Traditionally, using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to connect to a remote site has been a technical – and oftentimes troublesome – requirement. With the growing popularity of using “remote programmers”, I see requests for purchasing Cisco routers and Windows servers. Tiny businesses often expect VPN setup to be daunting and assume that you need to buy expensive hardware, complicated software, and an IT manager.
From Out-of-Office to VPN in 15 Minutes
By Ed Chung | Published October 14th, 2011How to Monitor Your APC UPS Units – Part 1
By Brad Tinder | Published September 29th, 2011Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering 
simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least, uninterruptible power supplies otherwise known as UPS. It’s a given that you will probably have monitoring setup on your servers, network equipment and even your network attached storage, but what about the UPS units? These definitely can be monitored, but it requires a bit of setup. In this 2 part post series, I’ll be detailing how SPK and Associates does monitoring of APC-based UPS units as part of our infrastructure support services.
What Happened to Google Wave? A Look at Collaboration Alternatives
By Ed Chung | Published September 15th, 2011Two years ago, Google announced a new product: Wave. Their (and I use the term loosely, since all new Google products seem to come from the same giant, faceless Googleplex) original goal was to unify messaging – have you thought about how many tools you use to communicate and coordinate?
How to Backup an ESXi Server with GhettoVCB
By Andrew McLeod | Published September 12th, 2011
VMWare is wonderful for getting full utilization of scarce resource. However, if you’re on a limited budget, affording ESX clustered hosts for all needs is overkill. Sometimes a free ESXi server is enough.
Leveraging Netapp’s Deduplication Feature
By Mike Solinap | Published September 2nd, 2011
We recently obtained the necessary licenses required to enable one of our clients’ FAS2050 filers for deduplication. Currently, deduplication is offered by Netapp for free. You simply need to get in touch with your reseller and request both ASIS licenses and Nearstore licenses. The Nearstore license for FAS should also be available at no cost as well. Once Netapp has approved the request, the new license codes should be available on now.netapp.com.
How to Setup a Local Redhat 5 Update Repository
By Brad Tinder | Published September 1st, 2011
In a previous post, my colleague Mike described how to setup a Redhat 4 (RHEL4) local update repository. With Redhat 5 (RHEL5), the procedure to setup a local repository has changed somewhat. At SPK, we often will setup a local update repository for Redhat or Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux servers as part of our infrastructure management service. Setting up a local repository reduces overall patching time and WAN bandwidth significantly which means less downtime and happy users.
Using Unix and Windows Groups with ClearCase
By Ron Ross | Published August 23rd, 2011
In this week’s blog entry, we want to have a look at how Unix and Windows groups work together in a mixed Unix/Windows environment. This topic can sometimes be a bit confusing, and here we hope to contribute to clarifying the subject. Many companies and development teams have a mixed development environment, often using a Unix/Linux VOB server in combination with both Unix/Linux and Windows client machines. Getting this all to work is an important and practical topic.
WebInject Scripting to Perform Advanced Monitoring
By Andrew McLeod | Published August 19th, 2011
Nagios is a wonderful tool. However, there are limits to what you can do with it directly. As my colleague Brad discussed in a recent blog post, using NRPE is a powerful tool for Windows. For complicated web checks that require multi-step operation, we use: WebInject.
How to setup basic Windows monitoring with Nagios
By Brad Tinder | Published August 4th, 2011
In my previous blog post, I talked about how to setup NSClient++ for Windows which is very solid Nagios NRPE client. In this post, I’ll describe how to setup some basic checks for your Windows server within Nagios and hopefully give you some ideas on what you should be monitoring on your Windows servers.
Ship Maintenance: Descaling is Critical for Effective Heat Transfer
By Goodway Blogging Team | Published August 4th, 2011
Water scale on any heat transfer surface reduces the effectiveness of that heat transfer. In turn, this results in reduced equipment efficiency while increasing energy consumption, increasing costs and even increasing plant operational downtime. Often this “buildup” problem is either ignored or relegated to “fixing it at the last minute or upon mechanical failure” status [...]
Contact Info
Backbone Media, Inc.
Read Generation
69 Milk Street
Suite 101
Westborough, MA 01581
phone: 508-366-2100
Read Generation
69 Milk Street
Suite 101
Westborough, MA 01581
phone: 508-366-2100