The lowdown on writing a technical book

July 14, 2009

If you’ve ever hankered after writing a technical book then Michael Foord has some advice for you garnered from writing IronPython in Action. Sounds like a shed load of work for no money… something I seem to be specialising in at the moment. Update: Michael has done a post detailing his first quarter earning from [...]

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Google Chrome OS from a sys admin perspective

July 9, 2009

What does Google’s recent announcement that it is getting into the operating system business tell us from a sys admin perspective? For a start whatever effects it will have are some way off. Chrome OS isn’t due to be released until the second half of next year. It is amazing how much fuss a company [...]

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My server uptime

June 26, 2009

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?

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Sourceforge open source awards 2009

June 23, 2009

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 [...]

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Windows based dynamic systems management update

June 18, 2009

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 [...]

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Windows based structured systems management

June 11, 2009

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. [...]

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Planet cloud ahoy!

June 10, 2009

… 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 [...]

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Planet data center ahoy!

June 9, 2009

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 [...]

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Five hundred comments and counting…

June 8, 2009

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!

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Vendor bloggers in Network Management; or

June 5, 2009

… 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 [...]

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