.

The software isn’t available yet, it was due first week of November. I’ll let you know when it’s released.

The first cloud friendly network management system...

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:11:06 +0000

Hyperic have just announced the release of Hyperic HQ version 4, the first cloud friendly network management system. Setting up a network monitoring probe in the cloud just got a whole lot easier.

Dia the open source Visio

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:24:20 +0000

If you need to create quick and easy diagrams but can’t justify a full priced tool like SmartDraw or Visio then you’re in luck. Dia is an open source diagramming tool that will make a welcome addition to your diagramming toolkit.

Four network monitoring tools with web based interfaces...

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:00:38 +0000

… a nice roundup by Linux.com outlining some of the options for network monitoring in a *nix environment.

Introduction to the cloud for the enterprise

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:11:40 +0000

John M Willis has done a great job introducing how enterprises can make use of cloud computing.

Enjoy! 😄

Selecting a content management system

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:00:23 +0000

One of the great discoveries I made whilst writing this blog has been the ease with which I can create posts using Wordpress as the content management system (CMS). It started good and it just keeps on getting better.

I’d love to be able to update content on the rest of the site just as easily. Unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, updating the site means wading waste deep in PHP. All changes to the website need to go through either myself or Dean, slowing things down considerably.

Elastic clouds with elastic bills

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:55:59 +0000

I mentioned this in a comment over on John M Willis ESM Blog. I thought it deserved a post all to itself because I think it’s important.

One anxiety I have with hosting my websites is the bill I need to pay each month. There are many many hosting options out there, all with their own particular risk characteristics.

With the advent of on-demand cloud offerings like Amazon EC2 there are lot of new options. One of the characteristics of cloud offerings is easy scalability. Scalability does have a problem though, because your bill will scale too.

May you live in interesting times...

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:31:01 +0000

…I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or scared by today’s 1.5% cut in UK interest rates. After all, the Monetary Policy Committee don’t normally go around lopping 1.5% off interest rates. Things were pretty boring there on the economic front for a decade or so, it is surprising just how fast things can turn around.

Screams as systems administration alert method

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:00:46 +0000

According to a recent survey carried out by Fluke Networks, 29% of IT managers say they have been alerted to business critical problems by screams. Doesn’t sound like they have pro-active monitoring then? 😉

When open source goes wrong...

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:51:20 +0000

… things ain’t too pretty.

My favourite quote:

“Clearly, their VC people have no picture of the situation other than their own return of investment.”

Well, yeah duh! Why anybody would be surprised that VCs are money focused is a mystery. VCs are managing other people’s money so their focus is bound to be primarily money focused. Your retirement fund isn’t going to give two figs about open source, it just wants a decent return on investment given the risks it is taking.

DEC answers year 2000 leap year bug report

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:17:19 +0000

Digital Equipment answers a user’s bug report that the year 2000 is not a leap year.

Various system services, such as SYS$ASCTIM assume that the year 2000 will be a leap year. Although one can never be sure of what will happen at some future time, there is strong historical precedent for presuming that the present Gregorian calendar will still be in affect by the year 2000. Since we also hope that VMS will still be around by then, we have chosen to adhere to these precedents.

How not to do XBox 360 support

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:35:34 +0000

I’ve had a XBox 360 for around a year now and I have to say it has been a fine console. I can’t get enough of Command & Conquer.

Unfortunately, my dear XBox 360 has decided to die a horrible death. There was no warning it just wouldn’t work one day.

Whilst it is pretty bad that Microsoft release a product that is so unreliable, it is far worse the amount of grief I have to go through to get my 360 fixed.

The really ultimate low power server

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:59:35 +0000

Al over at The Open Sourcerer mentioned in the comments of the ultimate low power server post another low power server running Ubuntu but for the bargain price of £99! There’s no Microsoft Windows option or WiFi but who cares for that price.

Ultimate low power server

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:00:23 +0000

Want a home server but don’t want the electric bills that come from leaving a high powered machine on all of the time? Help is at hand.

The fit-PC is a miniature, noiseless, extremely power efficient PC capable of running either Windows XP or Linux. And there’s built in WiFi too.

Make a great small, inexpensive network management server too! 😄

The IT Skeptic interview

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:29:39 +0000

A very interesting interview with The IT Skeptic over on the IT’s About Uptime blog. The interview covers ITIL and CMDB primarily with some background on The IT Skeptic himself.

For those who haven’t come across The IT Skeptic, he tends to take a rather sceptical view of current IT service management practice.

The strange case of the slow server

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:00:47 +0000

Our internet presence has been slow of late. Customers were complaining that the website was slow, we couldn’t log into the server reliably, sending emails was slow. All told not very good.

I remembered a while ago getting a call from my hosting rep saying that our bandwidth was maxed out. Many hosting providers provide unlimited bandwidth but limit the size of the pipe to your server. This has the benefit that whatever happens you know how big your hosting bill is going to be. The downside is that when the usage approaches the pipe limit, some traffic will start to slow down or fail. And there won’t be any discrimination between important money earning traffic and none monetised traffic.

Survey results

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:26:25 +0000

I ran a survey a couple of weeks ago asking for feedback on The Tech Teapot. A number of you were kind enough to take the time to fill it in.

All of the survey participants are somewhat satisfied & read the blog either frequently or always. The number of readers is currently hovering around the 700 mark with the vast majority of readers accessing the blog via the email subscription option.

A few days on the beach

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:14:04 +0000

I’m going on a few days break so I won’t be posting for the next few days. Normal service will be resumed next week. Whilst I will be at the seaside it most certainly won’t look anything like the picture. The good thing about the hotel is that it is slap in the middle of Whitby & Scarborough on the cycle route using the old railway line. A perfect spot for a bit of cycling, weather permitting. From the looks of the forecast yesterday I may have timed things perfectly. 😄 Where would cycling be without Dr Beeching…

Off Topic: Chin up

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:34:01 +0000

I personally think the doom & gloom is being overplayed at the moment, every bit as much as the euphoria overshot during the boom years.

Things certainly are going to be different for a while, but I don’t think we’re all going to go back to depression era levels of unemployment and the social deprevation associated with it.

Whilst the various world wide responses to the crisis haven’t been great, they’ve been a whole lot better than the response during the great depression.

Brian Clough book fest

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:00:50 +0000

Occasionally, when the mood takes me, I read up on a topic to a reasonable depth. This time it was Brian Clough, the eponymous ex-manager of football clubs Derby County & Nottingham Forest.

Network monitoring tools @ SLAC link visualisation

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:00:33 +0000

I thought it would help you to visualise the increased competition in network management by producing a graph of the links in the Network Monitoring Tools directory @ SLAC.

Gliffy: Visio in the cloud

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:00:11 +0000

If you think of Gliffy as Visio delivered as a web based app you’d be about right, just like Google Docs. Google, if you’ve got a spare few million bucks (and we all know you do), will you just buy Gliffy? And then integrate it into Google Docs. This stuff is way too good to waste behind a paid-for monetisation strategy.

An indication of heightened competition in network management

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:00:25 +0000

When I was doing the research for the Open source network management in Google 2001 vs Google 2008 I came across the Network Monitoring Tools website run by Stanford.

Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2001

Network Monitoring Tools @ SLAC 2008

I think the above images illustrates the heightened level of competition in today’s network management market rather well.

Open Source Management Options paper complete

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:47:13 +0000

Jane Curry has completed her Open Source Management Options [PDF] white paper.

Scheduling a PowerShell task on Windows 2003

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:00:50 +0000

Mike Wilbur provides a great post on scheduling a PowerShell script to periodically run using Windows 2003. Somehow I think that’s gonna prove very handy when used in conjunction with PowerTime. 😄

That old I.T. vs facilities thing again

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:52:47 +0000

The classic problem with facilities people running the air-conditioning systems.

[via The Daily WTF]

Render farm as wall art

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:00:28 +0000

If only data centres looked like this…

Via Devicelnn & Frederik Perman

Open source network management search result in Google 2001 vs Google 2008 vs Google 2022

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:35:10 +0000

Google have released a fully searchable version of their first available index from 2001 to celebrate their 10th birthday. I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast a search for “open source network management” using the 2001 index and the 2008 index.

I have now added the search results for the October 2022 index.

Figure 1: Google Results for open source network management search in 2001

Discoverable data centre infrastructure

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:00:03 +0000

David Cuthbertson of Square Mile Systems was kind enough to demonstrate his AssetGen software to myself and Denis last week.

Once the data has been inputted into a CMDB like AssetGen all sorts of very impressive reports can be generated very quickly.

Implementing a CMDB involves a heavy up front investment because you have to manually enter at least 50% of your infrastructure and associated dependencies.

The cause of the steep initial investment in CMDB is the invisibility of infrastructure in the data centre to auto-discovery software, meaning that infrastructure cannot be auto-discovered in the same way as devices on the network.

Intel study shows no effect from using none conditioned air

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:00:37 +0000

Intel have carried out a limited pilot to find out how a data centre would perform without the usual data centre environmental controls [PDF].

The top and bottom of it was that the servers, over a nine month test period performed as well whilst exposed to regular none air conditioned air and limited air filtration as servers in a fully air conditioned data centre.

Does this mean that you can switch off all of your air conditioners and circulate none conditioned air instead? No, I’d wait for longer follow up studies before you do that. 😉

Amazon cloud computing service applied to network management

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:00:35 +0000

Terry Slattery has some suggestions as to how you can use Amazon’s cloud computing offerings in implementing network management

European vs American views on open source

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:28:16 +0000

Larry Augustin created an excellent comparison between European & American attitudes towards commercial open source software.

[via Adventures in Open Source]

Update: sorry for being a clutz, I forgot the link to the article. All sorted out now.

Code & documentation mix-up on Google Code

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:45:24 +0000

Google Code is a fabulous, minimalist open source development portal. I love it because there’s no faffing around and it uses lots of standard open source development tools like subversion.

One of the more bizarre design decisions Google made when they developed the service was to show changes to code and changes to the wiki pages in the same place.

When I go to the history page, I just want to see a change log of software changes not changes to the wiki pages as well. Saving the wiki into subversion is a great idea, I just don’t see why it has to use the same repository as the project source code.

How will cloud computing change network management

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:32:49 +0000

The big selling point with cloud computing is that computing capacity grows and shrinks depending upon the load being put upon it. You typically only pay for CPU (by the hour) and storage (by the month) you actually use.

If your website enjoys a sudden surge in traffic, by appearing on the front page of slashdot for instance, then extra servers will be provisioned automatically. Once the peak load passes and more normal traffic levels return, the extra servers are automatically de-provisioned.

The network & systems management blogosphere

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:14:12 +0000

Thought I’d share the network & systems management blogs I read on a daily basis in the hope that you’d share yours with me.

Network & Systems Management

Cloud Computing

Open Source

Enterprise Management

Protocol Analysis

Data Centre

Aggregators

Planet SysAdmin

I’m always on the look out for good systems management blogs, so if you know of any I really should be reading, I’m all ears. 😉

Open source network management comparison podcast

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:27:14 +0000

A fine podcast discussing Jane Curry’s Open Source Management Options paper with Michael Cote, Jane Curry herself and John M Willis.

Distributed network monitoring interview with Robert Aronsson

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:36:22 +0000

Robert Aronsson is the CEO of Intellipool AB a company with over ten years experience of the network management market. Intellipool introduced a distributed network monitor over four years ago. I interviewed Robert with a view to getting some insight into Intellipool’s experience of implementing distributed network monitoring solutions with their customers.

The interview was conducted via email. My questions are in bold with Robert’s answers underneath.

Q: What key factors determine whether you need a distributed solution?

The most obvious factor is network location, doing direct network monitoring over, for example, a branch office VPN is not something I would recommend. Depending on what you are monitoring it can be a huge resource drain on a VPN that should be used for “normal” office work.

Off Topic: Autumn switch

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:46:43 +0000

It was uncanny yesterday. I entered the office in summer and when I left to go buy an espresso mid-morning the air had changed to an early autumn chill. The nice summer smell had gone too, replaced by a fresher autumn bite.

Oh well, that’s summer 2008 gone. Not a classic by any means. And I’ve got my 50 miles sponsored cycle ride to do this Sunday too. That’ll be nice in the wind and rain that is currently being forecast. 😄 My time last year was four and a half hours so I’m hoping to beat that. A couple of weekends ago I rode from York to Beverley (about 30 miles each way) and back on consecutive days and I did ok. On the way back my left knee went so I’m hoping that won’t recur on Sunday. Fingers crossed. 😉

Video ahoy!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:29:56 +0000

We’re in the process of producing a bunch of videos explaining the features on some of our more specialised products…what am I saying? They’re all specialised!

There are a lot of concepts in the cabling world that many IT workers haven’t come across before. We’re determined to make it as easy as possible for them to learn the dark secrets of cable testing and cable locating.

In depth open source network management comparison

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:33:10 +0000

Jane Curry of the UK based Skills 1st network management training and consultancy company has written a rather good open source network management tool comparison. It is a large PDF file ~150 pages, so you have been warned!

Kudos to Jane for doing the comparison, it must have been a whole heap of work. Enjoy!

Distributed network monitoring introduction

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:47:59 +0000

A number of mid-level network monitoring products, like What’s Up Gold & Intellipool for instance, have recently implemented distributed monitoring features. Mid-level network monitoring products are now implementing distributed monitoring so it is affordable by a lot more companies.

Single Poller Monitoring

With regular network monitoring you have a single poller measuring network and server performance from a single location on your network.

Figure 1: Architecture of a central polling in a distributed network

The big IT worker's bug bear

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:45:04 +0000

Looks like I’m not the only one to have problems with friends and family wanting help with their computers. I’ve talked about this before and, whilst my own problem has been much reduced, plainly a lot of people in IT have problems associated with people expecting unreasonable amounts of help with their home electrical equipment.

In many ways the problem isn’t close friends and family, it’s when friends and family start farming you out to their friends and acquaintances.

Google Code time bug

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:21:18 +0000

Whilst Google Code is a very good open source repository service, it does have a few wrinkles. Take the image below:

Unless I’ve been missing something these last few years, there are only 24 hours in a day!

Burnout is the enemy of all professionals

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:05:21 +0000

The chances are that the vast majority of the people reading this post are professional IT people in some capacity or another.

As professionals we are prone to burn out unless we take specific precautions to prevent it. Bashing your head against the IT firewall everyday can leave you feeling a bit empty and burnt out.

From my own perspective I have certainly been burnt out on this blog for at least a couple of months. I’ve had big problems coming up with topics to talk about, a sure sign of blogger burnout.

Surviving a hobby open source project

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:19:12 +0000

Excellent post on the Pushing Pixels blog about surviving a hobby open source project. Well worth a read if you are involved in a single person open source project.

Powershell as Lisp

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:47:19 +0000

One of the interesting things about Lisp is the ability to use macros to effectively create your own language. Instead of using Lisp to solve your problem, write a language in which your problem can be solved and then solve it using your own mini-language.

When I heard of the new features in Powershell v2, the one that stood out for me was the ease with which you can create cmdlets using the Powershell scripting language rather than being forced to use C# or VB.NET.

Off Topic: Featureless software for $1,000

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:46:37 +0000

So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all of these years… if only I’d known this earlier I’d currently be sunning myself on a beach in the Bahamas.

Resources for learning Windows Powershell

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:05:31 +0000

I am currently in the process of broadening my knowledge of Windows Powershell and I thought I’d post some of the excellent resources I’ve found. Many are available for free online, some you’ll have to shell out money for. The book, Windows Powershell in Action, is well worth buying if you want to gain an understanding of how Powershell works.

Tutorials

PowerShell Pro Tutorial
Arstechnica Tutorial – created prior to the rename to Powershell but still worth your time
The DFO Show – introducing Windows PowerShell [video]
Computer Performance Powershell Tutorial

Community

powershellcommunity.org – powershell oriented blogs, forums & cmdlet directory

Books

Windows Powershell in Action – the book from one of the founders of the Windows Powershell team

Blogs

PowerShell team blog – the blog by the people who are writing Powershell
The Powershell Guy
Get-Powershell blog
Dmitry’s PowerBlog – Dmitry Sotnikov’s view on PowerShell, PowerGUI and much else

Open source network management comparison: Support

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:45:51 +0000

A comparison of various open source network management tools with information about the support options available for each tool.

Open source network management comparison: General

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:14:09 +0000

A comparison of various open source network management tools.

Open source network management comparison: Introduction

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:44:59 +0000

One side effect of the increased competition in open source network management is that it is becoming increasingly hard to choose which tool is right for you.

With that in mind I intend to create a comparison featuring the best known open source tools to make the process of choosing the right tool a little bit easier.

I’ll publish the comparison in tranches so that, by the end of it, a comprehensive comparison is available. The first tranches will present more general information. As the series progresses more detailed information will be presented.

Code performance tuning in .NET

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:48:53 +0000

One of the things I’ve been busy with over the last two weeks has been to re-write the backend to PowerTime. Binary files are a nightmare to program, debug and maintain. With that in mind I’ve re-coded the backend to use SQLite through ADO.NET.

New 6 Point Checklist for Cables

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:30:02 +0000

A couple of weeks ago BASEC (The British Approvals Service for Cables) issued a 6 point checklist pre-empting the release of the 17th Edition Wiring Regulations in July. They are alerting cable installers that the need to ensure the correct specification of cables for major projects has now become critical.

Dr Jeremy Hodge, BASEC’s Chief Executive, said: “For any size of project, the last piece of news a contractor or specifier wants is that cabling has to be stripped out because the system is not working properly, there is a safety implication or the wrong cable has been installed.”

Multics goes open source

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:01:00 +0000

It’s kinda like seeing your grand father naked…if you’re Linux anyway. Multics sources in all its PL1 glory is now available for your perusal. Surprisingly for a system conceived in 1965, the last Multics system was shut down only in 2000. Impressive.

Handy server room toilet facilities

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:52:52 +0000

Working in the server room and busting for a pee? You need to install a toilet where it’s convenient…yes folks somebody installed a server room so that you’ve got to go through the women’s toilet in order to enter the server room.

Just think of all of the time you’d save not having to walk all the way to the men’s toilet.

Open source network management comparison: Platform

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:00:14 +0000

A comparison of various open source network management tools with information about the platforms the tools support.

Firefox 3 enhanced SSL certificate support

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:48:08 +0000

Firefox now has full enhanced SSL certificate support at last with the arrival of version 3. Enhanced SSL certificates verify that a website is owned by whomever claims to own it. Very useful in the largely anonymous Internet.

Expand the image above to see what it looks like. In the secure part of a site, for instance during checkout, you will now see a green area at the start of the Navigation Toolbar. The green area lists the verified company or organisation name and the country to which the secure SSL certificate has been assigned. If you hover your mouse over the green area a tool tip is displayed showing who authenticated the certificate.

PowerTime now on Google Code

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:46:35 +0000

PowerTime is now available on Google Code. You can even browse the code without having to download anything.

The only problem I ran into was the size of the ECAD data set exceeded the quota given to new projects. I’ve now split the ECAD data set so that it is available for download but isn’t versioned inside Subversion.

I’ll be back onto PowerTime real soon now. Just having a rest doing some web work at the moment. Expect a first beta by the end of June.

Odd insurance bar to dealing with USA

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:30:20 +0000

Just rung up direct line for business to get a quote for our compulsory Employers’ Liability Insurance and was refused because we have dealings with companies in the USA! Weird… I’m really surprised because Direct Line is a pretty big insurer. I’d love to know what the problem is with having dealings with the USA?

Suffice it to say all of the quotes have gone up this year. 😉

Mark Hinkle of Zenoss interview

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:53:36 +0000

Roberto Galoppini posted an interview with Mark Hinkle, the community VP over at Zenoss. Interesting…

Off Topic: Slug fest

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:26:31 +0000

Had a really gross moment last night. I was busy pouring my evening cup of tea (organic rooibos) when what should appear in my cup but a nice big fat juicy slug. How the slug managed to get into my kettle I do not know given that there aren’t any obvious ways in (the spout has a filter over it.)

Annie just told me that slug slime is supposed to be used for anti-ageing products so maybe I’ll get a nice youthful complexion out of the whole thing. 😄

Linux cluster in an IKEA filing cabinet

Wed, 28 May 2008 15:36:58 +0000

This is the story of Helmer. A linux cluster in a IKEA Helmer cabinet.

Hurrah! Some real data to play with

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:01:08 +0000

I’ve written about my woes finding some good test data sets for PowerTime before…some good news. There is a place you can get hold of climate data for free over at European Climate Assessment & Dataset project. Whilst the temperature data is averaged, the precipitation data is not…so that’s what I’m going to use for my tests. The Berlin data set goes all the way back to 1876 with only quite minor disruption during World War 2. Quite an achievement.

Network Instruments in the blogoshere

Thu, 15 May 2008 10:38:50 +0000

Brian Boyko over at Network Performance Daily mentioned in passing that Network Instruments now have a blog.

Well worth a read… oh, and Network Performance Daily is well worth a read too!

Hub projects in open source network management

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:09:06 +0000

Almost as a doodle I thought I’d create a graph depicting the dependencies between a selection of open source network management projects.

Once I’d done it, it occurred to me how much just about everything depends on just a couple of projects or project variants of, RRDTool & Net-SNMP.

The main conclusion I draw from the above graph is that if you wish to create a thriving platform for open source network management, you’d better have something like those two hub projects.

Whither Met Office openness update

Tue, 06 May 2008 11:38:30 +0000

A couple of months ago or so I lamented the fact that the raw temperature data from the UK met office is not publicly available.

I’ve just received some further feedback from the Met Office.

I was partially wrong, there is a lot more information available than I thought. Here’s a quote with a list of resources:

There is a wide variety of historical information that is available on our website and information can also be obtained from our National Meteorological Library and Archive see http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/library/index.html.

Creating open source software using Microsoft's .NET framework

Fri, 02 May 2008 15:14:13 +0000

Whilst developing PowerTime, I’ve kept in mind the requirement that I need to ensure that the software can be built using only freely available tools.

Of course we will eventually provide an installer, but I like the idea that people can build the software on their own machine if they want to.

One way to make self building easier is to minimise the number of external dependencies required. To that end, everything is written in C# and only standard .NET framework libraries are used. No external libraries are required to create a functional build.

If it works...

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:38:26 +0000

…it’s not AI.

Funny. 😄

Just ran across a great paper written by Eve Phillips documenting a history of artificial intelligence. Well worth a read. The title made me smile because my first job in IT, all the way back to 1989, was writing an expert system and it most certainly did not work.

The above paper reference came from Dan Weinreb’s post Why Did Symbolics Fail?

If you ever want to start a company, you can learn a lot from reading war stories like the ones herein.

Microsoft myopia...update

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:10:11 +0000

I complained in my recent Microsoft mypopia post that Microsoft had failed to support the main unit testing framework inside Visual Studio.

Happily, I’ve found a solution in the form of a Visual Studio add-in called TestDriven.NET. Now I can execute and debug my NUnit tests all from inside Visual Studio. 😄

Just need a bit of wallet surgery first. 😉

RE: Why Only Two?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:53:13 +0000

John Willis over at IT Management and Cloud Blog posted an interesting post I’d like to reply to.

The key question is will Enterprise customers make an investment in companies like OpenNMS and Nagios with out the warm and fuzzy that Software Companies provide.

That’s certainly an interesting perspective John…

It isn’t that Nagios/OpenNMS aren’t hitting enterprise customers. It is the nature of the sale that is different.

Nagios/OpenNMS is more of a bottom up kinda sell. Network technicians use the projects without telling the higher ups and hopefully they can spring for consultancy and training later on after they’ve derived value from it.

Introduction to middle age

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:58:15 +0000

I passed the marker buoy on the journey to middle age last week. At least according to the Collins Dictionary anyway. Of course, according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, I’ve got a further five years to go. 😄

To celebrate I treat my family (all twelve of them) to a play at the Theatre Royal in York to see Twinkle, Little Star.

The protagonist plays a pantomime dame, for whom life hasn’t been altogether kind, playing his last ever season.

Chris Sanders on ARP poisoning

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:39:52 +0000

Great post by Chris Sanders on ARP poisoning for protocol analysis. Well worth a read.

OpenNMS training in Europe

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:22:24 +0000

Are you wanting to get into OpenNMS but are struggling to get started? OpenNMS are running a series of training courses in Europe during May.

The introductory course titled “OpenNMS - A Day in the Life” will serve as an introduction to get you started with OpenNMS.

At the end of the day, you should have a firm grasp on how to get OpenNMS installed, how to discover the network, basic and some advanced OpenNMS configuration options, as well as troubleshooting skills.

Microsoft as 60s IBM or 80s IBM?

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:01:17 +0000

Just where the heck are Microsoft on the cloud computing thing? Ten years ago they wouldn’t have given their competitors years head start in a market without a response.

Microsoft’s really are going to be IBM. Are they going to be the 60s IBM or the 80s IBM. At the moment it’s looking like 80s IBM.

You would have thought that, of anybody out there, Microsoft would be in as good a position as anyone.

Google's manifest destiny

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:50:20 +0000

Google is the new Microsoft.

Microsoft used to announce mediocre products and people went potty for it. Because Microsoft’s manifest destiny was to dominate the desktop market, it was news when they announced something that took them a little further along that path.

Now Google elicit exactly the same response for exactly the same reason.

If anybody else announced App Engine the obvious limitations of their offering would be leapt upon by commentators and roundly criticised. But, it’s Google. They are fulfilling their manifest destiny to become the Microsoft of the internet, so their foray into cloud computing is news.

Microsoft myopia

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:44:45 +0000

I’ve just installed Visual Studio Pro 2008 and there’s one thing bugging me.

I use the very mature and powerful open source tool called NUnit to write unit tests.

Microsoft came pretty late to the whole unit testing thing. They didn’t provide a unit testing framework until pretty recently by which time a number of high quality open source frameworks were available.

So what did they do? Did they embrace the existing frameworks in heavy use by many developers? Nope. They did their own framework and completely ignored the existing frameworks.

Wordpress 2.5 image upload problem

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:35:52 +0000

If you’ve made the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 you may have problems with image uploading. The simple answer is to disable the Bad Behavior plug-in and it works just tickety boo. 😄

Update: Michael Hampton has created a patch to solve the above problem. Upgrade to version 2.0.14 and you’ll be fine.

Mid market broadband router follow up

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:05:44 +0000

Thanks to Ken @ Ingenity for suggesting the Vyatta open source router. Only question mark is whether it works “out of the box” in the UK? Comes in both software only form and as a pre-built appliance.

Others on the eval list are the DrayTek Vigor 2800 and Firebrick 105.

One major requirement is that it must, under no circumstances, have wireless capability. We need to be PCI DSS compliant because we handle credit cards and having wireless just isn’t worth the hassle of all of the extra security we’d have to put in.

Recommendations for a mid-market broadband router

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:08:54 +0000

We’re busy upgrading our internal network here at the Chambers. We need to host a number of devices on our internal network so that prospects can evaluate them before they part with their hard earned cash.

One of the problems we’re having is identifying a decent broadband router that’s got all of the features we want but is also easy to install. We’ve tried the 800 pound gorilla of the networking world Cisco and found them wanting.

Whither Met Office openness

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:42:01 +0000

I’m currently in the process of putting together a unit test for an open source project. I wanted to use real met office temperature data, ideally from around York or Leeds.

I emailed the met office to enquire where I could find the data I require. The met office, being a publicly funded body, I naturally assumed the data would be publicly available.

I could not have been more wrong. Here’s the reply I received:

ELEX Harrogate Pictures

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:41:01 +0000

Many thanks to everybody who attended the ELEX show in Harrogate last week. OPENXTRA had a stand and we enjoyed meeting you all.

Denis and Annie did heroic stand duty ably assisted by Steve from JDSU.

One of the big hits at the show was the cable tester demonstrator box (as demonstrated by Denis above) with various cables exhibiting a number of different faults like shorts, miss wires and the like.

Engineering in the trenches war stories

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:06:22 +0000

I’m a sucker for engineering in the trenches stories … some good ones I found today: here, here and here. There aren’t enough of them documented. If you’ve got any I’m all ears. Engineers and engineering should be celebrated not just be the whipping boys for the sales and marketing folks.

Windows users kill "free" open source

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:16:14 +0000

I read Bryce Harrington’s The paradox of FOSS projects supporting Windows with some interest. If you’re a Linux enthusiast it should scare you.

Bryce makes the very good point that the ratio between contributors and users on Linux is substantially higher than for Windows users.

The contributor ratio is crucial to the success of an open source project. If the ratio is too low, then users will have difficulty getting support and fixes. Not only that, but a downward spiral may kick in because existing contributors may become disillusioned and leave, meaning the ratio deteriorates further.

Tweets as open source network management metric

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:01:07 +0000

The folks over at TweetVOLUME have produced a tool for counting the mentions of words or phrases on the Twitter micro-blogging platform.

I thought that it would be an interesting, though not especially significant, metric for comparing open source projects.

The graph above shows the number of twits in which Zenoss, Nagios, Hyperic, OpenNMS or MRTG were mentioned according to the TweetVolume algorithm.

The graph once again shows that Nagios is ahead of everybody. The rest are too close to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Strange case of the missing application

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:43:42 +0000

Many moons ago, around about 1989 or so, my brother-in-law asked me to solve a problem for him. He was the secretary responsible for assigning referees to football matches in a local football league.

He was having considerable trouble with it. It was taking him ages to do the task manually because, whilst it sounds easy, it is rather complicated because there are a number of subtle constraints that must be taken into account.

Nano blogs are go!

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:36:02 +0000

If you just can’t get enough of The Tech Teapot and feel that your day isn’t complete without some more of my ravings you’ll be pleased to know that I also nano blog over at Twitter.

You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/techteapot. Enjoy! If you would like to join the fun, please subscribe.

Open source software from a VAR perspective

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:00:54 +0000

How can a network & systems management Value Added Reseller (VAR) benefit from offering open source solutions and what are the potential problems?

Any VAR not offering genuine added value is going to be left out in the cold. A “SKU” VAR, a company that expects to take orders with the minimum of fuss, are going to have a problem. But then, that’s the way commercial software like What’s Up Gold and Solar Winds Orion is going anyway. The internet is disintermediating the relationship from producer to customer pretty well everywhere especially in the close to zero friction world of software.

My first job

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:28:21 +0000

Every time I look back on my first job I realise just how odd it was.

First off my job interview was in a pub. I was met by a couple of engineers and one of their wives. It did seem a bit strange having a job interview in the middle of a pub but hey, it was my first so I just figured out that that was normal.

The pub interview wasn’t an aberration. Quite a lot of time would be spent down the pub one way or another. In fact, some days we not only had a wet lunch but also an entirely wet afternoon. Yes folks, sometimes we didn’t bother going back to work in the afternoon and just stayed down the pub.

Budget network taps

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:33:33 +0000

Sometimes you fall over a product and it blows you away. Network taps have until now been exotic hardware affordable only by large IT departments with the budget to match.

Not any more! nmon have brought out a range of low cost network taps and network traffic analysers with NetFlow support. Looks like network taps just got affordable to the masses.

Why should you be interested? They’re just enterprise doodahs aren’t they?

Computer Languages 22 years on

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:02:59 +0000

Many moons ago in the late 1980s, right at the start of my interest in computers, I bought a book about computer languages. The book titled Computer Languages: A Guide for the Perplexed by Naomi S Baron inspired me to get into programming and eventually led me to program professionally (in the sense that somebody paid me 😄 .)

What is interesting, 22 years on, is what has changed and perhaps just as interesting, what hasn’t changed.

Mozart the future of programming?

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:49:02 +0000

Recently I’ve been musing about the computer languages that will take us into the twenty first century. One candidate I’ve been watching for a few years is Mozart/Oz.

Mozart/Oz is a dynamic object oriented language… stop yawning at the back there… and what separates it from the rest of the pack is the built in constraint based and logic programming. It is built from the ground up to support massive concurrency inside a computer as well as between computers.

Where is Java's CPAN?

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:17:38 +0000

One of the most impressive things about modern scripting languages, and probably the biggest productivity booster, far bigger than the languages themselves, is the wide range of high quality libraries available through easy to use repositories.

Seems odd that Java doesn’t maintain a similar library repository.

PHP frameworks: not there yet

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:36:13 +0000

Over the last week I’ve been designing a mini-PHP application. No big deal, just a back end admin system with a simple display on the front end with some blog like feedback mechanisms.

I’ve had a look at the great work the Ruby on Rails people have done with Ruby and wondered whether PHP has anything similar.

Learning Ruby is too big an investment for the simple application I want to write.

Tech gobbledegook at its best

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:48:54 +0000

Denis received a letter from Agilent advertising a technical seminar.

The letter starts thus:

3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the Evolved UTRA project, which significantly enhances the current HSDPA/HSUPA based UTRA technology through variable bandwidth up to 20Mhz, a new air interface both on downlink (OFDMA) and uplink (SC-FDMA) and a new network design (SAE).

Hmmm, anybody got a translation for that? I’ve tried Babelfish but it can’t make any sense of it.

OPENXTRA's 5th birthday today

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:01:34 +0000

Many moons ago back in the mists of time, well late 2002, Denis & myself thought it would be a good idea to start a company.

Today is the 5th anniversary of the incorporation of OPENXTRA Limited. Our likkle baby finally had a legal life of its own.

To celebrate we’re treating everybody to a trip to see the Sweeney Todd musical at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Should keep everybody in-line when it comes to pay rise time. Maybe we’ll get into the pie business. 😄

SSL certificates with extended validation: know who you're dealing with

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:25:18 +0000

One of the biggest problems a website encounters is trust. How do you know who you are dealing with?

Well, you just look for the SSL certificate and that proves that the website is bona fide doesn’t it? Wrong! All a traditional SSL certificate does is verify that the domain is the same as the one specified in the certificate.

A scammer can very easily install a traditional SSL certificate for their website with the minimum of checks.

Re: Show Me Da Money (a Cautionary Tale)

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:15:31 +0000

This is a reply to Tarus Balog’s Show Me Da Money (a Cautionary Tale) post.

Tarus has labelled the business model of giving away an open source core but selling proprietary extensions as shareware open source.

It’s a great term, but I don’t think it’s wholly appropriate.

If the Hyperic & Zenoss communities have a problem with the licensing terms of the commercial extensions then they are in a great position to circumvent it.

Programmer middle age

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:36:16 +0000

You know when you’ve reached programmer middle age, a new operating system/IDE drops through your letter box and you don’t run off to install it. 😉

I received Visual Studio 2008 via MSDN last week and it is still sitting on my desk unopened. Is there any hope for me?

Even Eclipse managed to release a new version without me noticing.

Am I doomed to a gradual decline from programmer middle age through to programmer senility?

Ain't no such thing as SMB class kit

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:35:45 +0000

Every bout of downtime teaches you a lesson. At least one. 😄

The lesson

What’s the lesson this time: anything less than full hot swap disks just isn’t good enough.

If there is anything that is going to go wrong on a server it is the disks. Our last major bout of downtime back in 2005 was caused by disk failure and that is why we moved up to SATA based RAID system. Unfortunately, we didn’t go for hot swappable drives.

Sun catching up with the 1980s

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:52:37 +0000

The most noteworthy thing about the Sun purchase of MySQL isn’t the purchase itself, but that it took Sun as long as it has. Sun has been around since the dawn of time in IT terms, is heavily into the enterprise market, you would have thought that a major presence in the relational database market would be acquisition #1.

Still, they’ve got there in the end. MySQL, as the predominant open source database, ties nicely into Sun’s re-branding as an open source oriented enterprise company.

Back to normal redux, again

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:16:50 +0000

Apologies for the downtime over the last day or so. What started as a small hard disk failure turned into a much larger problem when the remaining disk started having intermittent errors and the server itself collapsed too. Fortunately, we are paranoid enough to take our own backups in addition to the ISP backups. Good job we did!

The images on the blog, from 30 November onwards, are missing because we didn’t have the bandwidth to back them up. I’ve got them on my machine so I will be restoring those throughout the rest of the day.

Pay extra for peace of mind

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:39:23 +0000

Sometimes you’re glad you spent that little bit more money on resiliency. Today is that day. I’ve just been informed by our ISP that one of the disks in the server that brought you this page has died and gone to hard disk heaven.

The last time that happened we had some bad downtime. Lesson learnt. If what’s running on your server is in any way valuable to you then pay the extra money and get a RAID based server with disk mirroring. In these days of cheap SATA based RAID systems, disk mirroring is not expensive and one day you may be very thankful that you did.

Lessons learnt writing open source software

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:42:40 +0000

I don’t suppose many of you know my dirty little secret: I’m a failure. There I’ve said it. I founded an open source project and failed miserably. Sorry! Please wait there whilst I go outside to self-flagellate…that’s better the open source gods have been salved.

Back in 2005 I knew there was a tool missing from Apache for ad-hoc searches on access logs. Now, I mean a tool for performing ad-hoc searches not the programmable type. You can use AWK, a very flexible text manipulation tool, for that.

Looking forward to 2008

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:58:53 +0000

We expect two main trends to continue to drive business throughout 2008:

Convergence – a lot of people not normally associated with computers and communications are being drawn in, most notably electricians working in the building industry. With things getting sticky in the housing market, it is likely that a lot of electricians will be looking for alternative sources of revenue;
Heat in the data centre – its not just the planet’s environment that’s warming up…servers keep getting hotter too with only modest signs that things are going to change any time soon. The data centre environment is going to be a concern for a while yet.

Mid March we will be going to the ELEX show in Harrogate. Given the first item above, you won’t be surprised to know that we’ll be showcasing cable testers aimed at the converged electrician.

Banned from Pandora internet radio station

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:05:04 +0000

Sigh. Just received this email from the folks at Pandora. What a shame, Pandora is by far the best internet radio station out there.

hi, it’s Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Long comment do follow bug

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:41:22 +0000

Any super observant readers may have noticed some problems with the blog comment system. Long comments wouldn’t display properly. The comment author name would appear correctly but the comment itself wouldn’t be displayed.

We’ve tracked it down to being a plug-in problem. I decided to selectively deactivate plug-ins until the comments worked properly again. The SEM Do follow plug-in looks to be the candidate…when I deactivated it long comments went back to being displayed properly.

Open source network management comparison 2007

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:32:35 +0000

Mark Hinkle from Zenoss sent me a link to an interesting document he prepared yesterday.

I think Mark may be over egging Zenoss clear market leadership but without any doubt their growth over the last year has been impressive.

Perhaps the most impressive thing to take away is that all of the projects featured have grown over the last year.

Happy new year!

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:31:22 +0000

I actually refused some chocolate last night…not often that happens! Geese, I need to get down the gym today. 😄

I must confess that I’ve been looking forward to going back to work for the last few days. The highlight of my holiday was the annual family trip to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in York. The award winning performance was up to its usual high standard and I recommend a visit if you can make it…the performance runs until the 2nd February.

Season's greetings from OPENXTRA

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:50:42 +0000

Merry Christmas to all our readers, from everybody at OPENXTRA. Many thanks to Tarus Balog over at OpenNMS for the lovely t-shirt.

OPENXTRA is going to be closed over the Christmas holidays, though we will fulfill online and fax orders. We’ll all be back at the Chambers officially on the 2nd January.

The Tech Teapot will be kinda sparse too…unless I get really bored of watching The Great Escape for the 40th time.

My tech hero: Alan Kay

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:10:53 +0000

There are very few people who really influence the world. I think one of those people is Alan Kay. If you’re a programmer I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with his work. He’s got some very interesting things to say about IT and programming in particular.

“To find the most interesting things about our field you have to go back 30 or 40 years.”

Kinda hard to argue with that sentiment. I can’t think of anything that’s been invented in computing in at least 20 years.

A review of 2007 at OPENXTRA

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:29:25 +0000

Following the 2006 review I thought it’d be nice to see the highlights for 2007.

The elephant and the cloud

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:06:43 +0000

The most interesting thing about technology change are the odd juxtapositions it throws up. If you’d asked me a few years ago who would be the leader in cloud computing, I wouldn’t have predicted that it would be Amazon.

Sure Amazon know how to run very large websites. How did they go from e-commerce pioneer to cloud computing? It’s kinda like your local supermarket deciding that they’d like to build ships.

Compute upon a cloud

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:01:50 +0000

Interesting what Amazon is up to…first with cloud storage then cloud computing and now cloud databases. Is the art of data centre management going to be concentrated into a few massive data centres?

We currently rent a single Sun box, running Linux oddly enough, in a data centre to run all of our websites and email. One of the down sides with renting a machine is the limited capacity of storage, CPU and bandwidth. If you go the Amazon way then capacity becomes elastic. You can increase it when you need to and reduce when necessary.

The great blog arms race

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:23:16 +0000

Spammers have automated tools to spam blog comments. Blog owners have a number of automated tools to stop them. Spammers set up dummy blogs with the anti-spam tools of the day so they can refine their spamming tools. Blog owners deploy new or updated anti-spam tools to stop the newly refined spamming tools…

All so that a few people can get links to their (completely worthless) websites. Who would have predicted even ten years ago that something as nebulous as hyper links would inspire a technological arms race in the 21st century.

Wordpress Bad Behavior hack scare

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:06:34 +0000

One of my pet hates is coming into the office only to be presented with a nice problem on the website. This morning I tried to log into this website and saw the screenshot above.

All sorts of things went through my mind. Have we been hacked? Fortunately not. 😄

The explanation was much simpler. The Bad Behavior Wordpress plug-in we use to keep the internet wild west at bay decided to issue permanent false positives. So, anybody trying to log into the blog would have been given the same error.

Back to the future with 8-bit microcontrollers

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:32:50 +0000

I’ve been hanging around with the 8-bit crowd lately! Yes, it does still exist, though is now largely restricted to the embedded market. What has surprised me is the level of functionality you can implement with very modest hardware. You can create fully functional web server, email servers and pretty well everything else all with off the shelf 8-bit microcontrollers.

The new breed of 8-bit microcontrollers are particularly good at network enabling older non-networked devices. Whilst I would hesitate to say that it is easy, it is certainly a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be.

The Tech Teapot's first birthday

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:01:42 +0000

The Tech Teapot, or as it was originally called, the OPENXTRA Blog is one year old today. Ten categories, 186 posts, 156 comments & trackbacks and more tags than I care to count and we’re still going strong.

Thank you all for reading. A blog is nothing without readers and commenters. Extra special thanks to the following people:

Chris Garrett – Sage advice on blogging. Thanks Chris!

Robert Aronsson – creator of the Intellipool software and blog

Your golfer's inner geek

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:50:00 +0000

If you aspire to the high priesthood of geekery, being a Star Trek fan, I recommend the U.S.S Enterprise NCC-1701 Putter. Perhaps the perfect fusion of Star Trek fandom and golf. 😄

Data centre heating effects

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:32:53 +0000

One of the side effects of the recent RackSpace outage in their Dallas/Fort Worth data centre has been finding out just how quickly their data centre heats up when the air conditioning system fails.

Our backup generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could result in data loss and irreparably damage customers’ servers and devices. We made the decision to gradually pull servers offline before that would happen.

First usage of the name "Google" from 1942?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:42:22 +0000

Denis, a co-founder of OPENXTRA, was reading a story to his son last night. He was rather surprised to find a character in the book called Google.

“Yes - it’s just the sort of thing you’d like to do yourself, isn’t it,” grinned Stickly Stanley, who knew what a little monkey Lotta was. “Well, the third clown is Google. He’s really funny too. He has a wonderful motor-car, and everything goes wrong with it–and in the end it blows up into a hundred different pieces! Google has a fine little dog called Squib. You’ll like him. He helps Google with his nonsense.”

OpenNMS for Windows now available

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:19:04 +0000

As promised in the OpenNMS coming soon to Windows post, OpenNMS 1.3.8 has now been released with Windows support & an installer.

Tarus Balog announced the release and the developer too.

You can download the release from the OpenNMS site.

bug labs democratise gadget design & manufacture

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:36:37 +0000

bug labs has come out of stealth mode at last. If you’ve got a gadget in you screaming to get out then I’ve got good news. 😄

What is the BUG?

The basic concept behind Bug is that you have a basic gadget chassis called BUGbase which you program. You can then plug into the chassis a number of add on modules called BUGmodules like GPS, touch sensitive LCD, accelerometer motion detector & digital camera. More BUGmodules like a mini-keyboard and speaker, are due early next year.

Open source network management download comparison

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:58:04 +0000

One of the great things about sourceforge, apart from the cool services they provide free to open source projects, is that they provide statistics about the projects they host.

One of the stats that sourceforge provides is a history of project downloads. You can’t compare the stats though. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the downloads for the major open source network management projects.

The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project. Download volume isn’t a perfect measure, but it is one of the best available. I doubt even the projects themselves have an absolutely accurate idea of how many installations they have.

Googlebot thrashing

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:29:19 +0000

Googlebot has swallowed 47,846 pages in eight hours. Eek! The server’s getting a good thrashing this morning. Maybe it’s time to get that dual processor 4 core server our ISP offered us a month or two ago. 😄

Voice alerts with Intellipool or pretty well anything

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:20:38 +0000

Thanks to Robert @ Intellipool for alerting me to this one.

Intellipool, as many of you may already know, is an excellent web based network monitor. One of the problems it has had, and its competitors for that matter, is the difficulty of informing off site duty IT personnel when things really go wrong.

Many people rely on email for alerting purposes. And that works fine whilst people are on site because email server or network failure will be noticed pretty fast or your SMS alerting will work okay.

Popularity Contest Widget

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:19:03 +0000

Update 2nd December 2008: The Popularity Contest Widget has now moved to the wordpress.org site. All updates will now appear on the new site.

Popularity Contest is a great Wordpress plugin for displaying your most popular blog posts. It powers the Teapot Highlights over on the right hand side of this post. 😄

One thing missing from Popularity Contest is a widget. We created one for this blog, so we thought we may as well share it for everybody else to use too.

How not to comment your code

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:01:54 +0000

I was talking to an old time programmer a while ago and he reminisced about a colleague who used to comment his code using Ancient Greek.

So next time you’re tempted to criticise one of your colleagues for their poor quality code commenting, just pause and think that it could be a lot worse. Instead of scratching your head trying to figure out what the English means you could be reaching for your Ancient Greek dictionary instead. 😄

OpenNMS coming soon to Windows

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:30:31 +0000

OpenNMS is one of the original enterprise grade open source network management tools. For the Windows based admin, it has had one huge problem: it only runs on Unix based systems.

Not any more!

After a week of prototyping, the development team now has a prototype running on Windows. Expect to see a full release on Windows in the near future.

Just goes to show, if you choose your development tools carefully you get a whole load of stuff (nearly) for free. IF the 250,000 lines of Java code had been in any other language I think it would have taken a lot longer than a week. 😉

Battery charge by the sea

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:54:44 +0000

Apologies for the lack of posts since last Friday. I managed to get a few days away in Robin Hood’s Bay just north of Scarborough. The weather was perfect, the hotel cosy as usual and the company good too! Well, I’ve got to say that as the party consisted of both of my parents, two sisters, 3 nephews and a niece.

Normal service will now be resumed. 😄

Real time log visualization using glTail.rb

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:38:03 +0000

Hat tip to Dougal Campbell over at Geek Ramblings for finding this.

Just occasionally you come across a tool that really blows you away… that tool is glTail.rb!

Getting an instant idea for how your web server is performing can be a difficult task. One way to do that is to use a command like:

tail -f <log file>

The main problem with this is that the output is darn hard to make any sense out of.

Social Media in Plain English

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:30:14 +0000

Hat tip to the Elastic Path folks for finding this one.

If you want a simple introduction to all of the new social media buzz flying around at the moment, I strongly recommend you check out these short tutorial videos by Lee Lefever at Common Craft.

A lot of you may already be familiar with social media. If you’re not, then I recommend you check out the videos. Social bookmarking & RSS are great time savers, especially when you work on more than one computer.

Blog Action Day: The server power double whammy

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:23:25 +0000

Servers are getting faster and faster, consuming more and more power, producing more and more heat. Removing heat from the data centre uses even more power.

According to a November 2006 Gartner report, over 60% of total data centre power consumption is spent cooling the data centre environment.

Making the cooling system less power hungry would be the best bet. Unfortunately, significantly lowering the power consumption of air-conditioning units is very difficult.

Paper prototyping: IT's best kept secret?

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:57:00 +0000

One of the biggest problems when developing a system, be it software or a website, is getting the customer to visualise how your proposed solution is going to work.

Quite often, you will get a long way down the path towards producing your solution before you get any meaningful feedback.

The big early career lesson for most programmers is showing an unfinished piece of software to the eventual users and assuming that they will be able to visualise how the software will eventually look and behave. They won’t!

IT run the servers, facilities run the air-con...

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:21:47 +0000

Facilities running the air-con in a data centre has to be one of the classical IT anti-patterns. You’ve got your nice shiny data centre, rows and rows of cabinets full to the brim with IT kit. Problem is, you don’t run the air conditioning, the facilities people do.

So what you say, the facilities people eat air-con units for breakfast. That’s probably true, but what happens when things go wrong? Are you going to be told about the failure in time to do something about it? Is the first thing you know about the air-con failure when you walk into a blazing hot data centre?

Power line networking: my experience

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:07:39 +0000

Over the weekend my wireless adaptor at home gave up the ghost. Not being the greatest fan of my wireless network at home (I find it too unreliable and slow) I took the opportunity to look at power line networking.

I took myself off to my local PC World and grabbed one of the Devolo Homeplug High Speed Starter Kits. Got home, plugged in; configured my PC with a static IP address; and hay presto I was up and running.

Mini interview: Robert Aronsson

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:28:38 +0000

Brendan over at Sentinel has a good post with some background information about Robert Aronsson, the co-founder of Intellipool, the maker of a rather good network monitor.

Darn, I was going to do that, but as you got there first Brendan, I may as well point to yours. 😄

How Green Is Your Valley?

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:30:14 +0000

“Few have made the connection between IT efficiency and green compliance” so says Steve Nunn in The Green Room, BBC’s green issues series. But I’m not so sure. I have noticed a significant increase in awareness at least in the IT press of the need to reduce power costs particularly in the Data centre environment, no doubt aided by the introduction of virtualisation which can reduce a Data centre’s energy bill by as much as 60%.

Back to Windows 3 with Web 2.0

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:15:48 +0000

With the move to more applications being accessed via the web browser I am becoming more and more reminded of the bad old days under Windows 3.

In the bad old days, if one application died it took all of your other applications down with it and any unsaved data as well.

Along came modern 32 bit operating systems like Windows NT and the problem largely disappeared. Each application was protected from the behaviour of other applications. Gone were the days when a badly behaved program could cause you data loss.

PayPal and Google Checkout use in UK businesses

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:01:23 +0000

It’s technical planning week this week, so I need to know about payment options you’d like to see.

Most of you have no doubt heard of PayPal and the new kid on the payment block, Google Checkout. The general idea with both is to help secure your credit card information by restricting who has access to your credit card information. You can pay for things online without the merchant knowing anything about your credit card.

Why do I need a network tap?

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:06:52 +0000

One of the big problems in a switched network is to access reliably network traffic for analysis or monitoring purposes. Many solutions require changes either to the hosts being monitored or require modifications to your network infrastructure.

Many managed switches have the ability to mirror the traffic on one or more ports. Mirroring simply involves the switch copying network traffic from one or more ports to another designated port. The switch still sends the network traffic to its original destination.

Test-Um training roundup

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:23:28 +0000

JDSU were kind enough to invite myself and Denis to a Test-Um product training day at the JDSU offices in Basingstoke. Michael, the Test-Um trainer, is extremely knowledgeable about cable testing in general (as an ex-installer himself) and about the whole Test-Um range in particular.

One heads up. The Test-Um name is going to start disappearing soon. All of the Test-Um range will be re-branded as JDSU Network and Enterprise Test.

SpamAssassin just works...

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:00:29 +0000

One of the great tools we have discovered recently has been Apache SpamAssassin, an open source spam identifier.

I’ve yet to see a genuine email that SpamAssassin has marked as spam. It doesn’t catch all of the spam emails, but it does get all of the really obvious ones.

We run SpamAssassin in conjunction with sendmail on Linux. You can get SpamAssassin to work for a wide variety of operating systems and email servers.

How not to manage your internet server

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:45:04 +0000

Our internet server managed to restart itself over night. That makes me feel real uncomfortable. Was the server shut down by the ISP as part of routine maintenance without telling us or did the server ABEND?

What really made my day is that we’ve not got round to starting all of the required services automatically at start up. So, both email and website were down when I got in this morning.

My worst nightmare...

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:24:38 +0000

Every IT person I’ve ever met has at least one nightmare story about being roped into fixing somebody’s home PC/network/broadband and everything going wrong.

A friend roped me into fixing his friend’s Windows 95 PC that his kids had managed to kill by installing all manner of junk onto it. Naturally, as soon as I had fixed it, I was on point duty from then on. If the PC merely hiccuped I was expected to drop everything and hurry round to fix it. Eventually, I went round after the PC went wrong again, and the friend of a friend had one of his mates round. He was completely drunk and throughout my stay repeatedly threatened to beat me up. My host didn’t do anything to stop him either. In fact, he seemed to find the whole thing hilarious. Suffice it to say, I never went back and swore that I wouldn’t do anything like it again for anybody but direct family members.

Rumint now works with WinPcap 4.0.1

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:49:22 +0000

Greg Conti has released a new version of rumint that now works with WinPcap 4.0.1. If you tried rumint before and had problems, I suggest you give it another go.

Network management's downward trend?

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:48:29 +0000

The most puzzling aspect of the new wave network management buzz comparison is the OpenView & NetIQ graph. I find it hard to believe that either OpenView or NetIQ are losing traction in the marketplace. So, how do you explain the fall in their respective number of searches?

Network management vs network monitor

First port of call was to see how the industry in general is doing. Whilst far from perfect I think that the network monitor & network management keywords will provide a reasonable guide to search trends.

Innovation & public funding

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:18:49 +0000

I was amused to read an article celebrating the launch of a new product called Multidweller by Pace Micro in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Sounds like a neat piece of technology delivering digital TV to multi-dweller buildings like blocks of apartments and the like.

The following are quotes from David Gillies, director of technology at Pace Micro:

“We work in an extremely fast-paced and competitive market, and the grant from Yorkshire Forward allowed us to get this product from concept to market faster than we could otherwise have done.”

"New wave" network management buzz comparison

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:41:48 +0000

Google Trends is an on-line service for comparing the search volumes for up to five keywords. I thought it would be interesting to compare the relative buzz of the new wave open source network management players between themselves, but also between other open source projects and commercial products.

Google Trends doesn’t supply the search volumes themselves, so no quantitative data will be presented. The data that is presented is solely comparative. You can see, over time, which keywords are being searched for the most. Please note: you cannot infer any intent from the search volume. The searchers may be looking for general product information, installation notes or just about anything else. I have assumed that the search patterns are the same between the various projects/products.

Work to the beat of Workrave

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:01:59 +0000

I doubt there are too many IT pros who haven’t had Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) at some point. My outbreak was induced by a long death march on a piece of network management software combined with bad posture and no breaks whatsoever. Whilst my immediate symptoms are gone, they return really fast after extended keyboard use. My need to avoid highly repetitive tasks is one of the variables I need to consider when I decide whether a task should be automated. No task in the long term is worth firing up my RSI again.

Server room equipment environment specs...more info required

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:12:23 +0000

Manufacturers of IT equipment usually specify recommended operating temperatures for their equipment. The temperature range is usually quite wide. For instance, the temperature range specified for our Dell servers is 10° to 35°C (50° to 95°F).

Given the wide operating temperature range, why can’t we run our servers at a sizzling 34.9°C?

It is odd that Dell don’t nuance the environmental information they specify. They don’t say what level of system reliability you can expect at a given temperature.

Copper vs Fibre cabling costs

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:00:25 +0000

You might assume that because the technology involved in manufacturing optical fibre cable is more complex than copper, installation of fibre networks would inevitably be more expensive than using copper. However, with the advent of CAT6 cabling means that copper is getting faster – but at a cost.

There are environments where copper is at a severe disadvantage; take an industrial environment with a lot of electromagnetic interference; copper cable in this type of environment will need a lot of protection, incurring extra cost, fibre would be totally immune to such interference.

WinPCap packet sniffer for commercial development

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:01:52 +0000

WinPCap is a great Windows based, open source driver for packet sniffing wire-based networks using a bog standard network interface card. WinPCap is licensed under the General Public License (GPL).

From a commercial software developers perspective, the GPL can be quite intimidating. Consequently, a lot of commercial developers won’t touch GPL’ed code with a very long barge pole.

Fortunately, the developers of WinPCap have come up with a commercial developer friendly version of WinPCap, WinPCap Professional. Of course, you’ve got to pay, but as a commercial developer, you’re used to that! 😉

Affordable wireless packet capture solution

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:30:56 +0000

Tools like the Test-Um Wi-Net are great for trouble shooting wireless networks. But, Wi-Net falls a long way short of giving you real low level technical insight into your wireless network. What do you do if you need more? Say, you need to capture packets and the like.

Wireshark Capturing Wi-Fi traffic using AirPcap

One solution is to use the WireShark + AirPcap combination.

WireShark I’m sure most of you have heard of. Formerly known as Ethereal, it is a very capable open source packet capture tool for a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows. And the best bit? It’s free!

PowerShell + network monitor = powerful network management tool

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:12:35 +0000

I am surprised that no network monitor manufacturer has jumped onto Windows PowerShell in a major way. Whilst tools like PowerGadgets use the full power of PowerShell, it isn’t really aimed at the network manager. It is more of a general IT visualisation tool.

A tool that combined the power and extensibility of PowerShell, with the reporting, graphing and mapping capabilities of a major network monitoring tool would be formidable.

A network monitor with integral support for PowerShell would mean that you could write your own script then leverage the full power of the network monitor in order to periodically run the script, graph the results and alert you when things go wrong.

What's Up Rises to Top in Bake-Off

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:32:33 +0000

CRN Tech put network management solutions up against one another and gave Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold Premium v11 first-place for its robust features, strong troubleshooting capabilities and comprehensive reports. Engineers were particularly impressed with its feature set, price/performance and integration capabilities, giving it top marks across those three categories. SolarWinds LANSurveyor 10 came second, with AdRem Netcrunch (personally I’ve not heard of this) third. The full article puts these solutions through their paces and is well worth a read.

Tracking live network cables

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:01:39 +0000

More and more companies have systems that are in operation 24/7, that cannot in any circumstances be switched off. Sometimes the data centre cabling is poorly documented.

Regular toners and tone generators are absolutely fine if you know the cabling is not live. Like identifying cables prior to the network cabling being hooked up to the network infrastructure or even to identify cables before the cables have been terminated.

Packet visualization with Rumint

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 14:56:33 +0000

One of the tools recommended in Chris Sander’s Practical Packet Analysis book is called Rumint.

Rumint is a free, open source packet visualization tool available for Microsoft Windows (written in Visual Basic.)

Roomint’s author, Greg Conti, has a book to be published by No Starch Press called Security Data Visualization.

One problem I’ve run into with Rumint is that it doesn’t work on my setup. I run Windows XP and I’ve got WinPCap 4.0.1. It looks to me like a problem between Rumint and the latest version of WinPCap. The problem is that Rumint won’t show any network interfaces to sniff, so obviously things don’t work too well. 😉

Summer holiday roundup

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:10:50 +0000

Summer is nearly over so I thought I’d share our summer holiday destinations with you. Please feel free to leave a comment saying where you went for your summer hols with an appropriate link to Wikipedia or whatever.

Denis managed a couple of weeks in Croatia, including the beautiful town of Dubrovnik.

Annie escaped for a week to the beautiful Mediterranean isle of Mallorca.

Andrea is currently finishing her PhD so she only managed a few days camping in the Lake District.

CSV file editor options

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:08:33 +0000

I need to create a CSV file using pipe (|) field separators and caret (~) field delimiters to feed some data into our e-commerce system. The format of the file is not under my control.

Excel is of no use whatsoever. Whilst I can use pipe field separators, I can’t use caret field delimiters. Excel only supports single or double quotes or no field delimiters at all.

What are the alternatives?

Are operating systems important anymore?

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:01:53 +0000

I was thinking about Jim Forbes post, and my reply to it. The more I think about it, the more the Windows vs OSX battle really is getting kinda irrelevant.

It’s just coming up for 11:30 in the morning and I have a confession to make. I have only used two applications so far this morning: Firefox & Thunderbird, a web browser and email application respectively. I’m pretty sure I didn’t use anything else yesterday either.

Bring the phone in from the cold

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:01:12 +0000

When is the phone going to come in from the cold? How much of our lives do we spend continually giving the same information to the same companies time and again down the telephone? Only for those companies to spend even more time typing the same information into their systems.

When are phones going to be integrated into our PCs so that you can send your contact details with the press of a button. Then at the other end, with a single button press, they could include the information on a form.

A urinal video game...no, really!

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:01:28 +0000

Great find by Larry O’Brien, a game to play whilst you’re urinating. I wonder if it is multi-player?

I just can’t imagine springing out of bed on a morning to go program a urinal game. They must have had industrial quantities of water around for the developers to drink!

Urinal game in action

RE: Microsoft Wake Up--Apple is gaining Intellectual Capital and Market

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:19:27 +0000

Jim Forbes wrote an interesting piece Microsoft Wake Up–Apple is gaining Intellectual Capital and Market over on his blog.

I have to disagree with most of it though. I don’t see Apple gaining momentum outside of a few new media folks, who’ve always held an exaggerated sense of their own importance.

From the home point of view: Apple has big problems on the gaming front. I can’t get the latest and greatest games running on OSX. That’s a deal breaker for me right there. Running the latest and greatest 3D games through a virtual machine just isn’t an option.

Chris Sanders interview

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:01:01 +0000

FYI there is an interesting interview with Chris Sanders, author of “Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to solve real-world network problems”.

If you are new to packet analysis, you can do a lot worse than read the book.

ANN: New blog theme...

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:45:59 +0000

Hope you like the new theme! We were bored with the bog standard Wordpress theme so we thought we’d custom build our own.

The theme, and the blog for that matter, are intended to be a bit folksy and characterful whilst at the same time giving a nice I.T. feel to the place. Please let us know if we’ve succeeded. 😄

The theme isn’t completely finished, we’re short of a decent photo for the about us page. It will probably take until September before everybody is together again… because of the summer holidays. So the pictures will have to wait till then!

"New wave" challenging the Big 4

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:01:04 +0000

There does seem to be a lot of heat in whether or not the new wave open source systems management players are going to take on the Big 4 (IBM, CA, BMC & HP). You can get more info here and here.

If the new wave do end up undercutting the Big 4, won’t the Big 4 just buy the new wave companies?

The new wave are venture funded…venture capitalist want to cash out at some point. All VC funded companies are up for sale to some degree. So, when the Big 4 come a shoppin’ they’ll get what they want.

Ohloh, a new kind of software directory?

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:01:35 +0000

Mark Hinkle over at Zenoss mentioned Ohloh, a new open source software directory. Good find Mark!

In Black Duck Open Hub own words:

Ohloh is a new kind of software directory, combining community driven content with a unique source code crawler that monitors up-to-date development activity.

It’s an old skool software directory with a bit of Web 2.0 magic thrown in for good measure. I don’t think the community features are particularly new, you can vote for projects on freshmeat. Perhaps the project suggesting tool is new?

Great print tech magazines still standing

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 09:01:25 +0000

Tech magazines are becoming a rare breed. Even more rare for them to be in print. I’m sure you read a good number, but I thought it would be good to share my list. Hopefully, you’ll share your list. 😉

For IT VARs and resellers, I’d recommend CRN.

If you want an exhaustive list of worldwide tech mags then the Computer & Internet category @ Yahoo is a great resource. Most mags in the UK are run either by VNU or CMP.

Data, Voice, and Video Cabling book

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:01:47 +0000

If you are involved in installing data, voice or video cabling then you won’t be disappointed by Data, Voice, and Video Cabling by Jim Hayes and Paul Rosenberg.

Jim Hayes, as we’ve recommended before, also has a couple of online tutorials available. Well worth a look!

The book gives a nice overview of the various technologies involved as well as more practical chapters on wiring installation, testing and termination. The book covers both copper and fibre cabling too.

ANN: Introducing "The Tech Teapot"

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:58:58 +0000

Some of you may have noticed a name change. This blog is now called The Tech Teapot. Why? Well, we are pretty obsessed with tea 😄

We make nice steaming pots of tea at least three times a day. Great for team building!

Our current brew is Waitrose Kenya large leaf tea. Loose leaf tea of course, no nasty tea bags here!

Green Everything

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:24:17 +0000

You know how hot carbon footprints, recycling and energy efficiency are right now, well Computacenter are introducing the Green Electronics Council’s EPEAT system, that stands for the snappily titled “Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool System” a tool designed to help identify the environmental friendliness of IT equipment. Based on a system of 23 criteria (I’ve just looked at this and it’s a little mind-boggling) it is designed to help both purchasers and manufacturers move towards more environmentally preferable products. Now I think this is a great idea but I know that in our company at least we sometimes find it difficult enough to implement very basic green practices like reducing paper usage, recycling paper, cardboard etc and helping our customers to dispose conscientiously by implementing the WEEE scheme I think it will take a while for this to become mainstream practice - no excuse really we should all have been doing this a long time ago!

Open source and the computer press

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:11:23 +0000

For a long time non-commercial open source projects had exclusive access to an audience. Sites like Slashdot are very focused on open source, commercial software doesn’t get a look in.

With the emergence of commercial open source players things are a little more complex. The commercial open source players have access to traditional media, but they are also able to access the traditional open source audience as well. That is bound to cause problems for the non-commercial players.

Introducing PowerGUI...

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:01:16 +0000

Whilst we are on the topic of PowerShell, may as well mention PowerGUI as well.

PowerGUI gives you a nice GUI based interface to the command line PowerShell. Dimitry Sotnikov runs a great blog around PowerShell, PowerGUI and Quest’s other free tools. Quest have got into PowerShell big time.

PowerShell Community Extensions well worth a look

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:14:41 +0000

I’m a fan of Windows PowerShell as I’ve mentioned before. I think it is going to be a boon for Windows admins everywhere.

We’ve had a stab at support for it too.

If you are currently learning about PowerShell, I’d recommend you check out PowerShell Community Extensions project. A large collection of PowerShell tools that will make you more productive.

"New wave" network management licences

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:14:10 +0000

Michael Tiemann made an interesting post titled Will the Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up. Alex Fletcher wrote an interesting follow up.

That got me thinking…how kosher are the licences used by the “new wave” open source network management companies? Have Hyperic, Groundwork and Zenoss really got the open source bug, or do they want the open source kudos without really opening up?

I did a bit of digging around, and I am pleased to say that, at least to my non-legal eye, the licences do look the real deal. All of the tools are licensed under the General Public License (GPL).

Practical Packet Analysis Book

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:01:17 +0000

Just found an interesting book…if you’re a blood ’n guts comms bod then I think this book should find a place in your bookshelf. The book can be found here on the publisher’s website.

The author, Chris Sanders, also has a good blog too. Well worth adding to your feed reader.

The World of Industrial Device Networking

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:06:45 +0000

If you manage networks in industrial or harsh environments, or if you have serial equipment that you currently have to monitor manually and are maybe wondering about the benefits of device networking, you could do worse than checking out this blog entry by Gary Marr, Senior Field App. Engineer, Lantronix (manufacturers of Netport Serial/Ethernet adaptors)

Do enterprise network management apps have a "low surface area"?

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:01:21 +0000

I was interested to read Open Source: What Makes for Success? by Gordon Haff. Alex Fletcher has written an interesting follow up.

Gordon Haff points out that one property of a successful open source company is to pick a very difficult problem that doesn’t touch upon too many parts of an organisation. A so called low surface area.

Now, my question is this: are enterprise grade network and systems management applications low surface area or high surface area?

"New wave" Windows support

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:51:11 +0000

One of the odd things about the three new wave players is that, of the three, only one Hyperic supports Windows natively.

The lack of native Windows support in the other two Zenoss/Groundwork seems like quite an oversight. It will be interesting to see whether the lack of native Windows support hinders their adoption. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.

Zenoss have produced a nice virtual machine for VMWare. Kudos to them for that. But, it is just a fig leaf for their lack of native Windows support. Scrape underneath the virtual machine and it’s Linux hiding underneath. A lot of Windows admins may not fancy learning Linux.

Network management's new wave

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:01:06 +0000

A bunch of venture funded network management start-ups are storming the enterprise space with pockets full of venture capital money.

The new wave comprise: Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork.

What ties them all together? All of the tools are open source, but that isn’t new in network management. Projects like Nagios, OpenNMS as well as a raft of others have been around for a decade or so. What’s new is the combination of open source products and the level of funding going into the new players.

Heads up: introduction to ntop video

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:01:44 +0000

Just a quick heads up to a video produced by GeekVideo featuring an introduction to ntop. Enjoy!

Intellipool Network Monitor and Windows Vista

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:01:58 +0000

Richard Aronsson from Intellipool has a post over on his blog concerning using Intellipool to monitor Vista based machines.

Unlike on versions of Windows prior to Vista, the remote registry service is set to manual start-up on Vista. I guess that has been a casualty of the new security sensitivity over at Microsoft. In the past, everything was started by default, and you had to go and switch it off if you didn’t need it. Now, and this pretty much falls in with *nix policy, things are switched off by default and you have to switch them on if you do need them. Fair enough!

New blog email subscription option

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:12:22 +0000

The more observant among you may have noticed some changes on this ’ere blog. The blog was a wee bit anonymous so I’ve added an About link at the top of each page. I’ve also added a link through to the products section too. Just so new visitors landing on the blog get an idea of what we’re about.

There’s also a mini About section on the main blog page too on the right hand side. Haven’t figured out how to get that on every page, but I’m working on it. Hey, I’m new to all this blog thing, so this is a work in progress. 😉

Network Cabling vs Electical Cabling

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:01:43 +0000

A lot of the skills that an electrician applies every day are directly applicable to network cable installation. But there are differences, and that’s what I will be covering in this article.

Network Cable is Delicate

Network cabling is lighter gauge. Any kind of rough handling has the potential to damage the cable before you’ve even installed it.

CAT5e or CAT6 cable has 4 pairs of thin copper wires. Damage to any of those 8 wires renders the cable unusable. Do not exceed 20% of the maximum cable strength when installing (or at any other time for that matter).

Great cabling resource...fill yer boots

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:29:00 +0000

If you want to know more about voice, data and video cabling we strongly recommend a visit to Uncle Ted’s Guide to VDV. Highly recommended!

For a great guide to fibre optics, you will find much to enjoy in Lennie Lightwave’s Guide to Fiber Optics.

Both of the above have been created by VDV Works a voice, data and video cable training company in the USA.

Introducing the Open Systems Management Consortium

Thu, 24 May 2007 10:29:22 +0000

There’s a buzz going around at the moment in the open source systems management space. A new consortium, aimed at evangelising the best tools and companies, has been formed. The Open Management Consortium is a loose grouping of projects, organisations and individuals interested in how open source can impact systems management.

The consortium has a great page with all of the member projects and companies. I think you’ll find much there to interest you. 😉

Hyperic Infoworld heads up

Wed, 23 May 2007 08:53:56 +0000

Nice Hyperic heads up by Infoworld. $50 million worth of R&D for $1 AND three customers. Sweet!

The enterprise open source systems management space sure is hotting up…

Enterprise open source systems management confusion

Tue, 22 May 2007 13:40:10 +0000

Another commercial open source systems management software product has recently appeared on our radar. Hyperic, founded in 2004, is going after the enterprise market.

The following quote is from the Hyperic blog:

Enterprise customers are open to participating in communities and are eager to reap the >benefits. but they don’t care about having access to the source code of a product or >participating as much as some would like to think.

My early career planning

Mon, 21 May 2007 16:52:02 +0000

Thanks Chris for tagging me.

When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?

The first time I can ever remember thinking about work was when my Father asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Naturally, as a five year old, I was very impressed with being a JCB driver. Seemed the coolest job in the world to me.

Other than that, I really didn’t give careers much thought. As my Dad had a building business, it was kind of assumed that I would go into that.

Pay as you go SIMs can be disabled -- please check

Thu, 17 May 2007 10:56:33 +0000

Most temperature monitoring equipment is purchased in order for you to be alerted when things go wrong. Quite often you want to be alerted using SMS.

Many of you use the z-text fixed line SMS modem for this performing the SMS end of the alerting. If that is you, you can stop reading right now because this doesn’t apply to you.

If you are using a GSM based modem, like the Falcom 55 & 75, you need to make sure that your particular SIM won’t time out. Some GSM network operators disable their pay as you go customers after a certain amount of activity.

Commercial open source network management focus puzzle

Tue, 15 May 2007 12:35:39 +0000

One of the interesting things to emerge in network management over the last year or two has been the commercial open source vendors like Groundwork & Zenoss.

The commercialisation of open source isn’t new, nor is it particularly surprising that commercialisation has happened in the network management space. Open source has been big in network and systems management from the beginning.

What has surprised me has been the focus of the commercial open source operators. All of the offerings I have seen are going after the enterprise space in a big way.

Top 3 easy Nagios setup options

Sun, 13 May 2007 09:01:10 +0000

Everybody loves Nagios, but let’s be honest, it can be a pain to set up, especially if you work in a Windows only environment. A few solutions do exist to make Nagios a little easier to get yourself up and running.

1: Hardware Appliances

Hardware appliances take the hassle out of Nagios, for a price. You buy a rack mountable appliance with Nagios all ready to go. Just plug the device in, configure the network settings and off you go.

Top 5 UPS power alarming options

Thu, 10 May 2007 15:08:39 +0000

Monitoring the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is a constant preoccupation of many people who manage a server room. If the conversations we have with customers are anything to go by anyway. 😄 Here’s a quick guide. We can, of course, help out with a number of the options…the rest can only be done by your UPS supplier.

1: SNMP Trap

The classical way, with network enabled UPS, is to use SNMP traps. The UPS notices that its power supply has gone, it generates a SNMP trap and sends it to wherever you have configured it to send it.

Blog review by Chris Garrett

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:23:36 +0000

Chris Garret at OMIQ has been kind enough to review this ’ere blog. Chris has highlighted some things we need to do better.

And by golly, we are going to do things better. And that’s a promise! We always take feedback, good or bad, very seriously and try to improve our service accordingly.

Using Wordpress as your blogging platform? Install Akismet

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:56:33 +0000

We’ve recently been getting a lot of comment spam on the OPENXTRA Blog. You will never have seen the spam because we have manually deleted it all.

Anyway, we’ve now enabled the Akismet Wordpress plugin and things are far far better. Akismet will somehow figure out whether a comment is spam or not and mark it appropriately. Spam it misses that you mark as spam are added to its database for future use. So, it just gets better and better at detecting spam. 😄

Unscheduled downtime resolved

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:16:43 +0000

Apologies for the recent downtime. The site was down for half a day yesterday and for around an hour of business hours today. All is fixed now…phew! All was a bit of a panic for a while.

The problem for those interested in the techie bits was a PHP config problem. We are moving over to PHP 5 and the new version of PHP started interfering with the old version 4. The upgrade will be happening in the next couple of weeks or so together with a major overhaul to the e-commerce system.

Even a switched off Cisco router can cause downtime

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:05:53 +0000

As we have mentioned in a previous post, our recent purchase of a Cisco router has not been entirely a happy one.

To rub insult into injury, even when I switched it off it still caused us downtime :(

It was at the top of our rack with the power switched off, but still with a live power supply going into it. Our regular broadband router started to fail intermittently. I assumed that it was just a software fault and cycled the power each time. After the third or fourth time around I was starting to get a bit annoyed. This time I picked it up so I could have a good look at it. I then realised that it was really hot, far hotter than it should have been. So I put my hand on the Cisco router it had been resting on and it was hot too.

OPENXTRA Console inducted into Google Gadget directory

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:33:09 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post we now have a Google Desktop Gadget. We are pleased to announce that Google have now accepted our Gadget to go on their own Desktop Gadget directory.

What can I say, we are thrilled. If you have the time please install it and try it out. You will need to install Google Desktop first though.

The plug-in displays the live values from your Sensatronics temperature and environmental sensors right on your desktop.

Three into one will go

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:27:32 +0000

Triple play is a marketing term coined to describe the provision of voice, video and data services over network connections. It is not a technical specification as such. It does not describe what the technology will be, how it will work or indeed why it is necessary. Though the why is the usual reason…cheaper & easier to manage a single set of infrastructure than a mangled rats nest of separate systems blah blah…

Server consolidation: Stage 3

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:14:51 +0000

Phew…all done. The last site has now been moved to our shiny new server (a Sun based AthlonXp box for the techies out there). Had to do it in a bit of a hurry after a slight misunderstanding with our service provider who switched off the server a couple of weeks early.

Hopefully you were completely oblivious to the changes. If you do web admin properly that’s how it should be. The site wasn’t down for more than a couple of hours at most.

Heads up: Windows PowerShell

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:11:34 +0000

Just a quick heads up about Windows PowerShell. Looks a really neat way to automate a lot of dull, repetitive admin tasks.

Windows PowerShell version 1 has now been released and is available as a free download for Windows XP and beyond.

Server consolidation: Stage 2

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 10:42:57 +0000

The server consolidation is continuing apace. Three more sites were moved into our nice shiny new hardened server. The switch-over happened over last weekend and should have fully propagated by now. The old servers are still there…we need to wait for the search engines to pick up the IP address changes. We will switch all of the redundant servers off in a week or so.

You guys shouldn’t have noticed anything. Please let us know if anything isn’t working as it should. Next weekend will see the end of the server consolidation…just one site to go 😄

Agent less monitoring equals standards based monitoring

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:17:23 +0000

Why is agent less network monitoring called agent less? An agent is required! Pretty confusing really. I don’t suppose non-proprietary agent has quite the same ring to it.

What agent less really means is proprietary agent less. Not quite the same thing 😄

So, if you are using SNMP or WMI or whatever then you are performing agent less monitoring.

The main benefit to not using proprietary agents are that lots of different tools can talk SNMP/WMI etc but the chances are that only the proprietary vendor supports their own agent. Also, chances are the proprietary agent may or may not be as rigorously tested as the standards based agents like net-snmp for instance.

Vista voice MP3...the next scripting revolution?

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:01:22 +0000

I was quite amused by a story about a potential Vista voice recognition security hole.

It got me thinking that perhaps in the future I’ll be able to perform some maintenance tasks on my Mother’s PC by sending her a MP3 file of me instructing her computer what to do. Perhaps, I could give her a range of files for performing those little jobs like rebooting her wireless router which I have to do from time to time.

How To Get A Windows Refund

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:33:51 +0000

If you buy a computer, you can find yourself paying for a Windows licence even though you don’t want it and aren’t going to use it. If you ever find yourself in this situation and decide that you have the time and the energy to get a refund Serge Wroclawski can show you how. He tried and eventually succeeded in obtaining a refund from Dell and shares his experience at Linux.com… he also stirred up some impassioned comments!

Great IT in education website

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:05:07 +0000

If you are involved in IT in the education sector in the UK you may find the EduGeek website to be of interest. Looks like a good place to join your fellow professionals for a good chin wag.

Oh, and the founder is also a fan of the Test-Um Validator too!

The Test-Um Tri-Porter is now available online

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 11:07:27 +0000

As was mentioned on a previous post, the Test-Um Tri-Porter is now available. It has now been added to our e-commerce system so it can now be purchased online.

One down, one to go...

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:02:57 +0000

I hope nobody noticed but we had some infrastructure changes over the weekend 😄

We scrapped one of our servers. Yippee! Not only does this save us a lot of money each month, it also means that we don’t have to endlessly patch the old server either.

Over the weekend the mail server was redirected to our new server and a number of websites too. Everything went well save for a minor snafu with a couple of parked domains. All was fixed on Monday morning.

The Test-Um Tri-Porter has landed!

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:16:30 +0000

I am happy to announce that the Test-Um Tri-Porter (IVT600) has arrived.

First impressions: absolutely brilliant! Three testers (voice, data & video) all in a single solid unit. Oh, and you get a tone tracer too.

It isn’t in the on-line shop yet, so please bear with us. It will be available early next week as soon as we have the images and web copy sorted out.

The Test-um Tri-Porter has arrived

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that the Test-Um Tri-Porter (IVT600) has arrived.

First impressions: absolutely brilliant! Three testers (voice, data & video) all in a single solid unit. Oh, and you get a tone tracer too.

Test-Um Tri-Porter Front View

It isn’t in the on-line shop yet, so please bear with us. It will be available early next week as soon as we have the images and web copy sorted out.

Last magazine still standing

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:27:31 +0000

Things must be pretty tough in the technical magazine market. My favourite magazine has died, with another on life support. Predictably, the one I don’t like much seems to be thriving.

Software Development magazine was a great read, covering topic areas not easily found outside of academia. Byte, my all time favourite, ceased being published as a print magazine back in 1998. It then morphed into an on-line magazine a while later. It was good but not in the same league as its print forebear. Recently the Byte website has become an article repository. OK, but not even a pale imitation of the print magazine. Shame.

Microsoft's kitchen of the future

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:22:39 +0000

I couldn’t help but laugh at the kitchen in Microsoft’s Home of the Future. Everybody knows that nothing dates like visions of the future, but this takes the biscuit (or the focaccia, see below). I’m still waiting for my jetpack and my nuclear powered million-miles-to-the-gallon car that I was promised when I was a child, but it looks like I’ll have to wait a while yet.

Anyway Microsoft are going to computerise everything in the kitchen (they would wouldn’t they) and it’s the most bizarre mix of things you’ve ever heard of. In this article some poor woman is gagging for a tub of mass produced, bar and RFID coded, microwaved instant soup one minute (I wonder if Microsoft will branch out into the soup kitchen market?) and the next she’s making focaccia from scratch! She can’t even spell the word!, really take a look. Just to make sure she’s wound up the computer’s talking to her all the while and projecting the recipe on top of whole lot (more likely the back of her head). And the voice appears to sound like Steven Hawking does Masterchef.

Three does go into one

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:17:03 +0000

We are in the midst of server consolidation drive. Three servers will go into one!

The hack attack last week has certainly speeded things up, though it was always in the technology plan for this quarter anyway. The new server is very locked down with a nice heavy iron firewall in front of it. We also went for a RAID 1 system too. If anything is going to go, you can bet that it will be a disk. Our only major piece of downtime around a year ago has been due to a backup disk going down. With the RAID set-up, a single disk going down won’t cause any downtime.

Server admin in Internet time

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend one of our web servers was hacked… fortunately it wasn’t our main e-commerce server. The server is in fact in the middle of being de-commissioned. The hack happened around a day after our software vendor reported a vulnerability and provided a patch.

You sure don’t get much time to fix things. You either fix it immediately or bang too late.

Thankfully, our system was locked down enough to prevent a root level penetration, only Apache got nailed. Everything is ok now, the software has been patched and fingers crossed 😄

A review of 2006 at OPENXTRA

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well, 2007 is here and I thought it would be interesting to review 2006 at OPENXTRA.

A start to 2007

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:54:03 +0000

Happy New Year to all our readers!

The new year has started off well. We kept the on-line shop working over the holiday period and most days there was activity on it (not Christmas day mind you). Obviously some people take very short holidays and were in work between the Christmas and New Year breaks.

Here’s hoping that things continue in the same vein. All the best for 2007!

Installation woes in networking land

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 16:20:43 +0000

We moved office recently as some of you may know. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a professional grade broadband router more in keeping with our new surroundings.

We went with a Cisco 877 router thinking you can’t get more professional grade than Cisco. The only problem with it is that nobody around here can persuade it to work.

We’ve tried everything…software upgrades, support forums the works. It is still refusing to do anything useful. It is currently decorating the top of our server cabinet, lights a blinkin’ but doing nothing useful.

Inch forward a bit, a bit more...

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:45:39 +0000

Programming is still way too hard. Even the smallest piece of software takes a huge amount of effort to build.

Software tools are not great. The tools I use now are not really that far away from what I first started using professionally in 1992. Back then it was a command line compiler with make scripts and Brief as the text editor. Now it is a Integrated Development Environment wrapping the same command line compiler. Not much change there.

Alarms as easy as 1,2,3?

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to get my head round what the Alarm Numbers mean in Intellipool INM. Just when I think I’ve got it everything just slips away.

The idea seems to be that you can escalate Alerts. If something gets ignored you can change the Action so that a different person gets notified or a new Action gets performed. For example you can take readings from a Temperature Monitor every minute. If a reading is too high the Alarm counter increments, eventually to the point where Alerts are sent out and Actions get performed. What the Actions are depends on what you’ve set up in the Action list and how you’ve set the Alarm Numbers. Alarms numbered 1 will be performed first, but if they get ignored than a new set, numbered 2 or more will get performed. It’s all very clever, but also very hard to explain.

Ode to odeus Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 11:36:10 +0000

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 has been out for over a year now. I would say that it is quite possibly the worst piece of software to come out of Redmond for a very long time. I am amazed that they released it. I am mortified that they still haven’t fixed it.

The bug that makes me fume is the Class View bug. Scroll down to a class you wish to view and just before you can click on the class you want to work on the view goes right back to the top again :(

Small company, complex IT

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:20:54 +0000

I was daydreaming today and I wondered just how many files actually make up the openxtra website. For a small site you would assume that wouldn’t be many?

Well, I’ve counted and I got quite a shock. The website is made up of 4974 files. And that doesn’t count the databases. There are three of those.

It just goes to show that things grow organically and before you know it you’ve got yourself quite a headache. Changing the website is not something we do lightly.

The great domain telephone test

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:53:52 +0000

I wish I’d known this 3 and a half years ago 😄

When starting out in business or anything else where a website or email is important. I’ve got a bit of advice for you. I call it the domain telephone test.

Get hold of a colleague or friend, ring them up and arrange for them to ask you the website address and then the email address of your proposed domain.

Samba Samba 75

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 11:40:42 +0000

More fun with GSM Modems. The Falcom Samba 75 behaves in the same way as the Samba 55, i.e. the CD doesn’t actually load the driver or the phone software so you still have to load them by hand, just like the Samba 55.

Mind you the screen image of the phone that turns up is different.

Installation instructions are here.

Another gem SQLite

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Open source software never ceases to amaze (and delight) me. I’ve found another gem, though not a network management package this time!

Sqlite is an excellent embedded database. I’ve been playing around with it for the last week or so and I am really impressed with it. It’s quick, it’s simple and it just works.

One of the big problems with a lot of open source software is that the documentation can be a bit sparse. I am happy to say that the Sqlite documentation isn’t bad. And there are a number of books available for it too.

Gadget Ahoy

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:57:59 +0000

I’ve been seeing lots of activity on the Desktop recently. Apple started it all off with their Dashboard built into OSX. All very impressive but hardly of much interest to Microsoft Windows users.

Anyway. Google have brought out a similar system for Windows users called Google Desktop. It has been through a few versions now and it looks pretty good.

As an experiment I thought it would be fun to create a Gadget as the Google Desktop plugins are called. So, that’s exactly what I did 🙂

Not the Dud but the Dude

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:31:03 +0000

Brendan from Sentinal was kind enough to point out a new open source network mapping tool. It looks really good and so far seems to work! It’s called The Dude, probably sounds better in an American accent, and I tried it on our test network with the following results.

There are more screenshots on the Microtik website.

Did I mention that it’s free?

I haven’t had time to compare it to other tools but it was simple to install and it worked first time.

Strictly Fun Dancing with the Falcom Samba 55

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 14:13:48 +0000

Is it just me or does everyone find the Falcom Samba 55 GSM Modem a real pain to set up? Loading the driver is OK, but trying to get the Mobile Phone Tools to install is a struggle.

I tried following the instructions on the CD to load the BVRP Phonetools, it seemed to an obvious place to start! but as George Bush said after the mid term elections, Shows what I know!.

Give me a boost Boost

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:16:34 +0000

I’ve not been programming full time since the end of 2002. Ah, those were the days…strong coffee and err RSI a plenty 😄

I am just about to embark on a heavy duty bit of programming, likely to last a few intense months. I’ll fill you in about the reason why in another post.

Anyway, I’ve just been having a peek at all of the new C++ goodies and my, haven’t the C++ standards people been busy. I don’t know why, but I am struggling with the new features. It doesn’t seem to matter how many books I read about generic programming, none do a good job explaining the new features.

You lucky people, yet more OSS

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:50:38 +0000

It is nice to see the open source network management community is still in rude health. Another network and systems monitoring tool has popped onto my horizon. Don’t know how I missed this one, it looks a goodie!

Based upon the much underrated application server platform Zope, Zenoss sure does look the part. If the website is anything to go by I can see a lot of IT and network managers finding a home for this one.

Why selling on the web is hard

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:58:43 +0000

We are currently on our fifth full iteration of our website. And when I say iteration, I mean full gut wrenching, throw everything out and do it again iteration. That works out to over one full iteration per year.

We’ve used the simplest e-commerce system you can use, called Mal’s-ecommerce, through a PHP based cart and then eventually to our current system based upon Elastic Path.

Trust me, it’s hard. But, that isn’t the hardest part of e-commerce. The hardest part on the web is trust. Trust is way harder to imbue in your visitors than anything else.

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