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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

…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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]