IT outsourcing has become prominent in nearly every area of the economy -- to the point that its benefits are taken for granted. We're aware of the saving of money, of cloud technology providing cost effective high availability infrastructure, and so forth. The...
In a previous post, my colleague Mike described how to setup a Redhat 4 (RHEL4) local update repository. With Redhat 5 (RHEL5), the procedure to setup a local repository has changed somewhat. At SPK, we often will setup a local update repository for Redhat or...
In this week’s blog entry, we want to have a look at how Unix and Windows groups work together in a mixed Unix/Windows environment. This topic can sometimes be a bit confusing, and here we hope to contribute to clarifying the subject. Many companies and development...
Nagios is a wonderful tool. However, there are limits to what you can do with it directly. As my colleague Brad discussed in a recent blog post, using NRPE is a powerful tool for Windows. For complicated web checks that require multi-step operation, we use: WebInject....
In my previous blog post, I talked about how to setup NSClient++ for Windows which is very solid Nagios NRPE client. In this post, I'll describe how to setup some basic checks for your Windows server within Nagios and hopefully give you some ideas on what you should...
This article reviews what an FDA 483 Observation looks like, some of the more common issues flagged in medical device companies, and how to respond.
This week’s posting deals with Rational licensing on the Windows platform. We are going to have a look at setting up a Windows Rational license server and how to configure it. It also turns out that with the arrival of Rational 7.1.2, a new version of the license...
Improve Your Ability to Sell Software into Medical Device Companies – In this paper we will share five things you can do to make your software application more attractive to medical device companies.
One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
This week we take up the topic of creating IBM Rational patch install areas for pre-7.1 versions. As we have discussed in previous weeks, there are a number of tools in Rational 7.1 and beyond that introduce much automation into patch management. However, there are...
Over the past year, I have been doing a lot of work with clients who use high-end CAD and/or EE software tools from respected vendors like Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. The majority of these software tools require a license server to be setup on your local...
Many companies utilize static analysis tools in some fashion. However, we often find they are not leveraging them to their fullest potential. At SPK and Associates, we believe in driving quality up front, at the Engineering Desktop, and not relying solely on finding...
