Dibbler's Net

A co-worker sent me a message letting me know that our Book was recently reviewed and that was posted on slashdot. Today being a long work day I hadn’t gotten to slashdot today but I did find time to read through the review. I felt it was fair and identified similar faults that Max and some of us felt were there and could be fixed if only there were more time (the story of any book project).

Please read the review and let me know what you think. If you have the book and have comments let me know. Also if you have the book and have had issues with Syngress’s web site for the digital content you can also find that at Nagios3Book.com.

D~

Found this through the Sun Blogs Award Winners.

Now reading through the winners there are some great submissions. One of these really grabbed my interest. Everyone seems to be working towards a LAMP, AMP, or other package of all you need. These packages normally give you Apache, Mysql, PHP, and some other tools in an easy to install and use setup. The one that I was drawn to was the one called Cayac (details here)

Cherokee - http://www.cherokee-project.com/
    Maybe I am out of touch, but I have not heard of cherokee before this. Overall I really like the idea that this project is working towards. There is always a better mouse trap, and in this case a different web server. We are all very very used to apache. We can do apache configs in our sleep and there is a module for apache to do everything but wash dishes. Cherokee looks like it’s taken that idea and focused it into a specific application for doing the generic work of serving web pages. Apache always works but sometimes it takes real time to get compiled just the way you need it. Also in this day and age anytime you can simplify management it makes support and deployment easier.

Now back to Cayac. Cayac is a nice package for Solaris that gives you Cherokee, MySQL, PHP 5, and phpMyAdmin all in one easy to use package. This makes your initial server setup for that quick application that much easier. I currently have a small quick setup project that needs a quick backend and simple setup. I plan to give this a try and see how it works. At the same time I am very happy to see that people are working to create and improve on those things we think of as staples in our environment. With competition comes better software for everyone. Congratulations to the Cayac team and thanks to Sun for making money available to opensource projects.

At the same time I must plug blogs.sun.com. There are specific Sun Blogs that I read all the time, but from the blogs site you can see all posts and quickly see what is new at Sun and what is hot based on how many entries you see for the same information.

Derrick

Here in the US monitoring your credit report is an important thing to do. Sometime last year I canceled whatever bad service I was using ans was planning on finding a new one.

So recently I thought about looking for a new credit monitoring service. After about 2 minutes of searching I stopped. Why ? Because then I thought about it and decided why pay for something that I will most likely get for free. Well yesterday I won the security lottery and got a letter about my free 12 months of credit monitoring. As the letter stated, an employee of a company I use, was caught selling personal data of customers. So while they promise that everyone is safe, and they can’t see how this would be bad, they are doing the PC thing and providing free service for all customers for 12 months.

In today’s world I have given up on commercial company’s that care about profit ever being able properly secure data. It’s just not their main priority so it never gets done right. Based on this I would guess that most people will win this lottery over the next few years. Keep this in mind before spending money on monitoring services.

D~