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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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… 😄

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.

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.