So I was sitting there watching “Nacho Libre” and I was noticing quite
a resemblence between Jack Black and my older brother who was sitting
three seats down. Near the end of the movie there was a shot of some
ancient ruins near the village and a curious thought entered my head:
We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants in just about every
way possible. Don’t roll your eyes at me, I know this topic is
overdiscussed, but I just wanted to pay some respect to the countless
people involved in creating not only the technical landscape I now find
myself, but the religious and social landscapes as well.
Sometimes we forget all of the intelligence, the inginuity and, most
importantly, the effort that has prepared the world around us for what
we have today. We should all stop every now and then and remember what
got us to the point we are. It is only in analyzing both the good and
the not-so-good of where we’ve been, that we can then use a little
inginuity of our own to advance into the future, and not just repeat
our past mistakes.

The beauty of the information age and of entrepreneurialism is that, if
you can’t find something that suits your needs and you can find
somebody to fund the project, build it yourself; you could even make
some money at it if it has enough general demand.
One of the things that I am finding difficult to find a good solution
for is an affordable and powerful configuration management package.
Now, I know that what I feel is affordable and what others may say is
affordable is something that could be debated back and forth. However,
my view is in the small business view where every dollar matters, so
you must keep this in mind when reading my entries. Of course, you must
also consider that every man-hour counts that much more to the overall
business as well, so each employee must be that much more careful about
their productivity.
Anyway, in my experience, I have only been exposed to one or two
systems that I would consider to fit my needs for wikipedia!”change
control”. Even these, however, only applied to parts of what I now view
as an entire data center change control system. The first application
that fit was a custom Lotus Notes database used to provide peer review
and change tracking. However, as far as I know, it didn’t have a direct
tie to an automated change tracking system to detect when the actual
configurations changed. The second application is Tripwire ™, which monitors various system files and parameters for changes and logs the differences. Another is NetPro
but I couldn’t seem to find any pricing structure AND it looks like
it’s only Windows based.
Now, I could probably implement Tripwire and it would do most of what I
wanted. However, and this may be a sign that I am too inventive for my
own good, the fact that the open source version has stagnated for years
now, and the “for purchase” version seems to be the only one I can find
that will even give me a price estimate. This just screams the need for
some competition. Who’s to say that I’m not the one that should give it
to them. I just need to get my design together and not try to design
the super, all-inclusive network management application that I’ve been
dreaming of for a few years now. I’ll just design each of the pieces
where needed and then put them all together

You know the saying “That guy can’t see the forest for the trees…”?
Well, I’ve got a related one that says “There’s too many trees in the
way for me to plant the forest!”
Okay, now that I’m done with that little outburst, I’ll go on to
explain. Sometimes, at least in technology positions, but I’m sure it
applies elsewhere, you get so busy fixing today’s problems that, even
if you’ve planned for tomorrow’s, you never quite got around to
avoiding them in the first place. Technology-wise, I can see this
applying in many small businesses that just don’t have the manpower in
many cases to implement the larger, more organized projects that will
keep the small, but pestering problems under control.
So how do you design for tomorrow whilst repairing today? It’s a
careful balancing act of putting up with smaller problems until you can
solve them with your longer-term project. However, you need to be
careful not to “put up” with too many of the smaller ones and have your
current architecture become neglected. Artful design combined with
careful project management and constructive “load sharing” can, in many
cases, keep this delicate balancing act in place and allow you to
achieve success.
Well, back to walking the tight rope while balancing multiple spinning
plates above my head… At least, I think they’re still spinning…

Much time and energy has been devoted to analysis of TCO on open source
vs. proprietary systems. I have, for a long time, been overly
optimistic about open source in general. I can attribute this to a very
conservative exploration of open source packages, usually limited to
widely used applications with deeply committed and knowledgeable
communities, such as those that support Apache, BIND DNS, Postfix and
Courier-IMAP on the server side and Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird
applications on the client side.
Recently, however, I have been working with projects that have exposed
me to projects with lesser depth and attention to usability acrossed
many environments. Trying to use the projects together in such a way
that they weren’t necessarily designed to work, but claim to be
compatible, has proven to be more of a task than the websites of each
project let on, do to the complexity and maturity of these projects.
For example, I have been investigating the realm of Java based portal
software as of late. What with the promises of
wikipedia!”JSR-168″{JSR-168} technology combined with an enterprise
level programming language in Java and all of it’s extensions, I was
hoping to develop a nice platform in which to architect a functional
intranet site, but to extend our legacy and seperated systems into the
portal and create a functional and easy to use customer extranet site
as well. What I have actually experienced, so far, is far from the
rosey scenario I originally naively imagined.
I went about things in what seemed to be a logical plan and did a quick
Google search on open source Java wikipedia:”portals”{portal} and found
a few that seemed to be highly regarded:
#1. Jetspeed-2 – Jetspeed-1
was also regarded well, but doesn’t have the JSR-168 capabilities, and
I had already reviewed it quite a few years ago.
#2. Exo Portal

#3. Liferay Portal
Note: JBoss seemed to be good as well, but infant in it’s release. It
also didn’t seem to have much history yet, and even though I like
technology, I wasn’t ready to be a bleeding edge adopter yet.
Before I begin with my experience, please note that I will be
spending more time on all of these platforms to achieve some sort of
satisfaction in my quest for a good portal.
I started with Jetspeed-2. I downloaded the prebuilt package and got it
running in a Tomcat web container after trying and failing to get it to
compile from source. I believe I could have gotten it to compile from
source eventually, but I was not in the mood to commit that much time
to the project just to get a decent example up and running so I could
do a good test trial. Regardless, I found the interface confusing at
first, with not many portlets included, so I continued on my way
recognizing that if I came back to Jetspeed as my choice, I would have
to write a few basic portlets as well as my customized ones.
I then moved onto Exo’s Portal. I can’t remember what the exact problem
was now, but I was just not able to get it to run the way I wanted it
to. It may have been my desire to run my Wildfire
wikipedia!”Jabber”{Jabber} instant messaging server. Regardless, I was
unable to get any of their versions to adequetly run to my
satisfaction.
Finally, I downloaded and tried to run the Liferay Portal. I was unable
to get it working in my version of JBoss or Tomcat, so I finally
resorted to downloading the bundled portal+JBoss suite (preconfigured).
When I did install it, I was unimpressed with the layout and with what
the general consensus around the project said it would do. I’m sure it
was there, I just did not have time to go looking much deeper than I
got to.
Now, on all of these, I didn’t have a good server with more than 512MB
of memory in it to spare, so I kept running out of memory in each of
the circumstances, which is something that concerned me as I was the
only user even configured to login. The sites also seemed quite slow,
though I admit that I hadn’t given them much of a chance to cache the
compiled JSP pages and servlets, that was almost expected with how
often I was restarting the web containers.
Note: Now, I’m going to go onto my general gripe about open source
architectures.
Maybe it’s just me trying to do things that don’t quite match the way
the developers environments were setup, but if a project says it’s
compatible with a certain environment, at very least it should have
basic instructions as to how to set it up, and they instructions should
be kept up to date. Well, the instructions are less important if it
just works, but instructions are what is generally lacking in most
software development projects. And, without structured support
scenarios as you generally find in proprietary projects, accurate
documentation becomes a significantly more important factor in the
success in any open source project.
Now, most people knowledgeable in the open source space realize that
the TCO (or Total Cost of Ownership) of any given project is affected
by the general level of knowledge required by system administrators. It
is, therefore, appropriate to assume that since the general population
of open source projects require a higher level of expertise to install
and maintain, the post-acquisition phase TCO of open source projects is
generally a little bit more expensive. However, this is generally
offset by the low entry cost to these projects and the ability to get
“more bang for your buck” by having access to the source code and being
able to alter the code and contribute those alterations back to the
community.

I think I have just rediscovered my “Madsen’s Rules of
Troubleshooting”… Every once in a while you should go back to your
basics and remember the first principles you learned in your career.
Anyway, the following are my basic troubleshooting tactics that I use
to efficiently determine solutions to the problems I face with
technology.
Rule #1: Check the cables… I would put a conservative estimate at
roughly 50% of the problems I face are related to some cable being
loose or disconnected.
Rule #2: Analyze what just changed… After rule #1, usually problems
are caused by a change in the environment.
Rule #3: Know your resources… Have a couple of good online
communities and a couple of good personal gurus you can go to in times
of need. Why spend 4 hours researching a problem if it’s likely that
one of your resources has the answer and can explain it to you in 5
minutes?
Rule #4: Let your troubleshooting brain rest every now and then… I
can’t count the number of times where I have spent 2 to 4 hours
troubleshooting some problem, only to get up and switch my brain focus
and have the answer come to me 5 minutes later.
I probably have more, but these are the ones that bring me back to my
core efficiencies. Please feel to suggest your own and we’ll come up
with a good set of “Network Goalie Rules of Troubleshooting.”

Well, since I’m on a Java kick as of late, I thought I’d try out one of
the more popular blogger’s running in Java. I have it online using Java
5 running on JBoss 4.0.4, but don’t get me started on whether or not
that’s an appropriate choice. I’ll go into more details in the future,
but let’s just say that I’m tired of trying application server after
application server only to find various major quirks in each of them.
They’re probably just related to my relative lack of experience in the
field of Java application servers, so I’m starting with one of the more
popular open source ones in JBoss’s Application Server.
As a network engineer and systems architect of close to 10 years, I
have recently realized that my job is much like that of a goalie on a
soccer or water polo team. I basically keep the network safe from being
scored on. Things like network failures, system outages,
misconfigurations and security breaches all are similar to the opposing
team scoring points against my employer (and my reputation ). So, I
decided to coin myself a new term (to my knowledge), a “Network
Goalie”. Who knows if it’ll really take off, but I think its cool, so
I’m going to use it.
Anyway, I’ll be posting reviews of projects here, usually open source
as that is my preference. Hopefully, in sharing my experiences with my
peers and exposing them to criticism and review, it will benefit the
entire community of network goalies like myself. There are many great
communities, but there are also many projects, both proprietary and
open source, that could benefit from a little bit more broad of a
vision.