Dear LazyWeb,

Today is "green" day, and for "green" day I want to turn on and off some computers by remote. This means I want to be able to telnet/ssh into a power supply to bring them up and down.

Cheap, I want cheap. Web interface is "ok" assuming it works with links (aka text based browser).

No cards... something I plugin. I want a very simple setup.

I've got test servers I rarely use and I want them off most of the time (aka... MySQL, Memcached, Asterisk, Gearman, Drizzle... all the rest).

Thanks!
-Brian

Last week I learned that Sun has put its 3 database groups (Java DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL) under Marten Mickos. First off, who knew Sun had such a broad database portfolio???? Second, smart move putting them all under Marten. In speaking with Marten's Java DB team I gave them a small nugget of advice that has served us incredibly well with WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE). Simply put win with the strengths of the family, not individual products. I've written about customers wanting choice and flexibility and the challenges of trying to position any product, OSS or not, as... READ MORE

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Good old William had his reasons to say so, but then either he was not concerned about misspellings or he didn't care. (A recent book about the Bard actually points out that all Shakespeare's known signatures are differently spelled, and none of them is spelled Shakespeare!)
The problem with my name is that, for the majority of non-Italians, it does not sound familiar, and consequently it gets misspelled. As a frequent traveler, I have seen every sort of mischief done to my first name.
I don't really understand why, but most English speakers write "GUIseppe" instead of "GIUseppe." Sometimes I was called "Giuseppa" (which is a female name) or "Giuseppi" (which is a non existing plural of my name), or "Jooseppai" …

New features for the next release. As follows:

1. Status page now reports daily error code summarizations, connection failures to hosts
2. Talkback report page now reports on myback_talkback script version number
3. Talkback report page now tracks the my.cnf file during the backup process, and the cnf file contents for each host are stored as LONGTEXT in the monitor database
4. Multi-tier access levels, admins (rw) and general users (ro)
5. View tables for the status page summarizations speed up reporting
6. Daily summary email - similar to the status page, instead of singular emails for each backup success/fail notification

Look for 1.3 being released very soon! You’ll be able to find it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/monolith-mysql

Last week, at the end of JavaOne day one, I was able to grab the JRuby dynamic duo for a podcast.  Tom Enebo and Charlie Nutter turned out to be really nice guys, must be their midwestern roots, and were a pleasure to talk to (I also learned a lot :). 

My interview with Tom and Charlie (14:19)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Charlie Nutter and Tom Enebo -- the JRuby dyanmic duo (and wearing the shirts to prove it).

…

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

With all due respect to the technology and it's advocates (myself included), after a surge in articles describing the merits of using memcached I'm just pushing a thought breakpoint for developers to think whether they actually need it or not?

Recently, I ran into cases where the developers have decided to use memcached over MySQL style architecture after reading some/many good/nice articles about it without giving a damn to their requirements. I would like to list few things as a checklist for developers to decide on their architecture. There is still no precise answer but sometimes few cases can be just ruled out :).

1. What is the total size of your data? It might be a possibility that you can keep the data in memory in each node, or MySQL can just keep the whole thing (data+indexes) in a buffer.
2. How frequently your data is updated? Very frequent updates may lead to low cache hit ratio for memcached …

The title of MySQL’s website states that they are the world’s most popular open-source database. This is false; MySQL is not an open-source database. That assertion is a fact, not an opinion.

MySQL is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL. People frequently use the two phrases “Free Software” and “Open Source Software” as synonyms, but there are very large, very important differences.

The difference between Free and Open Source

Open Source is much more of a development methodology than a philosophical standpoint. The first thing on the Open Source Initiative’s website is this introduction:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of …

So I got bored and I've just added array support to the Datagrid class. You can see it in action by looking at example9.php. Instead of supplying the connection parameters and the SQL query to the static Create() method, you simply supply the array. The array should be two dimensional, like that returned by mysql_fetch_assoc(). Indexed first numerically, and then by "column name". Barring any problems, this will be "released" shortly.

I've been working for the last week on implementing Zenoss to replace Nagios and Cacti. Individually Nagios and Cacti are pretty good at what they do, but they don't integrate well.

Nagios is primarily an availability monitor, so it's good for notifying you when something goes down, or a disk is filling up, or the load average is too high. etc., but it's not so great for monitoring performance. Nagios 1.4 uses text configuration files. There is a templating system which can be helpful if you have a lot of identical systems.

Cacti, on the other hand, is pretty good at monitoring performance, as in how much bandwidth are you using, resource utilization, and so on with nice long-term graphs using RRDtool, but it's not so great for notifying if something is …