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Engineering Operations

What Happened to Google Wave? A Look at Collaboration Alternatives

What Happened to Google Wave? A Look at Collaboration Alternatives

Two years ago, Google announced a new product: Wave. Their (and I use the term loosely, since all new Google products seem to come from the same giant, faceless Googleplex) original goal was to unify messaging – have you thought about how many tools you use to...

How to Backup an ESXi Server with GhettoVCB

How to Backup an ESXi Server with GhettoVCB

VMWare is wonderful for getting full utilization of scarce resource.  However, if you're on a limited budget, affording ESX clustered hosts for all needs is overkill.  Sometimes a free ESXi server is enough. In the latter, we ran into challenges doing backups. ...

Leveraging Netapp’s Deduplication Feature

Leveraging Netapp’s Deduplication Feature

We recently obtained the necessary licenses required to enable one of our clients' FAS2050 filers for deduplication.  Currently, deduplication is offered by Netapp for free.  You simply need to get in touch with your reseller and request both ASIS licenses...

In The Trenches: A Look At The Benefits of IT Outsourcing

In The Trenches: A Look At The Benefits of IT Outsourcing

IT outsourcing has become prominent in nearly every area of the economy -- to the point that its benefits are taken for granted.  We're aware of the saving of money, of cloud technology providing cost effective high availability infrastructure, and so forth.  The...

How to Setup a Local Redhat 5 Update Repository

How to Setup a Local Redhat 5 Update Repository

In a previous post, my colleague Mike described how to setup a Redhat 4 (RHEL4) local update repository. With Redhat 5 (RHEL5), the procedure to setup a local repository has changed somewhat. At SPK, we often will setup a local update repository for Redhat or...

Using Unix and Windows Groups with ClearCase

Using Unix and Windows Groups with ClearCase

In this week’s blog entry, we want to have a look at how Unix and Windows groups work together in a mixed Unix/Windows environment. This topic can sometimes be a bit confusing, and here we hope to contribute to clarifying the subject. Many companies and development...

Solve 100 Problems with a Bootable USB Flash Drive

Solve 100 Problems with a Bootable USB Flash Drive

Unlike using MultiBootISO, which required experimentation and custom linux-configuration for each tool, setting up YUMI is a straightforward affair: Get YUMI Multiboot USB Creator from Pendrivelinux.com. Download the Internet! You can go crazy with your office’s...

WebInject Scripting to Perform Advanced Monitoring

WebInject Scripting to Perform Advanced Monitoring

Nagios is a wonderful tool. However, there are limits to what you can do with it directly. As my colleague Brad discussed in a recent blog post, using NRPE is a powerful tool for Windows. For complicated web checks that require multi-step operation, we use: WebInject....

How to setup basic Windows monitoring with Nagios

How to setup basic Windows monitoring with Nagios

In my previous blog post, I talked about how to setup NSClient++ for Windows which is very solid Nagios NRPE client. In this post, I'll describe how to setup some basic checks for your Windows server within Nagios and hopefully give you some ideas on what you should...

One-click Installer for PADS Flow 9.3 and Update1

One-click Installer for PADS Flow 9.3 and Update1

Everyone loves a one-click installer, but setting this up can be a headache, especially when a company changes the way this is done. You can setup your installation script to install both PADS9.3 and PADS9.3_update1 with a double-click of the mouse! Here are the first...