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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. All of the offerings I have seen are going after the enterprise space in a big way.

Everybody loves Nagios, but let’s be honest, it can be a pain to set up, especially if you work in a Windows only environment. A few solutions do exist to make Nagios a little easier to get yourself up and running.

1: Hardware Appliances

Hardware appliances take the hassle out of Nagios, for a price. You buy a rack mountable appliance with Nagios all ready to go. Just plug the device in, configure the network settings and off you go.

Monitoring the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is a constant preoccupation of many people who manage a server room. If the conversations we have with customers are anything to go by anyway. 😄 Here’s a quick guide. We can, of course, help out with a number of the options…the rest can only be done by your UPS supplier.

1: SNMP Trap

The classical way, with network enabled UPS, is to use SNMP traps. The UPS notices that its power supply has gone, it generates a SNMP trap and sends it to wherever you have configured it to send it.

Chris Garret at OMIQ has been kind enough to review this ’ere blog. Chris has highlighted some things we need to do better.

And by golly, we are going to do things better. And that’s a promise! We always take feedback, good or bad, very seriously and try to improve our service accordingly.

We’ve recently been getting a lot of comment spam on the OPENXTRA Blog. You will never have seen the spam because we have manually deleted it all.

Anyway, we’ve now enabled the Akismet Wordpress plugin and things are far far better. Akismet will somehow figure out whether a comment is spam or not and mark it appropriately. Spam it misses that you mark as spam are added to its database for future use. So, it just gets better and better at detecting spam. 😄

Apologies for the recent downtime. The site was down for half a day yesterday and for around an hour of business hours today. All is fixed now…phew! All was a bit of a panic for a while.

The problem for those interested in the techie bits was a PHP config problem. We are moving over to PHP 5 and the new version of PHP started interfering with the old version 4. The upgrade will be happening in the next couple of weeks or so together with a major overhaul to the e-commerce system.

As we have mentioned in a previous post, our recent purchase of a Cisco router has not been entirely a happy one.

To rub insult into injury, even when I switched it off it still caused us downtime :(

It was at the top of our rack with the power switched off, but still with a live power supply going into it. Our regular broadband router started to fail intermittently. I assumed that it was just a software fault and cycled the power each time. After the third or fourth time around I was starting to get a bit annoyed. This time I picked it up so I could have a good look at it. I then realised that it was really hot, far hotter than it should have been. So I put my hand on the Cisco router it had been resting on and it was hot too.

As I mentioned in a previous post we now have a Google Desktop Gadget. We are pleased to announce that Google have now accepted our Gadget to go on their own Desktop Gadget directory.

What can I say, we are thrilled. If you have the time please install it and try it out. You will need to install Google Desktop first though.

The plug-in displays the live values from your Sensatronics temperature and environmental sensors right on your desktop.

Triple play is a marketing term coined to describe the provision of voice, video and data services over network connections. It is not a technical specification as such. It does not describe what the technology will be, how it will work or indeed why it is necessary. Though the why is the usual reason…cheaper & easier to manage a single set of infrastructure than a mangled rats nest of separate systems blah blah…

Phew…all done. The last site has now been moved to our shiny new server (a Sun based AthlonXp box for the techies out there). Had to do it in a bit of a hurry after a slight misunderstanding with our service provider who switched off the server a couple of weeks early.

Hopefully you were completely oblivious to the changes. If you do web admin properly that’s how it should be. The site wasn’t down for more than a couple of hours at most.