Informed Networker Blog

We’ve discussed in previous posts the cloud-based infrastructure of Informed Networker and some of the details of our system architecture. In this post we will focus on another aspect of Informed Networker’s infrastructure - the client side. We’ll look at the various applications that make up a regular portion of my day.

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1.

I’m running Windows Vista SP1 on both my desktop and laptop. As a Network Engineer I decided to switch to Vista nearly as soon as it was released. I knew eventually I would be responsible for migrating users to Vista and it seemed wise to dogfood Vista to myself first. The first few months were difficult - and until SP1 was released I couldn’t recommend Vista. But now I’m fairly happy with the OS and surprised at all the continued mumbling (perhaps sometime soon I’ll respond to some of this grumbling).

MP Software’s phpDesigner 2008.

I looked at a wide variety of PHP IDE’s before settling on MP Software’s phpDesigner. I chose MP Software for a number of reasons - featureset, price, and usability. phpDesigner is intuitive. My only complaint currently is the inability to collapse portions of code (something which the author acknowledges but at this time doesn’t intend to rectify).

TortoiseSVN.

A great little open source/free subversion client. It integrates into Windows Explorer and makes utilizing Subversion intuitive. For those who aren’t familiar with Subversion, it is for source control. It allows one to keep multiple versions of files, move back to old versions of files, leave notes on enhancements, merge code, etc. Another bonus with TortoiseSVN is that it integrates seamlessly with phpDesigner.

webYog’s SQLyog Enterprise.

A great application that handles a wide variety of SQL management tasks. Besides basic query management it includes the ability to create and schedule regular sql backups and the ability to synchronize data and schemas between databases (e.g. a development and live environment). Not free, but not too expensive either.

FileZilla.

An open source FTP client developed by Tim Kosse and faithfully maintained over a number of years. An FTP client allows one to upload/download files to/from a remote server.

Pidgin.

Pidgin is an open source (notice a theme?) instant messaging client. It allows one to talk on a number of different networks all at once - e.g. AOL, Yahoo, and Google. This makes it a must have when you are working in a distributed workforce environment.

PuTTY.

This little nifty application is only at version 0.60 but reflects the open source culture of conservative versioning. If it was a commercial application it would be in its second or third version. PuTTY includes several separate applications including an SSH/Telnet client (allowing one to remotely connect to a server as if at the command-line), a SCP/SFTP client, etc.

Mozilla Thunderbird.

While I once used Pegasus, I now use Mozilla Thunderbird - and have for several years. Thunderbird is the lesser-known sibling of Mozilla Firefox. Thunderbird is an email client - and once you install the Lightning add-on it also becomes a calendaring application. Yeah, I could use a web-based GUI, but I prefer the desktop client. I have thousands of emails categorized and sub-categorized with hundreds of new emails arriving every day (thanks master spammers for the steady flow of garbage…don’t worry, I pass all your great viagra ads and don’t i want to meet you in person ads immediately off to Knujon).

WinMerge.

Merging code is a constant task. One of the ways I keep updated on what the developers are doing is by merging the code they give me with my existing codebase (they also post it to the svn). This allows me to watch how the code changes. Its also useful when the underlying open source applications are upgraded and I have to merge the now somewhat differentiated code together. WinMerge is a great application that allows one to quickly see the differences between two files - or two directories.

OpenOffice.org and Google Docs.

I use the software application OpenOffice.org as an office suite instead of Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and database application - and can save in Microsoft’s formats. What else could I need? Docs is nice when doing light editing. I’d love to see some better synchronization tools between the two (there are some, just none I’ve been impressed by).

Well, thats a long enough list already - but for honorable mention I’ll just note Opera, Paint.NET, Safari, Jungle Disk, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Notepad++, RescueTime, Skype, TUGZip, FeedReader, and VMWare Server.

Probably few noticed but we suffered some downtime, mainly yesterday early a.m. from around 12:30 - 8:30. Our main WWW server took a complete tank. Fortunately, we were able to get it back up and running relatively quickly, but as with any business - this isn’t something we want happening on a regular basis. The last thing we need is a reputation like Twitter’s for downtime (though we would love their popularity). We figured others might enjoy how we are working to rectify this problem.

1. In our long-term plan is full system redundancy. Every system will be in a cluster and the failure of any single node will have no visible effect on the system.

2. We have an account with mon.itor.us. Its a free ping service with a nice dashboard (you should take a look, they also let us compare our response times to that of competitors). We also purchased an SMS package from them. This means morning, noon, or night (24×7x365) staff will now receive text messages any time the website goes down. This will allow rapid and effective response to issues (though perhaps to the detriment of our engineer’s sleep cycle).

3. We have an account with ScoutApp. ScoutApp allows us to monitor and receive notifications relating to CPU, memory, and disk utilization - not to mention the ability to monitor slow MySQL queries.

Some may wonder why we have chosen to utilize hosted solutions to provide our systems monitoring rather than an on-site solution. It’s SaaS baby! Okay, I just felt like saying that. But as most of you probably already know, SaaS stands for Software as a Service and has significant advantages over on-site hosting in many situations. In fact, we have built our entire service on a combination of SaaS and cloud-based technologies.

Because we haven’t deployed a traditional monitoring solution like AdventNet’s OpManager or Quest’s Big Brother we are able to reduce our surface attack area significantly (OpManager for example runs its own instance of Apache and MySQL), we’ve also decreased in-house system requirements. While we could theoretically have installed a monitoring solution on a web or database server we like (and believe in) separating roles onto separate servers (whether physical or virtual) - this would have required an additional server acquisition, setup, and management cost. Finally, we’ve detached our monitoring solution from our in-house network. What happens when your in-house network crashes entirely (e.g. someone digs up both of your fiber connections at the same exact moment?)? You don’t receive notifications because your monitoring application is down as well.

Using out-sourced systems monitoring provides thus three significant advantages: (a) increased security, (b) decreased in-house equipment and management, and (c) better monitoring of major system issues.

I’m mainly a Windows Network Engineer personally and while I’ve dabbled with Linux in the past, I’ve never really embraced it. With Informed Networker being written with a LAMP stack in mind it seemed time for me to take the leap and start working with Linux.

I have an old 700 Mhz machine with 768 MB of RAM with Windows 2000 installed. I downloaded Wubi and installed Ubuntu 7.04. Once this was completed I enabled Remote Desktop and installed TightVNC on my Windows Vista laptop - then I remoted in. Once in I began by ensuring all the software was updated and then by installing the rest of the LAMP stack - Apache, MySQL, and PHP. In addition I added Webmin for configuration management and phpMyAdmin for handling the MySQL databases. Now its late and I need to get some sleep, so hopefully tomorrow I will begin actually installing Pligg in this test environment.

There are a lot of software applications on my computer, but I decided to pick ten applications that would be of interest to the IT Professional community. Hope you find them as useful as I do:

1. FileZilla - An open source FTP client that has been around forever. Recently released its 3.0 version. Cross-platform, easy to use, and free. There is also a sibling product that acts as a FTP server for those interested in hosting their own FTP.
2. Paint.NET - Originally a simple replacement for Microsoft’s built-in Paint application, which remains nearly as simple as it was when first designed so many years ago, it has progressed to the point where it can replace many commercial graphics and image editing applications for the less artistically talented. Also open source and free.
3. Wireshark - Formerly known as Ethereal, it is a sweet packet capture and analysis application that also happens to be free and open source. If you want to understand how TCP/IP protocols work, here is the place to start. Very useful when troubleshooting network performance and stability issues.
4. Wakoopa - A very little web 2.0 application. Download it and run it. It keeps track of the applications you use, allowing you to see just how much time you are spending in your various applications. Its free, not open source.
5. VMWare Server - Allows you to run other OS’es on your local machine. Great if you want to try out (insert name of OS here) on your current machine but don’t want to reformat or do a dual boot.
6. OpenOffice.Org - A free and open source office suite that includes word processing, presentations, spreadsheet, database, and drawing software. A real competitor to Microsoft Office.
7. WinDirStat - Couldn’t live without this simple application that graphically maps the utilization of your hard drive. Allows you to quickly find those files that are hogging up all your space.
8. Auslogics Disk Defrag - While there are many defragmenters on the market, this is a free and a new one. It does a nice job, is fast, and is regularly updated.
9. CrossLoop - A nice GUI overlayed over the excellent open source VNC software. Allows you to get remote access over (name of family member/friend)’s computer without jumping through hoops or trying to translate technospeak into real english.
10. FeedReader - A free RSS reader. If you don’t utilize RSS feeds - you should! Most popular sites now have RSS feeds which notify you when new content has arrived. Maximize your productivity.
11. Firefox - The web browser that single-handedly challenged Microsoft’s dominance of the internet browser market, rowsing the behemoth from its sleep to put forth another spawn - Internet Explorer 7. Firefox is an innovative, open source, and free browser based on the old Netscape browser, but now nearly entirely new. It features a number of revolutionary features including tabbed browsing, a rabidly popular extension infrastructure, and an avid fan base.
12. Thunderbird - Lesser-known but still high quality is Firefox’s little sibling, Thunderbird. Thunderbird is an email client that offers a solid communications experience. It is a bit weak in the anti-spam department and can’t yet compete head-on with the full features of Microsoft Outlook in the arena of contact and calendar management, but its a great and free alternative for those who are looking to keep it cheap.
13. Skype - Revolutionizing the way we communicate, Skype brings VoIP to the masses. Bought out by eBay one can have confidence that the company will be around for years into the future. Skype allows you to make unlimited nationwide calls for less than $100 year. Watch those old copper phone lines fade away and experience the great features of VoIP.
14. Win32Pad - A very small notepad replacement. Its not meant to be a full-featured IDE that can write code in five minutes but it is an essential application if you are still using NotePad. Amongst its most significant features are line numbering, the ability to spawn new instances, minimize to tray, and bookmarking capabilities.
15. 4t Tray Minimizer Free - If you are like me you can fill up your taskbar in no time at all. Its not that you are actually utilizing all the applications all the time - but you don’t want to close them out either, as you might just need that email app, web browser, or word processor in a minute or two. For applications that don’t include the ability to minimize as an icon in your systray there is TrayIt.
16. AIM Pro - AOL can’t seem to do anything right these days - except for AIM Pro. AIM Pro offers business professionals advanced IM communications for free. Need secure communications? No problem. Records of your chats? On top of it. Multiple guests in a simple chat room on the fly? Got it. The ability to remote into another computer using WebEx for free? Yup.
17. Safari - Apple decided to make their browser cross-platform. While I still prefer Firefox, Safari is a good option especially if you want to test what your website is going to look like on a Mac in Safari.
18. Opera - Another minority browser. Again, useful for performing testing of how your website displays in different browsers. An innovative application in its own right which used to cost, but now is free. While it has many excellent features it seems unable to market itself in such a way as distracts the audience currently enamored with Firefox.