As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous article, we looked at the first three. For part 2, we pick up where we left off and talk about principles...
Configuration Management
The Difference Between Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
Enhancing Electric Commander Build Processes by Creating Dynamic Job Steps
In a simple, straight-forward implementation of a continuous integration pipeline you would typically create a chain of procedures that perform the same set of operations on the supplied input. This provides a build process that is well-defined, repeatable,...
Electric Commander: Transferring Homepage Settings Between Users
The Electric Commander homepage allows you to bookmark links and job configurations for easy access. It's easy to add one or two, but if you have a lot of links and you want to share them with other users so that they have the same links as well, its a lot of work to...
Keep Track of Passwords with Pleasant Solutions
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
Why Leaving Systems and Application Management to Engineers Can Cause Trouble
How Economizing can Hurt your Business There is a saying in some parts, “I am too poor to buy cheaply.” At first it sounds contradictory, but anyone who has bought something cheaply (electrical goods, car parts, computer equipment or any kind of service) and then...
Bad Changeset Management, Release Management Can Be Disastrous for Your Company
The core activities of configuration management (i.e. changeset management and release management) are essential to control the changes made to a system and to administer the release of its different versions. However getting it wrong damages your brand, customer...
Five Reasons to Outsource Compute Farm and Server Management
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...
How to Monitor Your APC UPS Units – Part 1
Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least,...
How to monitor Windows servers using Nagios and NSClient
One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
Reverse Proxy Configurations
Now it's time to look at some of the server side configurations. The first step is to configure reverse proxy for the HTTP services. These services live on hosts that sit in the DMZ. A proxy is very simple to configure and allows a lot of flexibility to grow over time...
3 Options for Network Installation and Application Management
It seems like every week there’s another article about “Network Installation Services” – even if we don’t realize it. I believe Apple really hit the nail on the head with their iPhone App Store, as evidenced by the copy-cat implementations in the WebOS App Catalog,...