Sparklining Excel

According to Wikipedia a sparkline is a
“small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images … Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed. Their [...]

Review: SB EventLog Monitor

I have only one thing to say about this product, “How did I ever live without it”. If you manage more than one Microsoft Windows Server then you definitely need to be using SB EventLog Monitor.
So what does SB EventLog Monitor do that is so great, it collects, collates, and reports via a web interface [...]

Review: Script Your Documentation Instantly

If you are anything like me you probably have little to no documentation on your servers. Probably it is because you don’t have the time or the personal to perform the tedious (and boring) work required; you know it is important, but other things seem to take priority. Well, you no longer have any excuse [...]

Managing Your FLEXlm Licenses with Cacti and phpLicenseWatcher

So you are tasked with managing multiple FLEXlm based software license managers, but you want more than a dump of the current license information into a text file or in some horribly written and truly user-unfriendly Windows GUI. Then I have a couple of web based open source products for you, and while the installs [...]

Cacti’s Painless Network Monitoring

For the past week I’ve submersed myself in the world of Cacti, and have been have a lot of fun making cool graphs. As my staff will attest, I’m really big into monitoring anything and everything on our network. I find it’s very helpful to be able to track usage, capacity, growth, and a bunch [...]

Insecure Protocols, Passwords, Ettercap, and PHP

So I was doing my daily web browsing looking for something cool, when I came across something that for the first time really hit home how completely unsecured the Internet is and how simple it is for people to grab your passwords.
Now, I’ve been on/using the Internet in one shape or form since 1987, and [...]

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to everyone from the Nerhood family. I hope you have a wonderful holiday filled with warm thoughts and memories. You probably won’t see any updates until the new year, but you never know.
Ellie drew the picture with TuxPaint, a wonderful open source, cross platform drawing package for kids. Click the picture to view [...]

Software for Your Mac

Mike over at JeepinXJ is almost ready to buy a Mac mini. He’s been asking about what software he’ll need to install in order to replace his Linux box. Instead of just sending him an email, I figured I post my list so that other could comment on it as well.
Fink is like yum for [...]

Monitoring Dell Hardware with Nagios

We use the excellent Nagios network, host and service monitoring software at the office to track the status of our servers, routers, and network devices and connections. The program works great and we love it. However, the one area that we have wanted to track was the status of Dell PowerEdge servers, particularly those running [...]

It’s good to be back

It’s been a crazy couple of days. I brought the new iMac home on Wednesday night, and started hooking it up in the office. In the process of hooking everything up, I had to move by web and mail server (the old Dell laptop). This ended up not being a good thing. Not good at [...]