Updating Frenzy

Today I found the Linux kernel 2.6.25 was released so I promptly downloaded the source and compiled me a fresh kernel. So since I was already updating my kernel and had to recompile the NVidia Driver to have X working, I also decided to update to the latest NVidia Driver. At that point I was taken by an update frenzy and downloaded the latest GSlacky and had my gnome desktop updated. So now I have a nice updated system running, here's an overview of the new version numbers I'm running.

* Kernel went to 2.6.25
* NVidia driver went to 169.12
* Gnome was updated to 2.22

All updates went quiet smoothly expect the NVidia driver because of the newly kernel which lead to an error during the kernel module compilation. But this was solved by applying a patch to the NVidia installation package. I found the patch in a forum by doing some googeling.

So now I'm waiting for the new Gnome release to use the evolution mail client to access my work's mailbox since our mail is managed by M$ Exchange 2007. And currently evolution only supports till Exchange 2003.

Search your data with Splunk

While I was gathering information about plugins for Nagios, I found out about splunk. Put in short splunk will accept any data you put into it and you'll be able to isearch and report on the data. Splunk does provide a way to customize how it index your data. As an example I took the os-monitoring bundle available on the splunkbase.com website, what it does is feed output from vmstat,lsof,netstat and other commands into splunk at that point you can search for system status data and generate reports (the bundle is shipped with several reports alredy created).

Splunk comes in a free and commercial version. The diffrences can be found here, shortly the commercial version has some interesting features like access control and distributed indexing.
One possible probelm of the free version is that it's limited to index 500Mb of data a day.

Kittens @ war

Doing some shopping for dinner last night at the supermarket i found a book entitled something like "kitten vs kitten" it collected several photo's of kittens and the result of the people voting the cutest kitten. Reading the introduction of the book I found out these photo's were taken from the site KittenWar! . So I decided to have a look and maybe enter my kittens into the contest !

Spread the penguin

Spread the penguin and Get Linux

2007: Microsoft in Review

Stumbled accross this article reviewing M$ activities in 2007

Excerpt:
"It’s no small secret. I hate Microsoft. I think they are the most vile and corrupt corporation in the tech industry. Their monopoly hampers innovation and they favor litigation, corruption and marketing tricks to maintain their position over simply creating great products. I have read and heard many people claim Microsoft is changing, improving, and the evil Microsoft of the pass is fading; I strongly disagree with this view, and it takes no more then a cursory look through Microsoft’s actions in 2007 to see why:"

read more in the article

Veritas NetBackup Backup Windows

Ever tried to manage Veritas NetBackup with about 35 Policies with both full and incremental schedules having only 1 tape drive in your library ? The first problem I ran into was the various backup windows set on the policies. Since I was unable to find some easy overview of all configured backupwindows inside the Veritas Netbackup GUI, I created a small Perl script to generate me a report off all configured active schedules inside netbackup. If you're interested you can find the source of the script here