League of Professional System Administrators - Tools

counterweight forklift

doug — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:42:19 -0800

Short Description:
a smaller fork lift with no annoying spreaders so you can get right up to the rack

Home Page:
www.materialflow.com/Presto-Lift-Stackers.htm#CW25

Release Date:
Tue, 2007-01-02 10:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

* 1000 lb. capacity
* Lifting heights - 62" & 74"
* Forks adjust from 6 1/2" to 20" O.D. between the wheels
* 15 1/2" high fork backs
* Built-in 10 amp tapering battery charger
* 1" thick x 3" wide adjustable solid steel forks
* 13" & 15" load centers
* Lifting speed 5" per second
* Foot operated floor lock
* No outriggers
* Heavy-duty 12 volt deep cycle battery

Editorial: Most server lifts have either annoying struts in the front that prevent you from going right up to the rack or are very expensive ($6500+). This is a novel model that allows you to go right up to a rack. Imagine you have a Sun X4500 that you want to slide right into the rails. This unit would allow you to slide it right into the rails in contrast to most where the struts on the bottom will get in a the way. It comes in various capacities from 200lb to 1500lb. The center of gravity is close to the back of the forks, so to compensate for this get one with a higher capacity than the gear you are lifting to adjust the center of gravity out on the fork. A 600lb unit should easily be able to handle a 200lb X4500. In addition, the price is about 1/3 of the typical 'server branded lifts' you will find. On the downside, while it comes with a tray to put over the forks, it is not ESD coated. This can be compensated by adding a sheet of ESD material on top of the tray.

Falcon

doug — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:13:38 -0800

Short Description:
Falcon is a transactional storage engine, based on Netfrastructure database engine integrated into Mysql

Home Page:
forge.mysql.com/wiki/Falcon

Release Date:
Sat, 2006-11-04 10:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

The main goals of Falcon are to exploit large memory for more than just a bigger cache, to use threads and processors for data migration.

You can find a video-presentation on Falcon in the MySQL_Tutorials category.

What is Falcon

transactional MySQL storage engine
based on Netfrastructure database engine
engine has been in mission critical apps for more than 4 years
extended and integrated into MySQL

Falcon is NOT

an InnoDB clone
Firebird
a Firebird clone
a standalone database management system
Netfrastructure

IPVS

doug — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:26:09 -0800

Short Description:
PVS (IP Virtual Server) implements transport-layer load balancing inside the Linux kernel

Home Page:
www.linuxvirtualserver.org

Release Date:
Fri, 2008-11-28 12:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

IPVS (IP Virtual Server) implements transport-layer load balancing inside the Linux kernel, so called Layer-4 switching. IPVS running on a host acts as a load balancer at the front of a cluster of real servers, it can direct requests for TCP/UDP based services to the real servers, and makes services of the real servers to appear as a virtual service on a single IP address.

IPVS is commonly used for DNS load balancing as well as other things.

Stonewall Cables

doug — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:09:12 -0800

Short Description:
all kinds of cables built to length spec v.35 rs232 rs449 VGA

Home Page:
www.stonewallcable.com/

Release Date:
Sun, 1998-10-11 12:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Not a tool, per se, but a recommended site for getting built-to-length cables of various sorts and colors.

inkscape

doug — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:41:05 -0800

Short Description:
a Vector Graphics Editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator, that strives to be SVG Compliant, open source and extensible

Home Page:
www.inkscape.org

Release Date:
Sat, 2003-11-08 21:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

because it is SVG compatible, you can display it in firefox which makes it very cross-platform. It doesn't have nearly as many stencils as Visio, though.

OSSIM

doug — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:11:24 -0700

Short Description:
Open Source Security Information Management

Home Page:
www.ossim.com/

Release Date:
Sun, 2002-04-14 19:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

OSSIM stands for Open Source Security Information Management and compiles more than 15 open source security programs providing all the technology levels to cover the full Security Management cycle.

The OSSIM Sensors integrate powerful open source technology for:

Attack Detection using Snort IDS for real time detection
Vulnerability Scanning using Nessus Vulnerability Scanner
Network Monitoring and Profiling thanks to Ntop
Anomaly Detection with spade, RRD aberrant-behaviour, arpwatch, pads and p0f

keepalived

doug — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:55:05 -0700

Short Description:
A project to add a strong & robust keepalive facility to the Linux Virtual Server project

Home Page:
www.keepalived.org/

Release Date:
Sun, 2002-04-14 18:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

The main goal of the keepalived project is to add a strong & robust keepalive facility to the Linux Virtual Server project. This project is written in C with multilayer TCP/IP stack checks. Keepalived implements a framework based on three family checks : Layer3, Layer4 & Layer5/7. This framework gives the daemon the ability of checking a LVS server pool states. When one of the server of the LVS server pool is down, keepalived informs the linux kernel via a setsockopt call to remove this server entrie from the LVS topology. In addition keepalived implements an independent VRRPv2 stack to handle director failover. So in short keepalived is a userspace daemon for LVS cluster nodes healthchecks and LVS directors failover.

Vrrpd

doug — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:58:40 -0700

Short Description:
VRRPd is an implementation of Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol as specified in rfc2338

Home Page:
sourceforge.net/projects/vrrpd/

Release Date:
Fri, 2002-09-06 12:27

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

VRRP is the virtual router redundancy protocol. VRRP is an IETF WG product described at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/vrrp-charter.html. Excerpt:

A virtual router redundancy protocol is a protocol which allows several
routers on a multiaccess link to utilize the same virtual IP address.
One router will be elected as a master with the other routers acting as
backups in case of the failure of the master router. The primary
motivation to using a virtual router redundancy protocol is that host
systems may be configured (manually or via DHCP) with a single default
gateway, rather than running an active routing protocol. The protocol
should also support the ability to load share traffic when both routers
are up.

Heartbeat / Linux-HA

dlang — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:51:19 -0700

Short Description:
Failover and availability clustering for *nix systems

Home Page:
linux-ha.org

Release Date:
Wed, 1998-03-18 10:58

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Linux-HA aka Heartbeat is a modular package to control high-availability clustering. In spite of it's name it is not limited to Linux (although that is the primary platform), It has an automake based compile and has been used on *BSD, Solaris, and to some extent on AIX as well.

It can hearbeat in multiple ways (UDP broadcast, multicast, and unicast as well as over serial ports, although the serial port heartbeat has been accidently broken in some versions), and over multiple channels (up to 32 as of the time of writing)

It can support sub-second failover

It delays heartbeat checking on initial boot to allow switches time to get through their spanning tree detection timeouts.

DIBS

doug — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:47:00 -0700

Short Description:
Distributed Internet Backup System - backups should be cheap

Home Page:
http://web.mit.edu/~emin/www/source_code/dibs/index.html

Release Date:
Wed, 2006-11-08 12:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Since disk drives are cheap, backup should be cheap too. Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a virus, fire, flood, power surge, robbery, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers. The Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) is designed to implement this vision.

Note that DIBS is a backup system not a file sharing system like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, etc. In fact, DIBS encrypts all data transmissions so that the peers you trade files with can not access your data.

hobbit

doug — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:08:00 -0700

Short Description:
Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks

Home Page:
http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/docs/about.html

Release Date:
Sun, 2005-02-06 11:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks. It collects information about the health of your computers, the applications running on them, and the network connectivity between them. All of this information is presented in a set of simple, intuitive webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes in the status of your systems.

Hobbit is capable of monitoring a vast set of network services, e.g. mail-servers, web-servers (both plain HTTP and encrypted HTTPS), local server application logs, ressource utilisation and much more.

Intermapper

doug — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:12:54 -0700

Short Description:
a network mapping, analysis and discovery tool

Home Page:
dartware.com/network_monitoring_products/intermapper/index.html

Release Date:
Fri, 1997-09-12 11:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Intermapper has been around for a very long time. The reference site has only been in place for about a year, prior to that it has been in various places. Intermapper is one of the first tools for network discovery and traffic flow analysis using a GUI.

Intermapper includes a network map, various charting and graphing tools, real-time traffic views between network elements, display of errors, utilization, and more.

PBNJ

doug — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:58:59 -0700

Short Description:
compares two nmap scans and outputs the differences, does mapping, and does scanning

Home Page:
www.darknet.org.uk/2006/05/pbnj-114-released-diff-your-nmap-results/

Release Date:
Wed, 2006-05-24 10:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

PBNJ is a network tool that can be used to give an overview of an machine or multiple machines by identifying the details about the services running on them. PBNJ is different from other tools because it is based on using a scan from nmap parsed to amap. PBNJ parses the data from a scan and outputs to a CSV format file for each ip address scanned.

However, PBNJ is able to handle additional scans and parse the data while only looking for changes. For example, if a machine was updated with a newer version of OpenSSH than was running when the first scan was performed, the CSV file would contain the difference of the scan. Very useful for vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.

Ucarp

doug — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:49:52 -0700

Short Description:
UCARP allows a couple of hosts to share common virtual IP addresses in order to provide automatic failover

Home Page:
www.ucarp.org/project/ucarp

Release Date:
Sun, 2006-06-11 06:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

UCARP allows a couple of hosts to share common virtual IP addresses in order to provide automatic failover. It is a portable userland implementation of the secure and patent-free Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP, OpenBSD’s alternative to the patents-bloated VRRP).

Strong points of the CARP protocol are: very low overhead, cryptographically signed messages, interoperability between different operating systems and no need for any dedicated extra network link between redundant hosts.

AKCP Sensor Probe

doug — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:58:38 -0700

Short Description:
intelligent 2 port sensor device for monitoring environmental variations, power, physical threats and security.

Home Page:
www.akcp.com

Release Date:
Wed, 2004-08-11 17:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

The sensorProbe series are intelligent multiport sensor devices for monitoring environmental variations, power, physical threats and security.The SP2 is a completely embedded host with a proprietary Linux like Operating System, including TCP/IP stack, Web server, email and full SNMP functionality. SMS notifications can be sent via a 3rd party email-to-SMS gateway.

The sensorProbe2 comes with a new CPU that is 3 times higher speed compared to the earlier version of sensorProbe2, a faster network connection, new web interface similar to sensorProbe8 series of products including the subnet mask, remote syslog interface. It also includes a battery backed time of day clock. The new sensorProbe2 also has advance events filtering options. Now you can plug in our motion detector to the new sensorProbe2.