DLSLUG Notes, 7-Aug-2008: James Fogg, Administrator In A Box

Eighteen attendees braved the downpours to attend the August meeting of
the Dartmouth - Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual on the
Dartmouth campus on the first Thursday of the month. Coordinator Bill
McGonigle noted that several past presenters had new books published:

Jeff Dwyer: Pro Web 2.0 Development with GWT
http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590599853

Barrie North: Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla!
Powered Website
http://www.joomlabook.com/

James Fogg was the main presenter, talking about high-end administration
of many machines, and how the adminstration tools are both growing out
of the grassroots and migrating downward from the large mainframe/mini
management systems. These systems configure, monitor, test, audit,
report and manage large numbers of computers, network devices (routers,
switches, etc.) and enable a small number of administrators to keep a
large plant running, manage changes in fractions of the time and effort
that a manual process would require, and provide in-depth information on
the state of the plant.  He talked about, and demonstrated, the high-end
products from HP and BMC.

We talked about many related FOSS tools which served some or all of the
functions of the high-end tools, though perhaps not yet with their
polish, breadth, depth or integration. Products mentioned included:

RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ)
http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/

OpenNMS http://www.opennms.org/

OpenQRM http://www.openqrm.org/

Pentaho http://www.pentaho.com/

Puppet http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet

ZenOSS http://www.zenoss.com/community/ and http://www.zenoss.com

Big Sister http://www.bigsister.ch/

Nagios http://www.nagios.org/

Upcoming meetings include "How to Write a Compiler" in October and "High
Availability Linux" in November. Stay tuned for more details.

Thanks to Bill McGonigle for arranging and running the meeting, to Heidi
Strohl (http://www.heidistrohl.com) for providing the awesome brownies,
and to James for the presentation.

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Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com