This week's TechMail is Learning more about Nagios for server monitoring which reviews the book Learning NAGIOS 3.0 published by Packt Publishing. This is a pretty decent book for anyone interested in learning more about Nagios. It taught me, who's been using Nagios for some time, a few new …

This past week's TechMail is Firewall MySQL with GreenSQL which talks about a really cool little application-level firewall that sits between your database-accessing code and MySQL. Really neat concept and although I've played with it a bit, I need to find some time to really dig into it as I …

For kicks, this Christmas I decided to give myself something "hackish" to do, and noticed that the local Staples was selling the MSI Wind with SUSE on it for $299CAD. This little beast (the U90, model number MS-N811) is nice... a little bit bigger than my Eeepc, so the keys …

This week's TechMail is Save time managing multiple systems with Parallel SSH, which discusses using pssh (or Parallel SSH) to do similar operations on multiple systems at the exact same time. Very useful little program indeed.

Decided to change the theme of the site as I upgraded to the latest WordPress. Also stuck a picture of my kitties on there (Tika, who's 16 (and grey), and Pepper, who's about 1.5 (and black, obviously)).

Some statistics, before I go on holidays until the end of the year.

Looking at bugfix updates, we've seen a steady increase since I've kept track (going back to 1999, although I think in 1999 it was only a half-year of doing updates).

• 1999: 13
• 2000: 24
• 2001: 25
• 2002 …

This week's TechMail is Monitor your server with Monitorix which discusses the Monitorix web package that provides a nice almost-real-time monitoring interface for your system that is accessible via the web.

On a side note, why is it that almost everytime I write these tips, some boob always asks "is …

Found this really cute/funny blog post today about programming languages being religions, or the comparison of programming languages to religions (i.e. C being Judaism, Visual Basic being Satanism, etc.). Quite funny.

Here's the link: If programming languages were religions....

This week's TechMail is Using pam_mount to automount filesystems at login, which essentially discusses using the pam_mount PAM module. A lot of people use it to mount encrypted partitions or loopback devices, which is great, but it can also be used to mount samba shares, NFS exports, etc. Very useful …

I've been saying it for a while, but never really put hard evidence to it. Our community has declined and by the numbers I'll produce, I'm going to say it declined a lot. I just wrote a quick shell script to parse the number of messages posted to each given …