Blog

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.

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.

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! 😄

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.