Applied Trust has been producing The Barking Seal for our clients, supporters, and friends since 2003.
One of the greatest features of being consulting IT infrastructure engineers is that we have the opportunity to see, touch, and experience a wide variety of technologies and their successful (and sometimes, not so successful) application. We have the opportunity to solve problems that have never been solved before. And, every once in awhile, we make mistakes that provide good lessons. It's our hope that sharing some of these experiences will better our community as a whole. We hope you enjoy it!!
Feb 03, 2011
This morning, Ned, Paul, and I watched the live video stream from the Number Resource Organization (NRO) as the last 5 IPv4 blocks were allocated to regional registries (AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE). This is the dawn of the IPocalypse (as predicted) and will radically change our IT world from here forward. It...
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Jan 01, 2011
Happy New Year, folks! It's that time of year again, and as is tradition, it's a great time to preflect on coming year. First, though, don't forget my End of Year IT Checklist and resolve to schedule Annual Preventative Maintenance (for the record, no one wrote in for T-Shirts last year :cry: ).
Here are some...
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Nov 22, 2010
In April of 2010, Google officially announced that web site speed is an important ingredient for ranking search results. That's right: a slow web site might lower your search engine rankings! Most organizations understand that "organic" search results are a critical source of web traffic. Whether you are a local...
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Nov 09, 2010
All successful NASCAR drivers wear their five-point seat belts and helmets, even though they hope to rarely need them. Likewise, you can't be a successful system administrator without a healthy respect for backups. Don't want to bother with backups? Your career will come to a similar fate as a NASCAR driver without a...
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Oct 27, 2010
We hope to see your smiling faces at our Halloween and book-signing party tomorrow, October 28th, from 5:30-9:30 pm! Prepare for a delicious gourmet catered meal, tasty cocktails from Boulder's "Bitter Bar," and shoulder rubbing with your favorite AppliedTrust engineers. We're excited for you to join us to celebrate...
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Sep 23, 2010
Investigators have just finished analyzing a new worm called Stuxnet that was first detected in July, and the results are fascinating. First of all, it targeted four separate zero-day exploits, which is unheard of up to this point. Previous worms and virii, if they have been able to identify a zero-day exploit,...
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Sep 09, 2010
I've been hearing a lot about a web server called Nginx recently. It's frequently used for Ruby on Rails web applications, and it's supposed to be small, fast, and lightweight. Apache's httpd (I'll refer to this simply as Apache), on the other hand, is the de facto standard for web servers in the Linux world, and it...
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Aug 20, 2010
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...
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Aug 16, 2010
We've blogged in the past about Nagios, the open source monitoring software. Another great open source alternative is Cacti. Both Nagios and Cacti do a great job of graphing system resources. Like Nagios, Cacti is capable of monitoring your servers, as well as processor, memory, network, and disk utilization on your...
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Aug 13, 2010
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...
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