This week's techmail is System monitoring with Zenoss takes complexity out of configuration (not quite sure why my original title got changed, as this one doesn't make much sense to me, but ok...). Anyways, I've been a long-time fan of Nagios, still use it, but I'm seriously considering replacing it …

Last week's mac techmail was Use Microsoft Remote Desktop from a Mac with CoRD. It talks about using the CoRD application to remotely control Windows systems (or Linux systems using xrdp). I've been told that Microsoft provides a Remote Desktop Client for the mac, but I hadn't found it at …

Last week's techmail was Using rsnapshot to back up and retain snapshots. Rsnapshot is pretty slick; the tip goes into the how and the why, but now that I've found this thing I think it's going to replace my home-brew rsync backup solution. I use subversion to retain old backups …

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I maintain a repository of packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (arguably these could/should be in EPEL but I've not had time to get into the Fedora side of things as of yet... someone will beat me with a wet noodle …

This week's mac techmail is Mounting NFS volumes in OS X which takes a bit of a tour on how to mount NFS volumes on a mac (which is not nearly as user-friendly as it should be).

This week's techmail is Setting the record straight on sudo which I wrote as a rebuttal to another, rather ignorant, rant against the use of sudo. I get it, the author uses Ubuntu and probably doesn't give much thought to the fact that Ubuntu really shouldn't use sudo the way …

Last week's mac techmail was How Thunderbird 3 works on Mac OS X: Better than Apple Mail? which took a look at some of the improvements in the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 3 and how it compares to Apple Mail in Snow Leopard. Is one better than the other? I look …

This week's techmail is Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives. Smartctl is awesome, and having it monitor your drives on a constant basis will likely give you the early warning "oh crap, something is wrong, backup NOW!" that people can really use. I know it's …

This week's TechMail is Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID which goes into the fun I had on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago replacing a drive in my backup box at my mother's place. All-in-all it was dead simple and very painless, which just goes to show …

This week's mac TechMail is Install open source software on your Mac easily with Fink. I love Fink. One of the first things I install on any OS X computer I setup is Fink. It gives me all the goodies I'm used to on Linux and makes the CLI so …