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Open Source Tools in Data Centers
An anonymous reader writes "There is a nice presentation on the L.A.S. Linux site entitled "Managing Data Center Functions with Open Source Tools" which was presented at Comdex 2003. It covers everything from IPtables to OpenNMS. As well as covering some less known but nice tools like NeDi, which lets you easily manage Cisco routers and swiches from a web browser."
in the enterprise datacenter has to be Cisco Enterprise Printing System of CEPS for short. With CEPS Cisco has over 10K printers in thousands of sites around the world with only 2 print admin's!! CEPS is based around SAMBA and CUPS and allows windows, linux, and unix clients to print to printers in a way that is unmatched for redundancy in any other product commercial or otherwise. Remote print servers can take over controll of print queues quickly in the event of a print server failure and queues can be rerouted to a new print device should a physical printer fail all without client reconfiguration! Cisco was nice enough to give the system back to the world. They have a sourceforge project available for anyone interested.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I would include Zabbix to the Monitoring and Administration section. This is out-of-the-box application that takes care of monitoring of our network consisting of more than 400 nodes. It is not as mature as Nagios or MRTG, but its stability and feature set makes it extremely useful. Native high-performance agents cover most of platforms: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, MS WIN, Linux, *BSD, OS X. Could be installed in a 5 minutes, this is big advantage over Nagios or OpenNMS.
With all the recent security issues surrounding open source (Debian, anyone), I would think twice about using open source in my data center.
Please get a clue. The Debian compromise was because of a lost password. Every OS/App is equally vulnerabne to this.
When it comes to centralized management of your IT assets, Microsoft products are unbeatable. An excellent reason to be an MS only shop, IMHO.
Now I get it, you're trolling. MS may have some good tools, if you need point-and-drool and don't try to do anything the system or tool was not explicitly designed to do.
In my case, I admin a research lab with 12 workstations and two servers, all running GNU/Linux. I spend no more than 15 minutes per week on routine admin tasks, all of it from home. I can also remotely install any software the researchers need. The only reason I ever need to physically go there is to replenish the office supplies (toner, paper, bsank CDs). That sort of a setup would be difficult, if not impossible, with an MS-only setup.