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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

… 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.