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