Savannah W-ITS

VirtualBox Security Tools – testing or installing Live CD images as virtual machines
I noted that this seems to be a popular approach for VMWare images and decided to try a few tools out using VirtualBox.   As with any such ’security solution’ you should carefully evaluate the tools that you allow (or the OS builds that you [...]

Rhomobile bills itself as: Smartphone apps made easy.
AND:

Native applications with full device capabilities.e
Write once: instantly build for every device.
Native applications with full device capabilities: GPS, PIM, camera & more.
Single codebase. Build for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android.

Note – at the time of my testing (early December, 2009) I did not see support for all [...]

ROR (Ruby on Rails) is advertised as a data-centric development framework.  I did what I considered Data-dev back in the 1980’s using 4GLs:

you created a schema for your data (it was a bit more involved since data fields were ‘typed’)
you created views, reports, etc. for your data (just drop your fields onto screen forms, apply [...]

Your mileage should vary, but for me this device was both a poor/bad investment and a trouble-shooting time hog. I picked this up at Office Depot for $20 (regular price ~$50.)  While relatively simple to configure (via a web interface) the device seems to have performance issues (i.e. both dropping established wireless connections as well [...]

NOTE – I’m simply writing about what I find as I explore Ruby on Rails (ROR) – your mileage should vary but chances are you landed here due to a long tail search. Since I am not a Ruby or ROR expert it is quite possible for me to discover a solution or approach [...]

Some thoughts on Automating and standardizing how you might create new scripts (or other) tools
Seasoned Unix/Linux administrators will usually have some level of experience with automating various aspects of their duties including:  backups, deployments, monitoring, code management, system config management, build management, etc.  A number of us will also have simple tools that we use [...]

Bash – Changing from a proven, ubiquitous tool to a new one – need a reason?  In this case it’s time to explore Ruby – I’m not ready to change yet but I do want to see what Ruby might bring to the table.   I’m starting with a simple Ruby script (extracted from a [...]

Are you looking for monitoring resources and the latest monitoring plugins?  Did you write a useful plugin/tool that you are interested in sharing?  While using search engine queries can provide useful results here is a new resource that may decrease your hunt for Open Source solutions.  [I am guessing that commercial solutions may eventually be [...]

How many times have you read or heard that the fix for a non-working program/web solution is to change the file permissions to 666 (allow user & group & others global read+write) or 777 (global read+write+execute)?
TOO MANY!
Sorry, had to shout a bit.  It is distressing to read such suggestions/fixes – worse, the readers of such [...]

Things are great when they work! Some recent change (around 11/14/2008) to the Yum Extender (or a change to some underlying component) caused it to ‘break’ – since there are quite a few users of this (very nice) package problem reports surfaced quickly (probably within hours or even minutes of the problem…)

If you are not using the Yum Extender then you are missing a great, simple GUI tool for