Karim Vaes

Introduction
“The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. This model has become the basis for subsequent models of group development and team dynamics and a management theory frequently used to describe the behavior of existing teams. It has also taken a firm hold in the field of experiential education since in many outdoor education centers team building and leadership development are key goals.”

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Today I stumbled upon an article mentioning the existence of BitNami. It was an unknown product to me, but I think it has some potential. Imagine the power of Lampp combined with your favorite cms/wiki/…

The key features where they prize themselves with:

• Easy to install
  In just a few clicks, you can have your favorite open source applications up and running.
• Multiplatform
  Bitnami Stacks are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
• Integrated
  By the time you click ‘finish’, the software will be integrated, configured and ready to go.
• Independent
  Bitnami Stacks won’t interfere with any software already installed on your system.
• Run Natively
  The stacks install directly on your system – no virtual machine required.
• Open Source
  All Bitnami Stacks are free to download and use under the terms of the Apache License 2.0

For a full list, check out the their stacks page.

Preface
Capturing load balancer traffic flows is not something that is elegantly handled by most commercial applications. Several can’t even gather statistics on the F5 appliances because they lack the ability to index mibs. With the help of some excellent templates found on the Cacti forums, you will be able to successfully graph my virtual servers, interfaces, and memory. This article will walk you through the steps required to install & configure Cacti to begin monitoring the F5 LTM Global Traffic, Virtual Server Traffic, Interface Traffic & Memory.

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OWA Most Popular has been updated.

From now on, the options can be set from the widget panel. So “bye bye” to manually adjusting the script…

The speculations

• Integration with Java : At the moment Oracle is seen as the “prefered database partner” for J2EE applications. This might be the start of a business move to get MySQL into this position.
• Marketing / Image : MySQL is a popular database, and has it’s respect within the OSS community, so it’s a good for the PR. (Yet expensive if that would be the only side…)
• Wide support : Whilst SUN was already working with PostgreSQL, this might allow them to give their customers the choice between three database systems (Oracle, PostgreSQL & Mysql) with their products.
• Competititors : Will RedHat & IBM focus on getting PostgreSQL in the lift? In order to put (financial) weight into the alternative…
• Engine collisions : Given that it would be a vendor showdown, how will it turn out of MySQL as their best enginers (InnoDB & BerkeleyDB) are owned by Oracle?
• …

References:
Official Statement
Kay Arno’s blog
Jonathan Schwartz’s blog
Jignesh K. Shah’s blog
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The Quotes
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