Does your software development organization have a well defined and implemented configuration management (CM) process? For many organizations, they equate the CM process with having a revision control tool in place. While versioning is a necessary prerequisite to...
Configuration Management
Keep Track of Passwords with Pleasant Solutions
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
Why Leaving Systems and Application Management to Engineers Can Cause Trouble
How Economizing can Hurt your Business There is a saying in some parts, “I am too poor to buy cheaply.” At first it sounds contradictory, but anyone who has bought something cheaply (electrical goods, car parts, computer equipment or any kind of service) and then...
Five Reasons to Outsource Compute Farm and Server Management
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...
Bad Changeset Management, Release Management Can Be Disastrous for Your Company
The core activities of configuration management (i.e. changeset management and release management) are essential to control the changes made to a system and to administer the release of its different versions. However getting it wrong damages your brand, customer...
How to Monitor Your APC UPS Units – Part 1
Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least,...
How to monitor Windows servers using Nagios and NSClient
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...
Reverse Proxy Configurations
Now it's time to look at some of the server side configurations. The first step is to configure reverse proxy for the HTTP services. These services live on hosts that sit in the DMZ. A proxy is very simple to configure and allows a lot of flexibility to grow over time...
Security layers on a modern website
Last time, we looked at a basic website design. Now it’s time to start digging into the details around what’s really being used behind the scenes. This time, we’ll focus on security aspects. When a user starts their browser and connects...
Leveraging Group Policy to Setup Wireless Access
In my last post, I introduced Clonezilla as an easy way to deploy Windows-based workstations into a corporate environment. But once a workstation enters the corporate network, what sort of policy applies to it? What sort of actions can a user take on their...
Lifetime Products Drives Digital Transformation by Moving from Paper-Based to Digital BOMs
Over the years, Lifetime’s products have continued to grow more complex. With a focus on innovation and continuous improvement, the manufacturer recognized the need to digitize and standardize its engineering and manufacturing workstreams. Paper-based processes and...
SRAM PTC Windchill PLM ROI Case Study
SRAM deployed PTC Windchill PLM to integrate and unify the engineering processes for all its brands. The company’s rapid growth through acquisition resulted in engineering and development groups that were not able to communicate and share information across...