RiverMuse FreeCool slipped until late Jan/early Feb

January 8, 2009

… at least the public release anyway. I expect if you work somewhere interesting, then it may be worthwhile contacting them in the meantime. RiverMuse are aiming their offerings solidly at Tivoli, Micromuse and OpenView event correlation users. RiverMuse are going to be using an open core strategy, so far blazed by Zenoss and Hyperic, [...]

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Tivoli vs open source network management buzz 2008

January 7, 2009

As suggested by Jane Curry in her comment on the Open source network management buzz comparison 2008 post I’ve compared Tivoli related keywords and selected open source projects. Tivoli covers a lot of ground so comparing it on its own doesn’t really tell you very much. Both Tivoli Monitoring and NetView have been pretty consistent [...]

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Ethereal.com website back up

January 7, 2009

I’ve noticed that the old Ethereal website is back up again after being offline for well over a year. The original Ethereal crew, including Gerald Combs the founder, disappeared over to Wireshark, where they created a fork due to problems with trademarks. Not sure what’s going on. The website hasn’t been updated since 2007. The [...]

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Open source network management buzz comparison 2008

January 6, 2009

As it’s the start of a new year I thought it would be an ideal time to look back over the year just gone. I have used Google Trends to compare the number of searches during 2008 of various open source and proprietary network management tools. Whilst search volume is an interesting metric for network [...]

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Signing off for 2008

December 23, 2008

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 be even more interesting than this year… but probably not in a good way. Expect to see a more tightly focused Tech Teapot in the new year. Also, a move over [...]

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Introducing Pandora FMS

December 18, 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 [...]

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Hyperic hyperbole

December 16, 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.

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Centreon – Nagios remixed

December 16, 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 [...]

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WordPress 5 minute install…

December 12, 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 [...]

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Google account security

December 11, 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 [...]

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