the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Posts tagged work
My New Best Friend – Introducing Spiceworks
May 17th
So for the last few months I’ve been looking for ways to improve our ability to monitor our network (both the Servers and Desktops), we already have external monitors for the really important, business critical things like our website and email but for the day to day tracking of our desktops and less important servers we dont really have anything apart from me sticking my head in the server room every morning to check for flashing red lights! I’ve also been motivated to find a solution for tracking our desktop PC’s too after seeing one of my colleagues spend (literally), a whole week building a giant Excel spreadsheet to track both hardware and software on all our Desktop PC’s. While I am quite happy with Cacti and its ability to graph pretty much anything, it isn’t really designed for much more than this and so isn’t much use for tracking all the things I want to.
This is where Spiceworks comes in, it is a free (but ad supported), program that is designed for SMB’s to monitor and track their desktop and server infrastructure. Unlike almost every other program I have tried so far it is actually designed to be simple to use, no messing around trying to decipher config files or setup SNMP polling or anything like that, simply download the one .exe and install it on a spare Windows server (or desktop), the installer will install a copy of Apache and Ruby on Rails and make all the needed config changes, all you need to do is make sure that nothing else is running on the port you choose (such as another webserver like IIS or Apache).
Third time lucky
Jan 25th
Well, its been a few months since my old blog died when I cancelled the hosting and since I had to renew my domain this month I decided to go crazy and setup some new hosting and give this blogging thing another go.
Since I last posted anything i’ve started a new job, im now the systems administrator for www.interregs.com and www.lsi.edu. I get to play around with and manage all their servers (currently just 2 racks full but a third may arrive later this year when we deploy Exchange 2010 and WSS2010). All this is a great change of pace and a whole lot more fun than my previous job at www.cobweb.com, which, while teaching me a lot was a little too busy for my liking (try talking on the phone for 5-6 hours a day, 5 days a week!). While I do sometimes miss the chaos and banter of a busy office its certainly a lot nicer being my own master and I can finally start on my career path to becoming a BOFH 
So, as I trundle through the next few months/years(!?!), I’l be using this blog to post anything I find thats useful while I rollout our Windows 7 deployment, new Exchange 2010 server and then eventually a Sharepoint 2010 server aswell.
