Windows Live Writer

Today Microsoft released a beta of a free blog writing program, Windows Live Writer. It appears to be similar in features to w.blogger and ecto, but without Parallels still, I cannot test it tonight. The one thing that WLW touts is the ability to add new categories to Wordpress blogs, something that I have not found in other blog writing programs. In any case, Microsoft did open up an SDK for the program so maybe this will be a win for Microsoft in the Web 2.0 word.

One other thing that intrigues me with this is the possibility of using it as a support model for University departmental web sites. Instead of tinkering with licenses for Macromedia Contribute, the University might be able to use this and some sort of content management software for departments to keep up their site. Who knows, but in any case it is an interesting development for blogs tonight.

Zabbix - a free monitoring tool

Zabbix is (free of cost) software that monitors numerous parameters of a network and the servers on that network. Zabbix is a useful tool for monitoring the health and integrity of servers. A flexible notification mechanism allows users to configure e-mail based alerts for virtually any event, allowing fast reaction to server problems. All monitored parameters are stored in a database. Zabbix offers excellent reporting and data visualisation features based on the stored data, making Zabbix useful for capacity planning. Zabbix supports both polling and trapping. All Zabbix reports and statistics, as well as configuration parameters, are accessed through a web-based frontend. The web-based front end means that the health of your servers can be assessed from any location.Properly configured, Zabbix can play an important role in monitoring IT infrastructure for companies with even hundreds of servers to monitor.

This guide contains all the necessary information for installing and understanding the architectural layout of the implementation. It was written with the assumption that you understand how to use Webmin and have a basic understanding of Linux Mandrake. This includes installing Linux Mandrake and RPM packages, editing files, making directories, compiling software and understanding general Unix commands. This guide doesn’t explain how to use or configure Zabbix, but information on where to obtain this information can be found in the "Additional information" section.

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