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The Barking Seal

• Centreon simplifies Nagios management

  20Aug
  Author: chris Categories: Infrastructure, Ramblings Comments: 0

  If you’ve been reading the Barking Seal for a while, you probably already know that we use Nagios to monitor a variety of things here at AppliedTrust.  It’s been a great platform for us, and we’ve put a lot of time and energy into writing custom plugins, integrating performance graphing tools, and generally making it work for us.  I’m a huge fan of Nagios because of its stability, openness (the documentation is truly excellent), and flexibility.  Historically though, Nagios has had two weak spots.  The first is auto-discovery, and the second is usability.  Unfortunately, the first issue is likely to be with us for quite some time — it seems like the process of going out over the network and automatically discovering and configuring servers and services is just too complex for the moment.  Or perhaps it just hasn’t been worthwhile for anyone to solve that problem yet… either way, I haven’t found a good solution as of now.  But amazingly, the last couple of years have seen a lot of development in the second area.  There are now several different open source projects that provide easy-to-use GUI interfaces for configuring Nagios!

  

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  Tags: centreon, monitoring, nagios

• An important year for Open Source Software

  13Aug
  Author: chris Categories: IT Management, Infrastructure, Ramblings Comments: 0

  Network World is reporting that 2010 will be the year of Open Source.  According to the article, half of the organizations surveyed are using Open Source Software in some capacity already, and the vast majority (71% in the US) said they are planning to greatly increase their use of OSS in the coming year.

  

  More interestingly, perhaps, many of the participants in the survey reported that they are switching to OSS for non-financial reasons such as:

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  Tags: 2010, open source software, OSS

• Now available: Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th edition

  20Jul
  Author: ben Categories: IT Management, Ramblings Comments: 0

  I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for this day:  UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th edition, is finally out! More than two years in the making, this edition covers six major operating systems in 1300 pages of fresh deliciousness. Plenty of new topics, including virtualization, green IT, scripting, and modern storage and security. Copies available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from Pearson Education.

  Writing a book of this magnitude is an intense process that I learned all about. The steps to produce the book, from inception to dead trees, include:

  • Brainstorm and agree on full topic list
  • Brainstorm and agree on contributing authors
  • Assign chapters to authors and contributors
  • Write chapter, distribute for review
  • Integrate reviewed comments from all other authors, distribute to external reviewers
  • Integrate external review comments
  • Repeat for all 32 chapters
  • Edit chapters
  • Index chapters individually
  • Engage artist (Lisa Haney) for new chapter cartoons, dividers and cover art
  • Engage outside organizations (IBM, Sun, HP) for test equipment
  • Regular (semi-weekly) meetings with authors, occasional meetings with publisher
  • Read and revise page proofs, searching for any obvious errors or inconsistencies
  • Deliver final manuscript to publisher and wait patiently

  One of the biggest challenges in producing this edition was the distributed collaboration effort. We Skyped regularly to stay in sync. Evi was around for much of the development, but we also corresponded with her while she was sailing in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We used a subversion repository for the Adobe FrameMaker source files to avoid stomping on each other’s work. I’d say this was met with mixed success; Frame’s binary files are hard to merge, despite Garth’s valiant efforts at a scripted solution.

  Special thanks to our named and unnamed contributors whose efforts are highly appreciated and certainly worthy of recognition. This is the best edition yet!

  
  Tags: linux, UNIX, USAH

• The Barking Seal Q3 2010 is Here and Filled with Goodies!

  09Jul
  Author: katief Categories: IT Management, Infrastructure, Ramblings Comments: 0

  The latest version of The Barking Seal is here , and it is filled with a variety of applicable and accessible treats.  Want some? Keep reading for a taste…

  Goodie #1: Learn why version control is important for all businesses across the board.

  Goodie #2: Get some assistance in deciding “Git or Subversion? Git or Subversion? Git…?”

  Goodie #3 (otherwise known as the cherry on top): Meet Jim Turpin, one of our fabulous network engineers, who embodies the concept of multi-discipline to a T both inside and outside of the office.

  Click here to read Q3 2010, and, as always, enjoy the treat!

  We’d love to hear from you, so please post your comments and questions here.

  
  Tags: applied trust, AppliedTrust, Git, open-source, Subversion, version, version-control, wordpress

• Information Security and Running, Long Lost Brothers?

  24Jun
  Author: terry Categories: IT Management, Ramblings, Security Comments: 0

  Saturday morning I was up and out the door early for a long run before the heat set in too much. As I was running I was thinking to myself, “Gosh, having a good exercise routine is kind of like having a good information security program.” I had lots of time to ponder this particular issue, as my iPod was unfortunately not charged and I had no one to talk to. Here are a few things I thought of that make exercise and security so alike.

  1) Set goals: Both in exercise and in information security, it is good to set goals. For example, before I can write up a training plan for myself, I need to know what race I’m training for, and what my target pace is. Similarly, before I can write up my information security plan, I need to know what information I need to protect and how much protection I need (is this credit card data, or is it records of what color paint my store sold last year?)

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  Tags: Ramblings, running, Security

• An IT lesson from the BP disaster

  04Jun
  Author: ned Categories: IT Management, Ramblings Comments: 1

  Sadly disasters happen, and when they do there are often valuable lessons to be learned. Unfortunately, poor IT infrastructure will limit the lessons the oil industry can learn from this incident.

  The Deepwater Horizon rig was equipped with a vessel management system (VMS), which records dozens of different metrics about the conditions on the rig and in the well. These VMS logs would contain valuable details about the blowout, much like an airplane “black box” is essential in understanding a plane crash.

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  Tags: Disaster Recovery, regulations

• AppliedTrust sponsors “Laps for Learning”

  08May
  Author: trent Categories: Ramblings Comments: 0

  Along with other notable members of the community such as Google, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Van Matre Construction, and many others, AppliedTrust is proud to sponsor this year’s “Laps for Learning” fund raiser at Douglass Elementary School.  This event raises funds for the education of elementary school children, helping to close the gap that has resulted from budget cuts at the State of Colorado and Boulder Valley School District level.

  

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  Tags: applied trust, community

• AppliedTrust featured on One Day, One Job!

  27Apr
  Author: ned Categories: Infrastructure, Ramblings, Recruiting Comments: 0

  I’m very excited to announce that AppliedTrust is being featured today on One Day, One Job, the popular site that highlights a different hiring employer every day.  Created by Willy Franzen, One Day, One Job is a unique resource for college students beginning their careers.  This is awesome exposure for our company and a great opportunity for us to find the perfect new Seal to join our team!

  As our regular readers know, AppliedTrust is looking for a great infrastructure engineer who wants to work in Boulder, Colorado. This role is a “Jack of all trades” within the broad field of Information Technology – they get to play with networks, servers, software, and security.  One ideal candidate for this job would be a graduating Computer Science or Engineering major who has experience with Windows and Linux system administration and doesn’t want to spend all day programming.  We would definitely also consider someone with more work experience.  If you are interested, or know of a good candidate, please check out our jobs page: http://www.appliedtrust.com/jobs

  
  Tags: applied trust, boulder, popular, Recruiting

• Social Engineering, Part Two

  01Apr
  Author: terry Categories: Ramblings, Security Comments: 1

  Who would have thought that just a few short days after I wrote a blog post about social engineering I would get called with a major social engineering scam? This one was at my house, not at work, but the same principles apply: never give out information you wouldn’t want a scammer to have, never agree to give them money (or passwords!), and verify their authenticity with a known trusted source.

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  Tags: information security, privacy, social engineering

• (In)Security of Removable Media

  24Mar
  Author: dan Categories: IT Management, Ramblings, Security Comments: 0

  

  Removable media: We all have them, maybe a few of them in different sizes. They’re invaluable for various administration tasks. Trying to get network drivers onto that new machine you’re re-installing? How about bringing one with you when you have to patch a few machines that aren’t on the domain? Or loading Knoppix LiveCD onto one for resetting administrator passwords? We love flash drives, but we also know they can be perfect vectors for malicious users. As with many types of technology, as their popularity increases the more lucrative it becomes to write virus code that targets them.

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  Tags: auto run, encryption, flash drive, usb media