Elise Bauer, author of Learning Movable Type has published the PCL. (Do you remember the NT4.0 HCL? If it wasn't there, it wasn't going to work with NT.) I found this more recent and relevant document while doing some last minute research before doing upgrades this week. If you are upgrading your MT blog, you probably want to take a quick look to see if your favorite plug-ins are on the list.
One thing that is key to make a web services business successful is to have the service up all the time. For almost as many years as I have run my web hosting business, I have relied on Big Sister to monitor my network performance and some specific metrics and to notify me of problems when they arise. I recently switched to the Trustix Linux Sunchild distribution, and I had problems getting Big Sister setup there. On top of Trustix, I run hosting management software called H-Shpere which has some components with which I am not as familiar as I would like.
As I worked through the installation, I ran into and solved a couple of different problems which mostly related to the constraints I mentioned above. In the rest of this post I will provide a series of instructions that a systems administrator can use as a starting point to setup Big Sister, more or less out-of-the-box, to monitor their own cluster of H-Sphere servers. Once you have finished these instructions, you will still want to learn much more about monitoring so you can adjust and refine the scenario described here to meet your own needs.
Big Sister Screen monitor home
To verify the information for this post, I did another install on a fresh Trustix "server", which was setup using the "minimal" option. If you are interested, I was able to make it run on a Pentium or Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM. Maybe if you monitor a whole bunch of servers then you will need to get a bigger display server; I'm not there yet.
Thanks to Thomas Aeby for writing Big Sister and also to Joerg Fritsch for managing the Big Sister documentation project which had some bits which were helpful in completing my setup and this post.
You should understand the steps I describe before wildly following my instructions because if some of your training wheels fall off in the process, I assume no responsibility for any slips or falls you may take. (On the other hand, if you impress your boss, you can take the credit too!)
At the company I run, we develop web sites for some of our customers. And even though we do, you'll notice that I did not write: We design web sites. I haven't always been very clear about that difference when I discuss what I do, because I don't think everyone will understand the fine distinction I am making. And I also don't want us to be lumped in with the other firms who name themselves web designers.
It turns out I may have been wrong about the words I have been avoiding. Adam Greenfield has published a great essay on this topic over at A List Apart, which is always a good read. He draws a clear distinction between the disciplines of design and style. I really enjoyed the essay, and I think its worth 15 minutes of your time to read it.
The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design)
Let me see if I can make my point a little more concretely, so that it doesn't begin to degenerate into mere bitter-old-fart acidity: I believe that success in design strongly implies a satisfying the requirements of a user. This is what distinguishes it from art or self-expression, and in the West, anyway, we went through several centuries of refinement to arrive at this understanding.
So it turns out, I do design and development but I am not exactly what you would call a stylist. I guess some people might even say I have no style, but I don't think that's true.
Almost a year ago, I said Dell should start blogging.
If I was King of Dell for a day, I would make all the executives start blogs to communicate with real users.
And they have. The blog is called ono2one and the tag-line is "Direct Conversations with Dell". So far the content is OK, they have mentioned at least one problem and said they are working on it. I think the "Rules of Engagement" anticipates a bit too much of a confrontational conversation. The whole thing struck me as too public-relations and corporate.
For instance, they mention the new gaming platform in a recent post. (Which I note seems to be branded Dell, although I NEVER remember seeing anything like that before they bought AlienWare, but they say it is unrelated.) Unfortunately its all about the supply chain and upcoming availability, and how the urban legends just aren't true. I don't do video stuff, so I can't comment on the the third item which was about MP4 files. They should really have some wannbe-uber gamer like myself paid to play and blog about the latest cool toys from Dell. If anyone at Dell is reading this, you can contact me by clicking the javascript contact thingy in the page navigation at the top.
I no longer want to even contemplate the difficulty of being King, but if they asked me to consult, I would tell them to loosen up a little and have some fun.