One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous article, we looked at the first three. For part 2, we pick up where we left off and talk about principles...
In the engineering world, there’s no underestimating how hard it is to attract and retain top talent. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough. But you want to go one better than that. You want to attract talent that gives your organization a competitive edge. Once...
Now it's time to look at some of the server side configurations. The first step is to configure reverse proxy for the HTTP services. These services live on hosts that sit in the DMZ. A proxy is very simple to configure and allows a lot of flexibility to grow over time...
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...
These days, everything is moving to virtual. Virtual reality, virtual machines, and with Docker, virtual filesystems. Actually, Docker is not virtual, it's very real and is a very convenient way to package an entire filesystem and run it on any supported system. Why...
Many customers of SPK & Associates utilize the IBM/Rational suite of products. As IBM partners we are often asked to define, configure and deploy IBM tools and processes. SPK has provided Engineering Technology Services to Medical Device companies for over 12...
Have you noticed that Rational ClearQuest 7.0 now comes with a new default Eclipse client? Wonder what is happening to the old Windows client and what the difference between the two is? Then this post is for you! Download the attached PDF file below to get the...
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...
This week we will change things up a bit and have a look at an IBM/Rational ClearCase utility used for importing files into ClearCase source control. The utility command, clearfsimport, can be used to import any sort of file from a variety of other source control...
(Originally published in 2012, updated January 2022.) One of the common tasks for any system administrator is managing disk space on a server. A common question is how to increase disk space on a linux system. I won't go into a boring lecture on why managing disk...
Are you missing out on reaching 25% of the US population with your current software engineering project? Maybe the elderly, at 13% of the population, aren't part of your target market, or maybe it's the 12% of the US population who are disabled that you aren't...