Two years ago, Google announced a new product: Wave. Their (and I use the term loosely, since all new Google products seem to come from the same giant, faceless Googleplex) original goal was to unify messaging – have you thought about how many tools you use to...
VMWare is wonderful for getting full utilization of scarce resource. However, if you're on a limited budget, affording ESX clustered hosts for all needs is overkill. Sometimes a free ESXi server is enough. In the latter, we ran into challenges doing backups. ...
We recently obtained the necessary licenses required to enable one of our clients' FAS2050 filers for deduplication. Currently, deduplication is offered by Netapp for free. You simply need to get in touch with your reseller and request both ASIS licenses...
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 the world of IT, solutions become problems with alarming regularity. The new software of today is the upgrade nightmare of tomorrow. The policies that solved problems create new ones years later. The corporate IT departments that we look to for solutions are...
Application management services sounds intriguing; have a company host and run your applications, and separate your business from your infrastructure. Anyone who's dealt with the stress of IT planning and purchasing understands the temptation to use application...
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...
Unlike using MultiBootISO, which required experimentation and custom linux-configuration for each tool, setting up YUMI is a straightforward affair: Get YUMI Multiboot USB Creator from Pendrivelinux.com. Download the Internet! You can go crazy with your office’s...
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...
Everyone loves a one-click installer, but setting this up can be a headache, especially when a company changes the way this is done. You can setup your installation script to install both PADS9.3 and PADS9.3_update1 with a double-click of the mouse! Here are the first...
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...
