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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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 now do realise that this is perhaps the dumbest post on this entire blog.

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.

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.

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.