The Tech Teapot

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I was messing around inside top trying to diagnose a server slowdown and I noticed that my server has been up for 463 days. The server runs Linux Centos 4.4.

Want to share your server uptime?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Looking at the entrants for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards 2009 I am struck by the wide range of applications, but also the quality of the finalists.

In the network management space, Nagios is a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins and OpenNMS is a finalist in the Best Project for the Enterprise.

You have until 20th July to register your vote.

Popularity: 2% [?]

As a follow up to the Windows based structured systems management post, I have found a network monitor that does have some dynamic abilities.

PolyMon is an open source network monitor written for the .NET environment. Steven Murawski has written PoSHMon, a series of PowerShell cmdlets for interacting with PolyMon dynamically. Whilst neither PolyMon or PoShMon are particularly full featured or mature, they do at least show what is possible.

If anybody knows of any commercial network management tools with PowerShell support for dynamic structured systems management, I’d love to hear about it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Found a post whilst reading a post by the Standalone Sysadmin… and it is a beauty. Michael Janke has a post comparing ad-hoc versus structured systems management.

One of the items that Michael says is essential for structuring your systems management is automation. As Matt Simmons says:

“Remember, if you can script it, script it. If you can’t script it, make a checklist”

In the Windows world automation has been a pretty tough ask until Windows PowerShell came onto the scene. Whilst it was possible to script Windows with VBScript, it wasn’t easy or quick. If it isn’t easy and quick it probably won’t happen.

I still haven’t noticed any network management tools supporting PowerShell yet. Shame. Given that nearly everything seems to be sprouting PowerShell support it is a shame that network and systems management vendors are slow supporting a technology designed to help sys admins do their job more easily.

The world is becoming a lot more dynamic with virtual & cloud computing coming to the fore. Management tools need to be equally dynamic and yet, so far, they’ve been pretty un-dynamic. If I have a script that provisions a new virtual machine it would be nice to tell the management platform to start monitoring its performance from the same script. If I have a script that takes down a service, it would be nice to tell the management platform to put that particular service into maintenance mode so I don’t get deluged with alerts.

Popularity: 6% [?]

… yeah, getting boring now I guess. This is the final planet site for a while… I give you planet cloud. The site is a little bit thin at the moment mainly because I’ve been pretty quick to clean out Google Reader screen. Google Reader used to have a feature where you could look at your feeds whether they had any unread posts or not. A recent software update took care of that though. That’s one of the down sides of web based applications… you don’t have any control over the deployment of the app and any “improvements“.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I enjoyed creating planet network management so much I thought I’d do it again this time centred around data centers. Friends, I give you planet data center! I’ve populated the site with feeds from this site’s blogroll and my feed reader… if you know of any other data center oriented blogs worth reading, please get in touch.

If you can think of any other planet sites you would like to see, I’m all ears!

Popularity: 6% [?]

500 Comments

Thanks to everybody who has commented on the blog over the last two and a half years (yes, it really is that long!). Interacting with the people who read this blog is what keeps me going. Here’s to the next 500!

Popularity: 6% [?]

… how I  created a planet network management website to aggregate all of the network management related blogs I read. I was just going to do your bog standard list post, but then I thought it would be more fun to have a dedicated website instead.

I’d like to tell you how I’ve sweated for days  deep into the night, depriving myself of sleep and sustenance, whilst I slaved over a blinking terminal to get it working… well, I can’t because it only took a few hours of not very hard work plus an inexpensive domain name.

The site uses the rather good planet software. The site is a bit stripped down at the moment, I will work on the look as things progress.

If you have any suggestions for blogs to be added, please get in touch. Alternatively, if you are the owner of a blog featured on the site and don’t wish to be, please get in touch as well.

Popularity: 9% [?]

… between various flavours of Windows. Not sure what Microsoft have done on Vista and Server 2008 but it hasn’t half slowed down WMI performance. Thankfully the latest release candidate of Windows 7 has much improved performance.

Oops!

Popularity: 10% [?]

Paessler have introduced a new product called Multi Server Simulator, currently available as a pre-release version, that creates a simulated network of devices and switches.

The main use for network simulators is for testing network management software. However, network simulators do have plenty of uses outside of software development.

If you are evaluating network monitoring software you may not want to unleash it on your live network. Network simulators like Multi Server Simulator allow you to create a test lab completely separated from your live network. There isn’t much point in subjecting your network to a piece of software if it can’t scale up to the job.

Unfortunately, within a few minutes of starting my evaluation Multi Server Simulator died a horrible death with the following dialog produced every few seconds.

Paessler Multi Server Simulator Bug

Still, it’s a nice idea…

Popularity: 14% [?]