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...
In my initial blog post, I explained a little bit about Nagios, and how it can be configured to monitor any networking device or server. Nagios' basic operation is this: Define a check Execute the check at a specified interval Take the result of the check and...
Over the past year, I have been doing a lot of work with clients who use high-end CAD and/or EE software tools from respected vendors like Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. The majority of these software tools require a license server to be setup on your local...
I recently came across a forum post asking for advice on the combination of running Pro/Intralink 3.4 on Windows 7 64-bit. In short, I’m happy to report that we’ve been using this combination without incident: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1, PTC...
As Senior Systems Integrator for SPK and Associates, a California based IT services company specializing in infrastructure management services, I recently completed an interesting project. The goal was to create an ESX cluster for a small engineering group...
In my last post, I gave an overview of Bacula, the enterprise-level free backup software. For this post I wanted to dig into the software a bit more and show how simple it is to setup a weekly backup job. One of the first things we do at SPK when working with a new...
Design Output: A Review of 21 C.F.R. §820.30(d) and FDA Warning Letter Trends
The goal of a typical system administrator is to get a job or task done as quickly as possible, without worrying about how elegant a solution might be. Reusing any existing scripts, tools, or utilities are always the first line in tackling the job. Often times, the...
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...
SPK and Associates routinely review warning letters to help our clients stay in step with FDA trends. One of the problem areas most often cited in company audits continue to be the CAPA system/program. This month we will take a look at some of the latest FDA...
One of the main areas SPK focuses on for our clients is backups. I won’t go into a long lecture about why backups are mission-critical for your business because you already know they are. Even the standard backup schemes, such as Grandfather-Father-Son, have been...
One of the most important aspects of our Linux server management service is operating system patching. With Windows, Microsoft has made this trivial by means of the Windows Update utility. Microsoft is the single source of the patches, and assuming that the patches...
