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The NeoOffice UI layer is written in Java, and according to the developers, would have been difficult to implement natively. The Vuze (Azureus) BitTorrent client and InterMapper Remote are also implemented in Java. In fact, Java applications on the Mac can look just like native ones, so it's often not obvious when Java is being used.

I would use a product called Weather Goose a water sensor and Dartware's Intermapper.

http://www.itwatchdogs.com/ - They have other environment monitors as well.

http://www.intermapper.com/ - As if this isn't already apparent, though it isn't necessary if you want to do some programming.

I'm a fan of InterMapper, powerful but not overly complicated, and easily extensible. It also runs on MacOSX, Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. It was originally developed at Dartmouth College to support their network, and has been marketed commercially since 1996.

If your intent is to detect network troubles, I recommend using some system like Cricket or MRTG to graph the interfaces as well as the Errors on the interfaces within the network. This may require some finesse in setting up for the first time.

Aside from that, Sysmon was written primarily to monitor hosts and the host based services, but was morphed also to monitoring networks. It may fit your needs as you can set up SNMP thresholds of network errors and other things.

If you want to be super-lazy, I would download the trial of Intermapper it may be able to find these troubles for you if you can SNMP poll the devices and has auto-discovery. I've not used it in awhile, so hopefully it has support for the platforms that you are using.

Our big hitch comes from the fact that we only have a satellite connection to each of the remote sites, so we can't do real time monitoring, so things like HP Openview NNM are out of the question - they use too much bandwidth.

You might be interested in Intermapper for its Remote component. You can run a monitoring system at each location yet administer them centrally. Your remote datastream will basically be the set of events that's interesting to the Human In Charge.

It's commercial software, so you have to weigh the cost of the software vs. getting it right yourself.

* A gnome-terminal that can open multiple windows without requiring multiple processes.

* Faster startup time and lower memory usage for GNOME applications.

* A GUI method of enabling emacs keymappings and user-rebindable accelerators.

* User-rebindable accelerators on contextual menus, rather than just regular menus.

* OpenOffice working like the rest of the GNOME applications.

* All config directories (dotfiles and dotdirectories) being moved from ~/.appdir to ~/.config/appdir (including gnome/gnome2 stuff. Less garbage in ~/.

* More types of data being supported in cut-and-paste in GNOME apps. This means being able to cut-and-paste from the GIMP or Inkscape to Open Office and back again.

* The introduction of an "infinite progress bar" widget containing barber pole stripes, a la the Mac OS, to be used on tasks with an indeterminate completion time.

* The finishing of *some* instant messaging client for *some* protocols. All of the GNOME-based IM clients have issues. This is mentioned in the roadmap. IM is a standard feature even at many businesses. To use GNOME, I need to be able to send/recieve files with it and send encrypted messages. This is currently a tremendous pain in the ass (for some reason, encryption support *still* has not been merged into gaim mainstream, despite the fact that the US no longer places encryption limitations on people).

* Security. The GNOME people are busily putting in auto-discovery stuff and the like. If GNOME talks to the network, it needs to be tied down very tightly. I get *very* unhappy when my desktop environment needs to talk to the network.

* Network management. GNOME's GxSNMP is currently dead, and there are no GNOME network management apps. There is nothing like Intermapper.

* Make a GnomeTreeView that's a more intelligent GtkTreeView. It should natively have the ability to reorder or hide columns (say, a popup menu can come up from clicking in an icon in the title line of the GnomeTreeView that has a checkmarked list of columns to make visible) -- this sort of functionality shouldn't really require the application to do anything.

There is *not* a heck of a lot of content here.

Most of the information is more than obvious to anyone interested in running a NOC (incidently, left out of the Slashdot story is that this is a *Security* NOC).

I've seen random Slashdot posts that would be a lot more useful to someone interested in building a NOC than this thing.

That being said, my own two cents:

If you're using SNMP to manage your network, snmpwalk+scripts is good. If you can stomach not using open source software, Intermapper is really nice. Unfortunately, the two big open source competitors don't quite measure up -- Scotty is kind of old and grotty and rather TCL-oriented, and GxSNMP appears to be dead.

Etherape, as suggested in the article, isn't the greatest choice either...IIRC, it doesn't support satellites, which means it needs to be running on the actual network it's monitoring. Not really acceptable for a NOC tool. Etherape is also, in my experience, rather CPU-hungry. There are a lot of commercial traffic flow visualization tools...not sure what's best, as I haven't played with many.

All in all, while the article's worthy of a post in a random discussion, it really isn't worthy of a Slashdot story.

InterMapper can monitor anything that responds to SNMP or other TCP/IP queries. For the central monitoring server, it is available now for Mac and Windows, and in beta for Linux.

I'm not totally clear on what she wants here, but check out Intermapper. It's sort of cool even if it's not what you're looking for.