OpenNMS has fields for serial number, location, asset number, etc. etc.
Or if your hardware is all HP-branded you can use their free HP SIM software. We managed to get HP SIM to work with dell machines too, by loading up a custom SNMP MIB.
We used OpManager in production for over a year. It has terrible Linux support. None of their built-in plugins worked properly for monitoring even basic parameters like disk space, free memory, CPU usage, etc. When we pointed this out to their support people, they said we should build our own plugins with SNMP OIDs. Um....no. Not for the amount of money we paid for that steaming POS. We finally kicked OpManager to the curb about a month ago, and have our entire environment, Windows and Linux servers being monitored with Nagios. Nagios scales well, we are currently watching several hundred hosts and about 3500 services.
OpenNMS is also a good tool, its ability to map servers back to switch ports is extremely handy.
...then you probably don't need RAID. Use NTFS and set up some kind of scheduled backup to the second drive. Or, build a Linux NAS device and run BackupPC (backuppc.sourceforge.net). BackupPC works great for this sort of thing, it can do incremental and full backups of all your data, on the schedule you choose.
Hopefully Bethesda will use the quake or doom engine in their new games. I never liked the feel of the controls in Oblivion or Fallout 3. The movement just felt weird compared to say, ETQW or other id titles. Like the controls were a little too loose or something.
I recently replaced the Sophos virus scanner software with ClamAV on a fairly busy 4-node virus scanning cluster. The performance is better, and I no longer have to beg the finance department every year to cut a check for new licenses. A win-win situation all around. Well, except maybe for Sophos...
I did email him twice but got no response. I also tailed my squid logs all night and nobody used it. I would like to help out here but am not much use if no one can find my proxy. Oh well.
I did go ahead and set up a squid proxy - how do I get the IP address to Iranians who need it without the government seeing it? I've asked this question on twitter several times over the last day, and my messages seem to just get drowned out by all the other information flooding in. Is there a trusted source who can pass the server address on to Iranian users who need it?
Here are some ideas for individuals or very small businesses:
* Weekly full backup of all critical data onto an external USB drive. This is kind of a bare minimum setup. Even better is to get several USB drives and rotate them a few times a week or every day.
* Amazon S3. Seriously - it's cheap and not too hard to set up. You can set up an automated script to suck all your important data into the cloud.
* BackupPC - backuppc.sourceforge.net. BackupPC can do full and incremental backups of Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It's free and runs on pretty much any hardware, as long as you have enough disk space.
So as soon as I heard the rumors about TWC implementing bandwidth caps I installed Cacti to poll my wireless router and monitor my usage. I work from home over a VPN, listen to some streaming music and play some games, watch a few videos here and there. I'm using between 5-10Gb per week and this is just normal Internet use.
If those bastards cut off my account I will *not* be a happy camper. They sold me unlimited Internet and they had better honor their commitment!
* Nice and fast, especially with Google applications.
* Many links on Facebook do not work at all.
* Requires the latest, greatest bleeding edge Java plugin to work with Java-enabled sites.
* Warnings for https sites without proper certificates are done well. One click to get through to the site, rather than the convoluted 4 step process Firefox 3 forces you through.
I would like to see an MMORPG with a skill-based FPS-like combat system. Something as big as World of Warcraft, but with fast and furious battles like the Quake series. The rock-'em-sock-'em robots style of combat in most of these MMO games gets a bit tedious after a while.
I'm guessing that it's probably hard to have the fast response times and detail of a good FPS inside a massive MMO world. But at least for the battlegrounds and arenas, this would be more fun than "point and click on target and push attack".
Also, specifically speaking to World of Warcraft they really need a graphical upgrade. At least re-do the player and environment models for those of us with reasonably modern hardware.
Not only that, on Firefox 3.0 it takes four mouse clicks to get through the barrage of self-signed certificate warnings. (IE 7 lets you through with one simple warning and click). If you somehow manage to get two certificates with the same serial number then you have to perform an elaborate voodoo ceremony to purge the offending certificate(s) from your system before it will even let you visit the site!
Ask the Firefox developers about this, they will be happy to tell you it is a *feature* and not a *bug*.
Ok, so I recently bought a new computer. It was about time, as my old dual-boot machine was getting rather long in the tooth. I shopped around and settled on a Dell machine that was on sale, and it came pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Edition.
All along I figured all the bad press about Vista was mostly hype. "I'm a system administrator after all, I should be able to sort it out", or so I thought. . . .
The list of things that suck about Vista goes on and on, but I'll just mention the one thing that I found most annoying: the new UAC (User Account Control) "feature". Every few minutes there is this extremely jarring, annoying screen fade and pop up dialog asking me if I'm REALLY sure I want to open a program, etc. Thank God I found a way to shut it off.
So I've tested Vista for about a month and am seriously considering going back to a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu system. So if you haven't tried Vista yet, don't make the same mistake I made. Yes, it does suck that bad. The only reason you need it is if you want to play DirectX 10 games.
I've had great experience with the Linksys WRT-54GL loaded with dd-wrt firmware. I've only had to reboot it once every 4-5 months, usually due to a power outage. Not as stable as a Cisco catalyst, but hey, it was only $60 from Newegg.com.
The QoS feature is great if you use VoIP or play games:)
"Either there's a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves."
Or maybe Dell can't figure out how to give good customer service and price it appropriately? Maybe they shot themselves in the foot selling bargain-basement computers with the cheapest possible India-based phone support?
Many people do not mind paying extra for reliable, consistent support, upgrades and service. Apple is obviously doing something right, have a look at their stock price side-by-side with Dell's:
* Some kind of qwerty keyboard, with commonly used bash shell characters in easy to reach places. Or at least an easy way to map the escape key and other essentials.
* Ssh-agent and support for public key authentication.
* Direct terminal input. This business of having to escape to a Java input window and then select "OK" on the phone's menu . . . well, it sucks.
* 80x24 terminal. I suppose the resolution on the phone will need to be at least 320 pixels wide for this?
* Must not be a Windows smartphone. I had one of these once and it was horrible to use.
If anyone knows of a phone that can do all this I'd like to know about it.
I have a web application that runs on a fairly standard Tomcat/Linux/Oracle stack. Is there anyone else out there using EC2 for something similar? I would be very interested to hear about your experiences with AWS. Contact me at scarolan[at]gmail[dot]com if you have any info.
How about a Kurobox? You could put a 500Gb hard drive in it, or even a 750Gb drive if you were inclined. You'll still have enough left in your budget for a secondary USB drive that you can use for backing it up.
Slashdot Mirror
12 hour shifts are not so bad if you only work three or four days a week, alternating every other week.
OpenNMS has fields for serial number, location, asset number, etc. etc.
Or if your hardware is all HP-branded you can use their free HP SIM software. We managed to get HP SIM to work with dell machines too, by loading up a custom SNMP MIB.
We used OpManager in production for over a year. It has terrible Linux support. None of their built-in plugins worked properly for monitoring even basic parameters like disk space, free memory, CPU usage, etc. When we pointed this out to their support people, they said we should build our own plugins with SNMP OIDs. Um....no. Not for the amount of money we paid for that steaming POS. We finally kicked OpManager to the curb about a month ago, and have our entire environment, Windows and Linux servers being monitored with Nagios. Nagios scales well, we are currently watching several hundred hosts and about 3500 services.
OpenNMS is also a good tool, its ability to map servers back to switch ports is extremely handy.
...then you probably don't need RAID. Use NTFS and set up some kind of scheduled backup to the second drive. Or, build a Linux NAS device and run BackupPC (backuppc.sourceforge.net). BackupPC works great for this sort of thing, it can do incremental and full backups of all your data, on the schedule you choose.
Hopefully Bethesda will use the quake or doom engine in their new games. I never liked the feel of the controls in Oblivion or Fallout 3. The movement just felt weird compared to say, ETQW or other id titles. Like the controls were a little too loose or something.
I recently replaced the Sophos virus scanner software with ClamAV on a fairly busy 4-node virus scanning cluster. The performance is better, and I no longer have to beg the finance department every year to cut a check for new licenses. A win-win situation all around. Well, except maybe for Sophos...
I did email him twice but got no response. I also tailed my squid logs all night and nobody used it. I would like to help out here but am not much use if no one can find my proxy. Oh well.
I did go ahead and set up a squid proxy - how do I get the IP address to Iranians who need it without the government seeing it? I've asked this question on twitter several times over the last day, and my messages seem to just get drowned out by all the other information flooding in. Is there a trusted source who can pass the server address on to Iranian users who need it?
Boot it up and log onto your Linux guest account. Most likely one of two things will happen:
1. Your x-windows configuration won't work with the schools projector.
2. The person who asked to use your laptop will have no idea how to use Linux.
Either way you win, and they won't ask you next time.
These guys were calling me on my cell phone every single day for a while. Then mysteriously the calls just stopped. Thanks Internet hacktivists!
Here are some ideas for individuals or very small businesses:
* Weekly full backup of all critical data onto an external USB drive. This is kind of a bare minimum setup. Even better is to get several USB drives and rotate them a few times a week or every day.
* Amazon S3. Seriously - it's cheap and not too hard to set up. You can set up an automated script to suck all your important data into the cloud.
* BackupPC - backuppc.sourceforge.net. BackupPC can do full and incremental backups of Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It's free and runs on pretty much any hardware, as long as you have enough disk space.
Hats off to id software for making Linux versions of all their games!
So as soon as I heard the rumors about TWC implementing bandwidth caps I installed Cacti to poll my wireless router and monitor my usage. I work from home over a VPN, listen to some streaming music and play some games, watch a few videos here and there. I'm using between 5-10Gb per week and this is just normal Internet use.
If those bastards cut off my account I will *not* be a happy camper. They sold me unlimited Internet and they had better honor their commitment!
* Nice and fast, especially with Google applications.
* Many links on Facebook do not work at all.
* Requires the latest, greatest bleeding edge Java plugin to work with Java-enabled sites.
* Warnings for https sites without proper certificates are done well. One click to get through to the site, rather than the convoluted 4 step process Firefox 3 forces you through.
I would like to see an MMORPG with a skill-based FPS-like combat system. Something as big as World of Warcraft, but with fast and furious battles like the Quake series. The rock-'em-sock-'em robots style of combat in most of these MMO games gets a bit tedious after a while.
I'm guessing that it's probably hard to have the fast response times and detail of a good FPS inside a massive MMO world. But at least for the battlegrounds and arenas, this would be more fun than "point and click on target and push attack".
Also, specifically speaking to World of Warcraft they really need a graphical upgrade. At least re-do the player and environment models for those of us with reasonably modern hardware.
Not only that, on Firefox 3.0 it takes four mouse clicks to get through the barrage of self-signed certificate warnings. (IE 7 lets you through with one simple warning and click). If you somehow manage to get two certificates with the same serial number then you have to perform an elaborate voodoo ceremony to purge the offending certificate(s) from your system before it will even let you visit the site!
Ask the Firefox developers about this, they will be happy to tell you it is a *feature* and not a *bug*.
Ok, so I recently bought a new computer. It was about time, as my old dual-boot machine was getting rather long in the tooth. I shopped around and settled on a Dell machine that was on sale, and it came pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Edition.
All along I figured all the bad press about Vista was mostly hype. "I'm a system administrator after all, I should be able to sort it out", or so I thought. . . .
The list of things that suck about Vista goes on and on, but I'll just mention the one thing that I found most annoying: the new UAC (User Account Control) "feature". Every few minutes there is this extremely jarring, annoying screen fade and pop up dialog asking me if I'm REALLY sure I want to open a program, etc. Thank God I found a way to shut it off.
So I've tested Vista for about a month and am seriously considering going back to a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu system. So if you haven't tried Vista yet, don't make the same mistake I made. Yes, it does suck that bad. The only reason you need it is if you want to play DirectX 10 games.
I think I'd be afraid to ride on that bus:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/631908.html
I've had great experience with the Linksys WRT-54GL loaded with dd-wrt firmware. I've only had to reboot it once every 4-5 months, usually due to a power outage. Not as stable as a Cisco catalyst, but hey, it was only $60 from Newegg.com.
The QoS feature is great if you use VoIP or play games :)
"Either there's a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves."
Or maybe Dell can't figure out how to give good customer service and price it appropriately? Maybe they shot themselves in the foot selling bargain-basement computers with the cheapest possible India-based phone support?
Many people do not mind paying extra for reliable, consistent support, upgrades and service. Apple is obviously doing something right, have a look at their stock price side-by-side with Dell's:
DELL vs AAPL
Oh, forgot to add - as a bonus it would be really nice if the phone's web browser could use forwarded SSH ports as a proxy.
My dream phone would have the following:
* Some kind of qwerty keyboard, with commonly used bash shell characters in easy to reach places. Or at least an easy way to map the escape key and other essentials.
* Ssh-agent and support for public key authentication.
* Direct terminal input. This business of having to escape to a Java input window and then select "OK" on the phone's menu . . . well, it sucks.
* 80x24 terminal. I suppose the resolution on the phone will need to be at least 320 pixels wide for this?
* Must not be a Windows smartphone. I had one of these once and it was horrible to use.
If anyone knows of a phone that can do all this I'd like to know about it.
I have a web application that runs on a fairly standard Tomcat/Linux/Oracle stack. Is there anyone else out there using EC2 for something similar? I would be very interested to hear about your experiences with AWS. Contact me at scarolan[at]gmail[dot]com if you have any info.
How about a Kurobox? You could put a 500Gb hard drive in it, or even a 750Gb drive if you were inclined. You'll still have enough left in your budget for a secondary USB drive that you can use for backing it up.
Anyone with extra space on their hard drive could do this:
1 partition or drive for gaming (Windows XP)
Rest of your hard drive(s) for everything else (Linux)