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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?

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.

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 .

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 Ártica, 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.

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

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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. There is a bug in the Firefox 3 implementation at present when more than one feed is available.