Recently in Software Category

Producing, pamintaining and reviewing system logs and graphs for predicting future requirements is a primary sysadmin responsibility. Ruby and Rails can both be used to make your job easier, and more professional.

Monitoring Rails Performance with Munin and a Mongrel

Once your application is moved into production, it becomes important to keep an eye on performance over time in order to get a feel for trends and plan capacity intelligently. Numerous Rails performance measuring tools exist, but I find that it helps to correlate performance of your application with simultaneous lower-level performance metrics of your system (CPU and Memory usage, Load Average, etc). Besides that, hey! Pretty Graphs! Enter munin, an open-source, extensible monitoring tool with a number of out-of-the-box plugins that are useful to SysAdmin type folks. There’s a pretty decent (though brief) writeup on howtoforge that explains a bit more about how to go about getting your own munin. Go ahead and check it out—I’ll chill here until you’re back.

Puppet: System Administration Automated

Puppet is a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it, and a library for realizing the configuration.

Rather than approaching server management by automating current techniques, Puppet reframes the problem by providing a language to express the relationships between servers, the services they provide, and the primitive objects that compose those services. Rather than handling the detail of how to achieve a certain configuration or provide a given service, Puppet users can simply express their desired configuration using the abstractions they're used to handling, like service and node, and Puppet is responsible for either achieving the configuration or providing the user enough information to fix any encountered problems.

Some VMware images

VMware lets you run another computer in your computer. There are times when you need to check if something "just works" on a different platform, perhaps so you can hassle your vendor about it :) Other times, you might just want to see how a different distribution fits together. Hopefully this page of VMware images, or "Virtual Appliances" will help.

Portable Python - your portable development environment

Portable Python is a Pythonｮ programming language preconfigured to run directly from a portable device, enabling you to have, at any time, portable programming environment. Just download and extract to your portable device and in 10 minutes you are ready to create your next Pythonｮ application.

VirtualBox

InnoTek today released VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE), marking an important milestone in the development of PC virtualization software. VirtualBox OSE is the first professional PC virtualization solution released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). With VirtualBox, customers get the most versatile virtualization product on the market, both for enterprise and individual use. VirtualBox' open source license allows everyone to contribute to the development of the product and customize it to suit individual needs. Backed by Europe's largest team of virtualization experts, VirtualBox continues to be developed and supported.

I keep thinking we're almost to that magical thin-client heaven, and then it doesn't quite appear. One thing I do know is unless processors start getting cooler, we're talking about expensive runtime costs from electricity.

2X ThinClientServer PXES edition

2X ThinClientServer PXES edition is the next generation of PXES 1.0, the popular free Linux thin client OS. The new version of PXES incorporates the Linux thin client OS, and also includes a server to allow for central configuration & management of the thin clients. 2X ThinClientServer PXES edition is the free version of 2X ThinClientServer. This commercial version also supports connecting to Citrix servers. The PXES edition can connect to Windows Terminal services servers (RDP) and NX terminal servers. The PXES edition does not include support, however user to user support is available via the 2X forums.

Wow and you have to wonder, how is google going to apply this?

press release @ the bren school of information and computer sciences

Topic modeling looks for patterns of words that tend to occur together in documents, then automatically categorizes those words into topics. Older text-mining techniques require the user to come up with an appropriate set of topic categories and manually find hundreds to thousands of example documents for each category. This human-intensive process is called supervised learning. In contrast, topic modeling, a type of unsupervised learning, doesn't need suggestions for an appropriate set of topic categories or human-found example documents. This makes retrieving information easier and quicker.

I need something like this...

SSHFS: Super Easy File Access over SSH | Linux Journal

[...]as long as you have SSH access, you can use SSHFS to mount and use remote directory trees as if they were local. SSHFS requires no special software on the remote side, just a modern SSH server with support for the SFTP extension. All modern Linux distributions support this extension, which was added to OpenSSH in version 2.3.0, released in November 2000.

Mysql automatic backup script - AutoMySQLBackup
Here is a nice package that does something I've been needing for awhile, completely unattended backups of a MySQL database.

AutoMySQLBackup

A script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. Features - Backup mutiple databases - Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB

Someone asked me to track this library down for them. It looks like it's no longer on the Sun site.

The Java(tm) communications API can be used to write platform-independent communications applications for technologies such as voice mail, fax, and smartcards. This download features API documentation in HTML format, reference implementations for the Solaris and Win32 platforms, and sample software.

Not on the Java sun site anymore...

javacomm20-win32.zip

This search turns up a few links:
Search for javacomm20-win32.zip

VMware to make server product free | CNET News.com
I'm excited about this more for how the competition will heat up, I'll wait and see if it ships free next week, but if it does, I'll put a system online just for firewalling my network...
Xen is still an option too.

VMware, an EMC subsidiary whose software lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, is expected to announce next week that it will begin giving away one of its key products for free, CNET News.com has learned.

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server
I have some old hardware offline, I might turn it on for this...

FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.
The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall.