greg haygood

I may have finally found the perfect monitor solution for my network: Zenoss. I have been using Nagios + Cacti + Smokeping for quite a while now. It works, but it's not integrated, and for many services, I'm running 2-3 checks. Running those every 5-10 minutes generates a tremendous amount of traffic (during the last 2 weeks, the monitor station has caused 20% of all traffic crossing the primary firewall!). The closest all-in-one I'd found previously was OpenNMS, which is so difficult to really understand and manage well, and so didn't fit my needs.

I've started helping out on Qunu. It's a great little service that matches experts with help-seekers, using IM for real-time chat instead of email, providing a much quicker and better solution to their problems than Usenet or Googling could. I just added their bot to my chat client (kopete, if you're curious), and can make myself available whenever I have downtime or a slow period. If someone needs help in an area that matches something in my profile, then Qunu asks if I want to help.

The sound on my laptop has always been muted after a suspend/resume cycle. I had hope Edgy would resolve that, but it didn't. The various posts (1, 2) I could find on the issue suggested a combination of toggling KDE's KMix setting "Restore volumes on login" (which would logically only apply on startup, anyway) and the alsa-utils save/restore.