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SplunkBase Brings IT Troubleshooting Wiki to the Masses
OSS_ilation writes "IT troubleshooting firm Splunk is using LinuxWorld Boston as a platform to formally launch Splunk Base, a global wiki that will offer IT pros a free-of-charge venue to exchange troubleshooting information, tools and fixes. Splunk is promising that the wiki is completely vendor neutral, and can be compared to Wikipedia, the online open encyclopedia that is regulated and updated by the community-at-large. Users don't even have to have a copy of Splunk Professional to use it. From the article: 'If you believe the research from firms like Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, then Splunk Base has arrived at a key moment. According to IDC, companies will spend more than $100 billion this year on managing the world's data centers. And with virtualization quickly becoming an IT buzzword in 2006, the complexity and costs could increase.'"
quite possibly the worst name ever
All your splunk base belong to us!
Eww....
-m
http://www.invisik.com
How long until the solution to all of the problems is "Reboot the computer"?
This guy's the limit!
I'm glad these people have suddenly gotten the idea that there is a lot of knowledge in the global community that can be shared, but seriously, how is this better than Wikipedia, Expert's Exchange, or plain old Google?
What does this tool offer that's better in any way?
Move along. There's nothing to see.
Not only a bad name, they are a very frequent advertiser here on Slashdot which should have been mentioned.
Have a look at their demo - I was not impressed. Plenty of tools do the same thing. Both Open Source and proprietary.
A troubleshooting Wiki would be nice, though. Give ExpertsExchange some competition when it comes to IT peer questions and answers.
http://www.splunk.org/
Meh.
This is a great concept.
Being an IT professional, it is hard to track down solutions to difficult problems using Google alone. If you Google a problem, odds are you are going to wind up finding a message board where someone has the same issue, but no solution has been posted.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
If I buy an advertisement on here will that also entitle me to stories that will directly contribute to my bottom line? I'm not sure the Slashdot readership appreciates these tactics.
In my field (desktop support) there's good and bad techs..and some are REALLY bad. They know a script of things to ask, but anything outside that and they are totally lost.. they can't work "out of the box" to coin the phrase.
I've also worked with some excellent techs that I've tried to learn from as much as possible, and I try to emulate as I work with customers. These are the ones that see a problem and dig in and try and solve it. Yeah, it takes time but the knowledge base built up can be helpful.
So.. on a database like this.. who's to watch the submissions to select if it's a real tested and found solution, versus something else that doesn't really work? And who's to say the solution provided is from an actual PC tech and not an armchair one? If I had a dime for every time a "friend that knows lots about computers" screws one up..
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
...is the actual address of the IT wiki in question. How do I get to this Splunk Base? (Splunk base is IMO the worst name of any Web2.0 company ever. Sounds like a euphemism for... well anyway...)
So come on editors, it's the announcement for the release of a new wiki, which despite the $DIETY-awful name, might be a useful resource. How about, you know, linking to it? I hear the web is good for that.
Causation can cause correlation
Or the biggest publically edit-able clusterfuck ever launched. I would hope that it is used as intended and doesn't become an ego whirlpool, or a 'clique' club where only the edits of the elite favorites seem to be left in place.
.. which nobody else seems to have ever happend upon.
:) I just really, *really* hope it stays as community focused as they say it will.
I would love (and avidly use) such a beast with the capabilities they are talking about. If I am not mistaken, I could search for something like
VT Enabled Xen Windows 2003 Server
And get what I need out of it quickly. I've also got a laundry list of very odd cryptic errors in openSSI I'd love to find the causes of
Looks like experts exchange is about to be selling cheap ad space
...before some non-open source software vendor comes along and gets a court order to shut this down or other such injunction / legal action claiming release of proprietary information?
Its called "usenet"
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I have looked at splunk. I've got a copy of their eval of professional installed, and it's interesting. There are a lot of things that they do well. Marketing isn't one of them, but the underlying technology is pretty cool.
Here's where they shine: finding data lost in a log file. Picture if you will a log file with free-form text in parts and XML in other parts. With no training about what the log looked like, their tool could do a great job of identifying patterns in the free-form text - essentially blocks or "records" of data there, and pulling out the XML sections.
You can search for patterns in the data, and splunk will help identify them for you. The data import and pattern-matching parts of their code are platform agnostic. There are no adapters to buy, and no "training" to find useful data patterns. I think that they are doing a good job on the technologyside of things, and it's definitely worth the time to look at this tool.
Please note: I have no affiliation with Splunk. I'm not even one of their customers. I have no reason to promote their product. I've looked at it and they do a good job of finding obscure data.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
When looking for solutions to an IT problem, usenet is the last option for me. I go to manufacturers public web forums (almost everybody has their own web forums now). I find usenet to be almost useless for anything except porn, warez and political flame wars.
Meh.
All your splunk base ARE belong to us!
Well, I will admit I didn't install it, but I did browse around and take a tour.
This is nothing like wikipedia. It is a log file aggregator. It's a program that transmits and indexes log files on your UNIX/LINUX machine(s). How is that like wikipedia in the slightest? Granted, users can comment on log entries and create a knowledge base, but that doesn't make it wikipedia at all.
I think they've made a cool tool here. I can see it being useful. But the fact that they are targeting businesses and yet it trasmits all log data to a remote location will make most businesses uneasy. If the application could be setup to keep all data internal, this could be a neat tool for system administrators. But in its current form, it's only really good for hobbyists and other people who don't mind having the guts of their servers on the web ready to be searched by strangers.
sounds like it needs a .xxx domain.
Expert's Exchange? Give me a break. Most of their solutions require a login and the page is so filled with ads that it's not worth your time.
:P ]
I guess you weren't of the ones who simply scrolled down to see the answer.
See:
[Question]
[lame subscription button]
[ads]
[more ads]
[answers here, doh
I currently use google groups when I want to find out the answer to a technical problem. Kind of hard to beat every usenet post ever written. I don't know how i'd get by without it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As long as it is as easy to use, ad-free and has the clean look of wikipedia, I am all for it.
Possible suggestions for new SplunkBase names:
DeadPCBase
FixItYerself
FindOutWTFHappened
YouCanDoIT
WherestheNEkey
IsThisThingOn
MyPuterBroke
DamnYouBillGates
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Whenever I've done tech support for someone, even after fixing the problem and if it nothing to do with rebooting, I will reboot the system. Just so I don't get a call the next day "i turned the computer on this morning and it wasn't working again". Before I leave, I show the client/customer that the machine does in fact work even after a reboot.
Meh.
I think this needs to be summarized because I was thoroughly confused by reading the Slashdot blurb and the linked article didn't help much.
Splunk is a log aggregation server that classifies and tags events found in your logs making it easy to grep through them.
SplunkBase is an extension of Splunk, a web based service that you can lookup events (linked from the Splunk application) and (perhaps) get more information about them.
Dinomite.net
That's the sound a spammer makes when he hits the spamassassin filter.
What is the license on the contributed material going to be?
How does a person know, when they're contributing, that Splunk isn't going to take the site's content at some point down the road, and turn it into some steaming pile of ads and subscription fees like Experts Exchange?
If it's a wiki, it's difficult to separate individual contributions, so a Slashdot-style "Comments are owned by the Poster" probably wouldn't work. The actual work has to be owned by somebody, and frankly I don't know Splunk from Adam and I'd certainly question whether I wanted to spend a lot of time writing an article if at some point it might just become part of their "Premium Membership" service, or if they won't let other people mirror it as a backup in case they decide that being 'community oriented' isn't paying the bills in the way they thought it would.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Note that when you open an Experts Exchange page without logging in, a popup ad window appears. If you leave that window open behind your question page, you can scroll down to the answers. If you close that window, the question page excludes the answers from your view.
I will say that the unregistered EE is heavy on the advertising, and they make it fairly difficult to register for a free account. This signs you up as an "expert," although any registered user, paid or not, can answer questions.
You get a limited number of points per month to ask questions with, and need to earn 10,000 expert points (answer a question for 500 points with an 'A' grade, and you get 2000 expert points) to get free premium membership, then 3000 pts/mo to maintain that membership. If you are knowledgeable about anything tech, you can do it easy.
The tech forums are extremely well moderated, and the caliber of people who answer questions is fairly high.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I keep forgetting to check that first....