Archive for December, 2008

Signing off for 2008


December 23rd, 2008

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Not sure how to subscribe to a RSS feed? Read Subscribing to blogs the easy way. Thanks for visiting!I’d like to thank all of you, my loyal readers, for sticking around throughout the last year. It looks like 2009 may prove to [...]

Introducing Pandora FMS


December 18th, 2008

The open source systems management space sure is hotting up. Pandora FMS looks like a good emerging open source systems management tool.
Pandora FMS has been developed by Ártica, a Spanish company founded in 2005. A VMWare image is available for download, so checking Pandora FMS out is a breeze.
From a technical perspective, Pandora FMS is [...]

Hyperic hyperbole


December 16th, 2008

I was researching a post when I was amused to come across the Hyperic advert in the image below. Even by marketing department standards, to claim Hyperic is the “world’s most popular systems monitoring software” does seem a teeny, weeny bit over the top.

Centreon – Nagios remixed


December 16th, 2008

One of the problems with Nagios is that initial set up & configuration can be intimidating to the new user. There are a number of methods for easing the initial installation problems, but you are still left with an intimidating configuration process.
One option is to use Centreon, a (relatively) new front end for Nagios with [...]

Wordpress 5 minute install…


December 12th, 2008

…used to be a category leader in ease of installation. It isn’t now. You can install very powerful CMS software like SilverStripe in under a minute. By comparison, five minutes seems like an eternity.
The SilverStripe installer does away with any database and config file messing around. Just run the install script and bob’s your uncle [...]

Google account security


December 11th, 2008

Here at Teapot Towers we are pretty paranoid about security. One of the things we’ve done to improve our security is lock down our web sites with a nice phat firewall.
Outside of the firewall, you just get to see the standard web & incoming email ports. Internally, from the company network, we bypass the firewall [...]

TWiki begets Foswiki


December 5th, 2008

At the end of October I mentioned a project called Twiki that was in the process of being forked because the project creator wanted to take the project down the commercial open source route.
The community behind TWiki wasn’t too pleased about this. Consequently, they have forked the TWiki code and have founded the Foswiki project [...]

Firefox RSS subscription bug


December 5th, 2008

I’ve recently noticed a bug in Firefox 3. If you subscribe to a lot of blogs you’ve probably noticed the RSS symbol on the right hand side inside your Firefox address bar.
The feature is very useful because, when you go to a blog or a news page, you can quickly and easily subscribe via your [...]

It’s usually the firewall/anti-virus software


December 4th, 2008

A good case in point today. Software ran just fine on Windows XP but the move to Vista stops the software working.
First conclusion: the software mustn’t be compatible with Vista. Wrong! It was nothing to do with Vista. It was the anti-virus software running on top of Vista that was causing the problem.
For reasons best [...]

Off Topic: A few pictures from Otley on a snowy day


December 4th, 2008