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Richard Aronsson from Intellipool has a post over on his blog concerning using Intellipool to monitor Vista based machines. Unlike on versions of Windows prior to Vista, the remote registry service is set to manual start-up on Vista. I guess that has been a casualty of the new security sensitivity over at Microsoft. In the past, everything was started by default, and you had to go and switch it off if you didn’t need it.

The more observant among you may have noticed some changes on this ’ere blog. The blog was a wee bit anonymous so I’ve added an About link at the top of each page. I’ve also added a link through to the products section too. Just so new visitors landing on the blog get an idea of what we’re about. There’s also a mini About section on the main blog page too on the right hand side.

A lot of the skills that an electrician applies every day are directly applicable to network cable installation. But there are differences, and that’s what I will be covering in this article. Network Cable is Delicate Network cabling is lighter gauge. Any kind of rough handling has the potential to damage the cable before you’ve even installed it. CAT5e or CAT6 cable has 4 pairs of thin copper wires. Damage to any of those 8 wires renders the cable unusable.

If you want to know more about voice, data and video cabling we strongly recommend a visit to Uncle Ted’s Guide to VDV. Highly recommended! For a great guide to fibre optics, you will find much to enjoy in Lennie Lightwave’s Guide to Fiber Optics. Both of the above have been created by VDV Works a voice, data and video cable training company in the USA.

There’s a buzz going around at the moment in the open source systems management space. A new consortium, aimed at evangelising the best tools and companies, has been formed. The Open Management Consortium is a loose grouping of projects, organisations and individuals interested in how open source can impact systems management. The consortium has a great page with all of the member projects and companies. I think you’ll find much there to interest you.

Nice Hyperic heads up by Infoworld. $50 million worth of R&D for $1 AND three customers. Sweet! The enterprise open source systems management space sure is hotting up…

Another commercial open source systems management software product has recently appeared on our radar. Hyperic, founded in 2004, is going after the enterprise market. The following quote is from the Hyperic blog: Enterprise customers are open to participating in communities and are eager to reap the >benefits. but they don’t care about having access to the source code of a product or >participating as much as some would like to think.

Thanks Chris for tagging me. When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up? The first time I can ever remember thinking about work was when my Father asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Naturally, as a five year old, I was very impressed with being a JCB driver. Seemed the coolest job in the world to me. Other than that, I really didn’t give careers much thought.

Most temperature monitoring equipment is purchased in order for you to be alerted when things go wrong. Quite often you want to be alerted using SMS. Many of you use the z-text fixed line SMS modem for this performing the SMS end of the alerting. If that is you, you can stop reading right now because this doesn’t apply to you. If you are using a GSM based modem, like the Falcom 55 & 75, you need to make sure that your particular SIM won’t time out.

One of the interesting things to emerge in network management over the last year or two has been the commercial open source vendors like Groundwork & Zenoss. The commercialisation of open source isn’t new, nor is it particularly surprising that commercialisation has happened in the network management space. Open source has been big in network and systems management from the beginning. What has surprised me has been the focus of the commercial open source operators.