Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

An article on Debian Administration got my attention today, since it listed something my colleague just showed to me the other day. Often, when debugging network issues, you call up some support guy and he wants to know which switch ports your NIC is using. Often, you're in the office and the server is in a distant data center. So getting to the cables is next impossible or very time-consuming at the very least. And often, documentation is not trusted because you are having problems to begin with. Using CDPR or the less brand-specific lldpd can become a god-sent tool. It allows you to monitor Cisco Discovery Protocol packets from the command line and tell the network admin exactly what he needs to know. :) Solaris admins have snoop to make use of. Linux guys can also use tcpdump: tcpdump -nn -v -i -s 1500 -c 1 ‘ether[20:2] == 0×2000’

Never seen so many IPMI messages flying around on the Dell Linux mailing list. It's an open standard to monitor information of basic health parameters of a server. Here is a very good from by someone from Dell that sums up the usage and support of IPMI under Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers. Basically, you only need ipmitool to issue power on/off the servers. If you want to do more, you need to install the IPMI packages (yum install OpenIPMI)

Gurtle is an IBugTraqProvider plugin for TortoiseSVN, dealing with the issue tracker of Google Project Hosting (aka Google Code). Gurtle just released a new version 0.4, and this time it comes with a nice installer so you don't have to build it yourself anymore. In case you don't know whether you need this tool, ask yourself two questions: * Are you using TortoiseSVN? * Are you hosting one or more projects on Google Project Hosting? If you answered both questions with yes, then you need Gurtle!