All of the blog posts contained within The Tech Teapot with the most recent at the top.
Larry Augustin created an excellent comparison between European & American attitudes towards commercial open source software.
[via Adventures in Open Source]
Update: sorry for being a clutz, I forgot the link to the article. All sorted out now.
Google Code is a fabulous, minimalist open source development portal. I love it because there’s no faffing around and it uses lots of standard open source development tools like subversion.
One of the more bizarre design decisions Google made when they developed the service was to show changes to code and changes to the wiki pages in the same place.
When I go to the history page, I just want to see a change log of software changes not changes to the wiki pages as well.
The big selling point with cloud computing is that computing capacity grows and shrinks depending upon the load being put upon it. You typically only pay for CPU (by the hour) and storage (by the month) you actually use.
If your website enjoys a sudden surge in traffic, by appearing on the front page of slashdot for instance, then extra servers will be provisioned automatically. Once the peak load passes and more normal traffic levels return, the extra servers are automatically de-provisioned.
Thought I’d share the network & systems management blogs I read on a daily basis in the hope that you’d share yours with me.
Network & Systems Management Network Instruments Blog Network Performance Daily Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog 4sysops Cisco Blog Sentinel Everything Sysadmin Lone Sysadmin Standalone Sysadmin Last In - First Out Jeff Hengesbach IT Skeptic Cloud Computing RightScale Blog Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds The Wisdom of Clouds Thinking Out Cloud Open Source Adventures in Open Source Zenoss Blog Blogging Hyperic Open… Socialized Software Enterprise Management John M Willis ESM Blog People Over Process Protocol Analysis Inside Laura’s Lab Chris Sanders Data Centre The Raised Floor Data Center Networks Data Center Knowledge Aggregators Planet SysAdmin I’m always on the look out for good systems management blogs, so if you know of any I really should be reading, I’m all ears.
A fine podcast discussing Jane Curry’s Open Source Management Options paper with Michael Cote, Jane Curry herself and John M Willis.
Robert Aronsson is the CEO of Intellipool AB a company with over ten years experience of the network management market. Intellipool introduced a distributed network monitor over four years ago. I interviewed Robert with a view to getting some insight into Intellipool’s experience of implementing distributed network monitoring solutions with their customers.
The interview was conducted via email. My questions are in bold with Robert’s answers underneath.
Q: What key factors determine whether you need a distributed solution?
It was uncanny yesterday. I entered the office in summer and when I left to go buy an espresso mid-morning the air had changed to an early autumn chill. The nice summer smell had gone too, replaced by a fresher autumn bite.
Oh well, that’s summer 2008 gone. Not a classic by any means. And I’ve got my 50 miles sponsored cycle ride to do this Sunday too. That’ll be nice in the wind and rain that is currently being forecast.
We’re in the process of producing a bunch of videos explaining the features on some of our more specialised products…what am I saying? They’re all specialised!
There are a lot of concepts in the cabling world that many IT workers haven’t come across before. We’re determined to make it as easy as possible for them to learn the dark secrets of cable testing and cable locating.
The video is hosted on YouTube because it is cheap and very, very available.
Jane Curry of the UK based Skills 1st network management training and consultancy company has written a rather good open source network management tool comparison. It is a large PDF file ~150 pages, so you have been warned!
Kudos to Jane for doing the comparison, it must have been a whole heap of work. Enjoy!
A number of mid-level network monitoring products, like What’s Up Gold & Intellipool for instance, have recently implemented distributed monitoring features. Mid-level network monitoring products are now implementing distributed monitoring so it is affordable by a lot more companies.
Single Poller Monitoring With regular network monitoring you have a single poller measuring network and server performance from a single location on your network.
Figure 1: Architecture of a central polling in a distributed network
