Tech Stuff

Tech

What is smart?

Details: Last Updated on Sunday, 10 March 2013 22:13; Written by MrB

Jim Carrey The long standing rule that "if they have to put it in the name, it probably isn't" seems to have spread into the technology world. In the tradition of great ironies like Quality Inn, Jim's Fine Foods, 1st Class Removals and Sydney Prestige Motors we now have Smart [Stuff]. More and more we refer to smart phones, smart cars, smart cameras and of course smart televisions. The term has been around for a while but I was recently lamenting just how bad a misnomer this actually is. Dictionaries imply smart is with "quick understanding and intelligence". What does my phone do that makes it smart? Most smart phones still need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it. So what would make a phone truly smart? Here's a list of some things I think would really make a phone smart. A starting point at least.

Experiments with Distributed Splunk

Details: Last Updated on Sunday, 03 March 2013 21:23; Written by MrB

Managing Splunk is a scenario that will be unique for every organisation/network. Here I have dropped some samples and lessons learnt for monitoring distributed servers internally and externally. The scenario is a small, local network running a couple of servers and remote, cloud based servers running websites and remote storage and I wanted to be able to monitor these effectively using Splunk. I used the sample apps *NIX 4.6 and Web Intelligence for testing.

Splunk diagram

Splunk for Sensor Monitoring

Details: Last Updated on Friday, 15 March 2013 06:29; Written by MrB

Splunk Logo

I run Dell Servers that utilise the Linux based Dell monitoring software. It is based on the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and provides things like fan speeds, temperature, chassis state, voltage readings etc. You'll see me talk about it elsewhere on this site. Whilst I've run it for a while I'd never really had a way of collating the data efficiently or automatically.