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One of the great tools we have discovered recently has been Apache SpamAssassin, an open source spam identifier. I’ve yet to see a genuine email that SpamAssassin has marked as spam. It doesn’t catch all of the spam emails, but it does get all of the really obvious ones. We run SpamAssassin in conjunction with sendmail on Linux. You can get SpamAssassin to work for a wide variety of operating systems and email servers.

Our internet server managed to restart itself over night. That makes me feel real uncomfortable. Was the server shut down by the ISP as part of routine maintenance without telling us or did the server ABEND? What really made my day is that we’ve not got round to starting all of the required services automatically at start up. So, both email and website were down when I got in this morning.

Every IT person I’ve ever met has at least one nightmare story about being roped into fixing somebody’s home PC/network/broadband and everything going wrong. A friend roped me into fixing his friend’s Windows 95 PC that his kids had managed to kill by installing all manner of junk onto it. Naturally, as soon as I had fixed it, I was on point duty from then on. If the PC merely hiccuped I was expected to drop everything and hurry round to fix it.

Greg Conti has released a new version of rumint that now works with WinPcap 4.0.1. If you tried rumint before and had problems, I suggest you give it another go.

The most puzzling aspect of the new wave network management buzz comparison is the OpenView & NetIQ graph. I find it hard to believe that either OpenView or NetIQ are losing traction in the marketplace. So, how do you explain the fall in their respective number of searches? Network management vs network monitor First port of call was to see how the industry in general is doing. Whilst far from perfect I think that the network monitor & network management keywords will provide a reasonable guide to search trends.

I was amused to read an article celebrating the launch of a new product called Multidweller by Pace Micro in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Sounds like a neat piece of technology delivering digital TV to multi-dweller buildings like blocks of apartments and the like. The following are quotes from David Gillies, director of technology at Pace Micro: “We work in an extremely fast-paced and competitive market, and the grant from Yorkshire Forward allowed us to get this product from concept to market faster than we could otherwise have done.

Google Trends is an on-line service for comparing the search volumes for up to five keywords. I thought it would be interesting to compare the relative buzz of the new wave open source network management players between themselves, but also between other open source projects and commercial products. Google Trends doesn’t supply the search volumes themselves, so no quantitative data will be presented. The data that is presented is solely comparative.

I doubt there are too many IT pros who haven’t had Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) at some point. My outbreak was induced by a long death march on a piece of network management software combined with bad posture and no breaks whatsoever. Whilst my immediate symptoms are gone, they return really fast after extended keyboard use. My need to avoid highly repetitive tasks is one of the variables I need to consider when I decide whether a task should be automated.

Manufacturers of IT equipment usually specify recommended operating temperatures for their equipment. The temperature range is usually quite wide. For instance, the temperature range specified for our Dell servers is 10° to 35°C (50° to 95°F). Given the wide operating temperature range, why can’t we run our servers at a sizzling 34.9°C? It is odd that Dell don’t nuance the environmental information they specify. They don’t say what level of system reliability you can expect at a given temperature.

You might assume that because the technology involved in manufacturing optical fibre cable is more complex than copper, installation of fibre networks would inevitably be more expensive than using copper. However, with the advent of CAT6 cabling means that copper is getting faster – but at a cost. There are environments where copper is at a severe disadvantage; take an industrial environment with a lot of electromagnetic interference; copper cable in this type of environment will need a lot of protection, incurring extra cost, fibre would be totally immune to such interference.