Systems Management

[30-Apr-2014]
NRPE on OpenVMS:   Trials and tribulations of making NRPE work on OpenVMS. (396 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[26-Jan-2014]
Moving production:   After months of setup, we finally successfully relocated the main machines that support our ERP application to the new data centre today. (260 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[28-Aug-2013]
Bespoke dashboard:   A description of a little application and infrastructure dashboard I whipped up. (667 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[14-Jul-2013]
Last of the Alphas:   Today I shut down the last of the AlphaServers here. I worked here on contract to port to Itanium quite some time ago. Finally, five years later, the business has shut down the third party tool that forced them to keep an alpha in production. Finally. (46 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[03-May-2013]
Rack and stack, part 2:   I've been busy building this room. The majority of the equipment that will end up in the room is brand spanking new kit. All of this has now been racked and cabled, with the exception of some stuff that is lacking cables that the project manager overlooked and failed to order. Fortunately, most of that gear is not required for the first part of the relocation. The rest of the kit is old gear that will be physically relocated from the old room to the new room. This includes the OpenVMS CPUs. (287 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[06-Mar-2013]
Rack and stack, part 1:   We commenced the build on the new data centre yesterday. The backbone cabling is complete enough so that we were able to rack and stack the first of five cabinets, roll the new disk storage onto the floor, and power a few things up. (110 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[17-Dec-2012]
Cable management:   Recently, I talked about looking for a cable database, and ended up settling for RackTables. Since then, I've ended up becoming a very big fan of this Open Source freeware product. (167 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Jun-2012]
HC X01-00:   A new utility called HC (short for Header Count) has been added to the Downloads page. This utility gives you a count of the number of headers in use, and also gives you a count of the number of words that are free in INDEXF.SYS to store additional retrieval pointers. This gives you an idea of how many more times the index file can be extended before you hit the dreaded %SYSTEM-W-HEADERFULL error. (73 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

[16-Jun-2012]
ALMF X01-05:   I've just released a new version of ALMF, my licence analysis software. New features include updates for new values that can appear in the "Options:" field of a PAK, build support for IA64, and inclusion of IA64 objects and executable. You can download it from the Downloads page. (48 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[17-Mar-2012]
Unified monitoring system:   It's about time that we standardised on a centralised monitoring tool. Looks like we are going NimSoft. (107 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

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