Posts tagged Free
To Open Source or Not To Open Source?
Dec 8th
At my current day job, I work for a small technology start-up in La Jolla California. We offer web-based solutions for some of the nation’s top banks, and housing lenders. We also provide a database for “closing service” providers, so you can hire people like home inspectors, and exterminators at the best price when selling your house. It’s kind of like the “Orbitz” of the real estate closing market.
Any way, the company is only a few years old, and up until now we are running on a Microsoft BizSpark licensing plan. Now that we’re getting a little older though, and we are using more servers to produce our goods, we need a more robust licensing plan from Microsoft. I decided to go to one of my local VARs to work on some quotes, and what they came back with almost gave my boss a heart attack.
In this post I am strictly going to talk about Microsoft SQL Licensing. Just so you know though, the quote we got for SQL was on top of an already ridiculously high $107K three year quote for server licenses. Before I give you the quote I got for SQL, keep in mind this is only for two physical servers running SQL Enterprise.
So we got our quote from Microsoft, and it was roughly $183K for three years. Yes, for two servers it was almost $200,000! That is because at the time of this writing, they were quoting us based on the number of processors. One of the physicals servers has four processors, and the other has two. Bam! Bend us over for $200K!
On top of that, my VAR is telling me that next year Microsoft is switching to a per-core model of licensing. On my server with four procs, each proc has six cores! On the two proc box, each proc has four cores! Now my boss is starting to hyperventilate.
I’m sorry Microsoft, I know you’re just a mom and pop shop, and you’re just trying to make your way in this crazy world, but $200K is too much to pay for a database. The good news for us is that Microsoft SQL isn’t the only game in town. Good news for my company, I’m not afraid to think outside of the Microsoft box.
After getting that quote, the manager of our dev team and I started talking about moving to an Open Source database solution. First he said MySQL, but since they’re owned by Oracle now they have more strict licensing. I’m suggesting PostgreSQL.
Never heard of it? Here’s a description from their About page:
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
Best of all, PostgreSQL provides all of their Enterprise features absolutely free under a Liberal Open Source License! With something like this we can lower our overhead, and use those cost savings to improve our bottom line.
We will have to no doubt do some serious coding changes to make sure our data is compatible with PostgreSQL, but I think in the long run, the cost savings of switching to open source will outweigh the work to get there.
What do you think? Move to an open source database? Stick with Microsoft and suck up the cost? What’s your argument for or against? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
New Favorite Packet Analyzer in The Cloud
Dec 7th
Image via Wikipedia
I have been trying to track down a network issue I’ve been having at work for the last month and a half. It’s a real pain because it only happens once a week randomly, and it only lasts for 2 to 5 minutes. Since it’s so unpredictable, it’s nearly impossible to track down how, or why it’s happening.
Anyway, I decided to setup Wireshark on a laptop, plug it into a port on my switch with mirroring enabled, and collect some network traffic. The problem I have with Wireshark is that it doesn’t display information is a way that is easy for me to read.
A buddy of mine recommended uploading my capture files to an online analyzer called CloudShark. This thing is actually pretty cool, and really easy to use. Plus it has easy graphing options so you can get a better visual idea of all the 1’s and 0’s you’re looking at.
Another cool thing about CloudShark is that once you’re capture is uploaded, you can forward the URL of your capture files to some of your Network Engineer buddies to get their take on what’s going on in your network, and they don’t need to break out any analyzers of their own. Everything is displayed right in their browser!
Here is a link to an example capture file: http://www.cloudshark.org/captures/f62e1db77ba0
One thing I did notice is that you need to use CloudShark in Internet Explorer or Firefox. It doesn’t work so well in Chrome.
Know of any other good, free and easy to use packet analyzer tools? Are they cloud based like this one? Let us know what you like to use in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
One Line ASCII Art For IM/Twitter/Facebook Status Updates
Dec 6th
At my office we use Office Communicator to keep in touch with other users in the office. It’s nice to be able to send a quick chat to someone in the next room to save yourself a trip from having to get up and go talk to someone, or pick up the phone to call them. I am a huge advocate of chat and IM.
Well, not sure if my coworkers do this, but I like to use the status update area in Office Communicator to subtly say what I’m thinking about. Sometimes that also requires a little bit of ASCII art.
Do you do the same? Awesome! Here is a list of some simple one line ASCII art you can use to put in your messages:
Ascii Text Animals
Caterpillar ,/\,/\,/\,/\,/\,/\,o
Fish <`)))><
Fish Swimming ¸.·´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><(((º>
Happy Cat <(^.^)>
Kitty cat =^..^=
Koala @( * O * )@
Loch Ness monster _mmmP
Monkey @(‘_’)@
Mouse <:3 )~~~~
Rat (to the left) <^__)~
Rat (to the right) ~(__^>
Sheep °l°(,,,,);
Spider ///\oo/\\\
Ascii Objects
Crayon ())__CRAYON___)) >
Cup of coffee [_]3
Glasses -@-@-
Needle |==|iiii|>—–
Pie fight —=======[}
Rose 1 @-}--
Rose 2 @}}>-----
Rose 3 @)}---^-----
Rose 4 @->-->---
Rose 5 --------{---(@
Ascii Faces/People
Angel ^i^
Concerned (@_@)
Heart <3
In Love <*_*>
Looking at you ô¿ô
Very Happy ^_^
Very Happy 2 [^_^]
Sleeping (-.-)Zzz…
Sleeping Baby w/Pillow [{-_-}] ZZZzz zz z…
Whoa O_o
Miscellenous Ascii Art
Ascii Waves 1 *~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*
Ascii Waves 2 `’~,.,~’`'~,.,~’`'~,.,~’`'~,.,~’
Hearts w/text »-(¯`·.·´¯)->TEXT<-(¯`·.·´¯)-«
Robot d[ o_0 ]b
Text Embellishment 1 (¯`·._.·(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.· Your Text ·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)
Text Embellishment 2 ,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-(_Your_Text_)-,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸
Not only are these good for IM, but you’ll find that they work pretty good for Twitter and Facebook as well. Hell, you can use these for email signatures if you want. The sky’s the limit really.
Do you like to add a dash of ASCII to your every day? Let us know how you like to insert ASCII into your stuff in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
[Via Squidoo]
Get More Out of SNMP
Dec 2nd
When I started my current day job one of the things the IT department didn’t have was a decent monitoring system. They did have an external service that monitored the company websites, but nothing internally for monitoring servers for disk space, service, or CPU issues. To remedy that problem I decided to implement a really cool open source monitoring solution called Zenoss Core.
After setting up Zenoss, I learned about a really cool application for Windows servers that lets you get more our of monitoring using SNMP. With this applications, it means less to configure, and you can simply add servers to your monitoring solution with SNMP, and pretty much get everything you need to keep your network in top top shape!
It’s called SNMP Informant. Here are some of it’s features from their website:
- Full 64 bit support – Our "all-in-one" installer automatically detects the operating system version and installs
the correct components - Access Windows Performance data – Our Performance providers allow you to connect to any "out of the box" Windows Performance counter object using industry standard SNMP Object IDs (OIDs)!
- Access Custom Performance data – Our new "Custom" provider (part of SNMP Informant-Premium) allows you to collect data from any valid Windows performance counter. If you’ve got a performance counter instrumented application, and you can see the performance counters in PerfMon, then you can monitor it using SNMP Informant Premium!
- Run Remote scripts and collect data – If you’re using custom scripts to monitor something on a remote Windows server, you can now execute that script remotely using SNMP Informant, and collect the results of that script into an OID that YOU specify!
- Use your OWN Private Enterprise ID – You can customize SNMP Informant to respond to queries made against your OWN IANA Private Enterprise number!
- Read Remote Registry information – The new "Custom" provider also lets you specify what registry value to read!
- Collect WMI information – Our WMI providers allow you to connect to the Windows Management Instrumentation sub-system using SNMP! Stop/Start/Restart services! Reboot servers! Execute programs remotely!
- Monitor Exchange, SQL, Cluster, BizTalk, ISA and more, including Forefront, WSUS, Virtual Server, Citrix, the OS, and system hardware. Supported Operating Systems include Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, Server 2000, Server 2003 (incl. R2), AND Server 2008 (incl. R2).
- Extend your monitoring system’s ROI – If you use products like HP Network Node Manager, IpSwitch Whatsup, OpenNMS, Nagios/Cacti/MRTG/RRDttool, Zenosss, or other SNMP compliant management platforms, find out how SNMP Informant can add significant value to them in minimal time and with minimal effort!
- Stop/Start/Restart Services and Windows Server – Using SNMP, you can control your Windows server like never before!
- Can be used with SNMPv1, SNMPv2 and SNMPv3 – Many companies are starting to to take advantage of enhanced SNMPv3 security. SNMP Informant supports all 3 versions. Find out more here!
- SNMP Informant is priced attractively – We recognize that while functionality is important, value cannot be overlooked. That’s why we have priced SNMP Informant to help maximize your IT budget spending.
Their standard version is absolutely free, so you can start adding it to all of your Windows servers today, and start seeing better results with your monitoring solution.
What are you guys using for monitoring these days? Solarwinds? What’s Up? Microsoft Systems Center? OpManager? What’s your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
Cool Free Tool For Wardriving
Nov 29th
I think it was in 2006 I attended my first hacker convention in San Diego called Toorcon. It was pretty cool because the company I worked for at the time was a sponsor, so they paid for my admission in. I will never forget one of the guys that I saw there. Dude was bald with a douchy bluetooth headset on, a military M1 jacket with cammo pants, sunglasses indoors, combat boots, and of course a backpack with a friggin’ antenna coming out of the back that was easily six feet tall. The dude was a serious wardriver.
What is wardriving you ask? According to Wikipedia:
Wardriving is the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer, smartphone or PDA…
…Wardriving originated from wardialing, a technique popularized by a character played by Matthew Broderick in the film WarGames, and named after that film. Wardialing in this context refers to the practice of using a computer to dial many phone numbers in the hopes of finding an active modem.
Basically you drive around, and look for open wireless networks. Simple right?
Now I’m not saying you need to be like the guy at the hacker convention, but sometimes it’s nice to know where in town you can go to catch some free Internet in case you have to send an emergency Tweet, or update Facebook at the drop of the hat.
Well I found a cool tool that runs on Windows that will automatically try find and connect to open wireless networks when you’re in range, and will alert you to stop when it has found an open access point and is trying to connect.
The tool is called outSSIDer, and you can get it as a free download. From their page:
outSSIDer automatically attempts to connect to any open access point that comes within range as you walk down the streets hunting for WiFi.
When an attempt is made it alerts you with sound to stand still and wait. That way you don’t need to watch the screen while walking – you can even close the laptop lid to save battery!
The connection is then verified against payment hotspots and restricted networks by trying to fetch the Google website icon.
If it fails connecting or verifying, it alerts you with the sound again and resumes scanning.
This tool is light and easy to use, and certainly a good tool to have in your wardriving goody bag. Do you go wardriving ever? What tools do you like to use? Let us know in the comments!
-=El Di Pablo=-
Need A Free Web Host? We’ve Got The Hookup!
Nov 28th
A few years ago I came across a free web host provider, and have been using them ever since. Now, as some of you know, I have my own technology blog called Bauer-Power, and that is hosted on Blogger. I love Blogger because it’s easy and free. Plus it’s owned by Google, so that means that the servers that it’s running on are fairly rock solid. The problem with Blogger though is it’s not as versatile as other blogging platforms like WordPress.
For you guys looking to move over to WordPress like here at AskTheAdmin, you probably want to go with your own web host. What if you don’t have any cash yet? I mean it takes a few months for that Adsense revenue to kick in right? Well don’t fret, I have a solution for you. It’s a free webhost that supports PHP and MySQL. Guess what? That is exactly what WordPress runs on jack!
The provider is called 000Webhost, and here is a list of their free hosting features:
- 1500 MB of Disk Space, 100 GB Bandwidth
- Host your own domain
- cPanel Powered Hosting
- Over 500 website templates ready to download
- Easy to use website builder
- Free POP3 Email Box with Webmail access
- FTP and Web based File Manager
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.
- And many more…
I personally use them for my custom Ninja themed URL shortening service, and I also set up a test WordPress blog so you can see what I’m talking about. You can have unlimited websites under your account as well, so if you want to be the next Internet mogul, you can get started on 000Webhost.
Know of any other free web hosting providers? Are they better than 000Webhost? Why? Share with the rest of the class in the comments!
-=El Di Pablo=-
Disclosure Notice: Although 000Webhost is free for you, I will get $5 per sign up as long as your account stays active for 30 days. A guy has to pay the bills doesn’t he?
