12 hour shifts are not so bad if you only work three or four days a week, alternating every other week.

OpenNMS has fields for serial number, location, asset number, etc. etc.

Or if your hardware is all HP-branded you can use their free HP SIM software. We managed to get HP SIM to work with dell machines too, by loading up a custom SNMP MIB.

We used OpManager in production for over a year. It has terrible Linux support. None of their built-in plugins worked properly for monitoring even basic parameters like disk space, free memory, CPU usage, etc. When we pointed this out to their support people, they said we should build our own plugins with SNMP OIDs. Um....no. Not for the amount of money we paid for that steaming POS. We finally kicked OpManager to the curb about a month ago, and have our entire environment, Windows and Linux servers being monitored with Nagios. Nagios scales well, we are currently watching several hundred hosts and about 3500 services.

OpenNMS is also a good tool, its ability to map servers back to switch ports is extremely handy.

...then you probably don't need RAID. Use NTFS and set up some kind of scheduled backup to the second drive. Or, build a Linux NAS device and run BackupPC (backuppc.sourceforge.net). BackupPC works great for this sort of thing, it can do incremental and full backups of all your data, on the schedule you choose.

Hopefully Bethesda will use the quake or doom engine in their new games. I never liked the feel of the controls in Oblivion or Fallout 3. The movement just felt weird compared to say, ETQW or other id titles. Like the controls were a little too loose or something.

I recently replaced the Sophos virus scanner software with ClamAV on a fairly busy 4-node virus scanning cluster. The performance is better, and I no longer have to beg the finance department every year to cut a check for new licenses. A win-win situation all around. Well, except maybe for Sophos...

I did email him twice but got no response. I also tailed my squid logs all night and nobody used it. I would like to help out here but am not much use if no one can find my proxy. Oh well.

I did go ahead and set up a squid proxy - how do I get the IP address to Iranians who need it without the government seeing it? I've asked this question on twitter several times over the last day, and my messages seem to just get drowned out by all the other information flooding in. Is there a trusted source who can pass the server address on to Iranian users who need it?

Boot it up and log onto your Linux guest account. Most likely one of two things will happen:

1. Your x-windows configuration won't work with the schools projector.
2. The person who asked to use your laptop will have no idea how to use Linux.

Either way you win, and they won't ask you next time.

These guys were calling me on my cell phone every single day for a while. Then mysteriously the calls just stopped. Thanks Internet hacktivists!

Here are some ideas for individuals or very small businesses:

* Weekly full backup of all critical data onto an external USB drive. This is kind of a bare minimum setup. Even better is to get several USB drives and rotate them a few times a week or every day.

* Amazon S3. Seriously - it's cheap and not too hard to set up. You can set up an automated script to suck all your important data into the cloud.

* BackupPC - backuppc.sourceforge.net. BackupPC can do full and incremental backups of Windows and Linux desktops and servers. It's free and runs on pretty much any hardware, as long as you have enough disk space.

Hats off to id software for making Linux versions of all their games!

So as soon as I heard the rumors about TWC implementing bandwidth caps I installed Cacti to poll my wireless router and monitor my usage. I work from home over a VPN, listen to some streaming music and play some games, watch a few videos here and there. I'm using between 5-10Gb per week and this is just normal Internet use.

If those bastards cut off my account I will *not* be a happy camper. They sold me unlimited Internet and they had better honor their commitment!