• Black Duck Software – amongst other things, Taros Balog investigates the licence terms of the Zenoss Enterprise product
• Auditing 100,000 Hosts or More with Nessus
• SSL/TLS Flawed: Using Wireshark to Decrypt Attack Traces from PhoneFactor
• New Version of PRTG Consumes Less Memory and less CPU Cycles
• Wireshark 1.2.4 Released
• So you think you know traceroute…
• Run, run, run, dead.
• 10 eBay Secrets for Planet Wide Scaling

From all these points of view we can only advise those who are looking for a good monitoring product to write PRTG Network Monitor right at the top of the list of products to look at. For Network Computing this product is, as previously, still the reference.

PRTG 7.2 came out on top!

• WhereFi, WhenFi, and WiFi – a discussion of why there isn’t more free WiFi available
• Scanning Windows 7 With Nessus 4.2 – an interesting post outlining the security of a default Windows 7 installation
• Lua script – Checking expiry time of HTTPS certificates – Robert implements an INM plugin for checking the expiry date of a SSL certificate
• Devopsdays 09 – Automated Deployment With Chris Read of ThoughtWorks – more cloud goodness from John M Willis
• [Hyperic] HQ 4.2.0 is Now Available
• Meet The Community – Tobi Oetiker of MRTG, Smokeping, and RRDTool – an interesting interview with Tobi Oetiker, founder of open source projects MRTG and RRDTool
• Small Scale QoS
• Cisco Game! Become a CEO with myPlanNet – a SimCity style real time strategy game putting you into the shoes of a service provider CEO
• Avoid the most common culprits for single points of failure on small to midsize networks
• Microsoft’s UAC: A change in philosophy from Vista to Windows 7?

• Hacking The Reboot With Nagios Magic
• A long overdue report of DevopsDays
• Slow Bandwidth? Remove Unused Protocols to Improve Speed
• Cynical Cloud Computing
• Lina Software’s Cross-platform Port of Zenoss 2.5
• Sending Notifications from PRTG to iPhones With Prowl For Free
• Meet the Community Installment 4 – Joerg Linge (pnp4nagios)
• Book Review: “The myths of Security” by John Viega
• Quick tips and checklists for common admin tasks
• City of Motors
• Pandemic Planning – The Dilbert Way

• Hockey Night in the Data Center
• Simple Network Management with Syslog
• The Kindness of Strangers – Tarus Balog (of OpenNMS) gives a talk at the Open Source Monitoring conference in Germany
• RRDtool 1.4 – higher Performance and cool Features
• Zenoss 2.5 is Now Available!
• Quadruple whammy for IT as a startup grows
• Wireshark 1.2.3, 1.0.10, and 1.3.1 Released
• The Re-Education of NetFlow
• Get Your Network Management Checklist Here!
• Has your MOM seen better days?
• Teasers, for future Web-UI – some screenshots of the new Icinga interface
• Please schedule your unplanned emergencies at a more opportune time

A great example of the talibanisation of software is the reaction of parts of the open source community towards the Mono project. Why does Mono get the goat of the software taliban? Well, Mono is an open source implementation of a standard originally developed by the great satan Microsoft.

Whilst the software taliban’s fixation with Mono is unfortunate, their targeting of applications written using Mono is far worse. Many developers have chosen to use C# as their preferred language for application development on Linux. And a number of high quality applications have been the result. Why should the developers’ perfectly reasonable language choice result in the Mono uninstall fest that greets every new version of Ubuntu for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the application itself?

But the software taliban, being the purest of the pure, aren’t satisfied with high quality apps written for the one true operating system written under an open source licence. Mono, to the software taliban, has the whiff of being a Microsoft technology. And woe betide anybody who has the temerity to even think of using a Microsoft technology, even when the technology is completely open source and based upon published standards. If you do transgress you’ll have the software police descend upon your application in order to help the observant maintain a pure machine.

I’ve long harboured a suspicion that many liberals hide a strong streak of iliberalism, as exemplified by the Politically Correct brigade. The open source community, a community supposedly founded on the ideals of software freedom, seems to have developed a similar streak of iliberalism towards honest developers work.

Does anybody have any photos of the dry contact status points on their server room air conditioning units that I could use as an illustration on a guide I am currently updating? A picture saves a thousand words as they say and I’ve got 40 pages already…

If you could contact me I’d appreciate it.

• Microsoft “Patch Tuesday” – The Aftermath
• A Preview of the New User Interface in Opsview 3.5.0
• A Peek into the Developer Environment – a look into the typical Zenoss developer development environment
• The Blue Screen of Deathly Hallows – some good feedback for Microsoft on the Windows 7 release
• The limits of some anti-spam precautions
• Sysadmins and Egos: Great in pairs!
• Windows 7 releases!
• How to waste lots of CPU time checking for module updates
• What Windows 7 means for network administrators
• Scotty Time: A guilty indulgence?

• Is SPAN Port really so bad?
• Ethereal is Dead! – time to move on folks, Wireshark keeps on getting better
• Open Source, Open Core, Open ScoreCards
• Review of Wireshark and CACE Pilot
• GWOS Slashes Pricing For Introduction to Enterprise Edition
• The Five Phases of Losing a Job
• A tale of network horror, or at least excitement
• Maintenance, Downtime and Outages

• Using Real-time Events to drive your Network Scans
• Conclusion: KPIs and Application Monitoring
• IT Hiring Improving? There may be signs that the IT jobs market is improving, in the States anyway. Not before time if you ask me.
• QuickTip: Managing Columns in Wireshark
• KPIs Continued: Systems Management