I know, I missed these release by about 2 months, but better late then never, right? Anyways. Zabbix 1.6 was released. I've been watching this product since the 1.1 release, and they keep making it better. For those that don't know, Zabbix is a monitoring solution. It uses agents and SNMP to collect information and provide a nice interface to view it all. It is actually pretty robust as it is a distrbuted monitoring solution, which can make for some nice scalability through larger enterprise networks.

The last version I used was 1.4 and it was at my old job. I've been watching the development of 1.6, they have added a lot of improvements and features. I can't wait to get my hands on this release to see what it can do. If are looking for a monitoring solution, I highly recommend Zabbix.

Yep, you read the title right, and no this blog isn't becoming an advertising site, just so happens this post and the last are right after one another.

Codeweavers has created a challenge and that challenge has been met. Gas in the Twin Cities as returned to where it was a year ago, at $2.79 per gallon, after being up to $3.79. I guess I will tell them that the avg gas here in Ft. Worth, TX is $2.25 right now, with some suburbs having gas wars between Exxon and QT and seeing the price below $1.95 per gallon. But that is another story I guess.

So for today only, you can go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and get your free serial number for their software. You have to register it before it is any good, and because of the increase of traffic today, their servers have died. Not literally, but they are done, and all their sites are now just plain text. You can get your serial number today only, but they are allow you to register it tomorrow also because of the down time.

For those that don't know CodeWeavers Crossover Office is a product based on the open source application Wine. You aren't paying for Wine itself, but yet the support and tweaks CodeWeaver's has done to the package to help it run your favorite Windows applications. It can run Quicken, Powerpoint, Excel, even some version of Access. With CrossOver Games, you can run your favorite games also. This product isn't just for Linux, but for the Mac also.

So go get, try it out, and hell, if you like it this publicity stunt might of paid of big time as you will likely want upgrades after your subscription is out.

Browsing the web today, I found two nice tools for managing AD in Linux. First up is adtool. The home page is at http://gp2x.org/adtool/. This is a tool that lets you manage the objects in active directory without having to know too much knowledge of LDAP. You will have to know a bit about the layout in Active Directory, but you don't have to worry about having to write your LDAP queries. This small little app lets you list out directories, modify attributes, reset passwords and more.

Next up is a package released by the ZenOSS group, they use it with their monitoring suite, and it is a WMI client. Again CLI only, but works great. I found it over at http://felimwhiteley.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/wmi-calls-from-linux/ and the package can be downloaded from http://dev.zenoss.org/svn/trunk/inst/externallibs/. It seems to be a python script with very little documentation. Based on the blog post, the syntax isn't much different then that of the wmi client for windows.

Between these two tools, you could decently manage basic task from linux, and even write some nice scripts to do more. While these two tools won't Network and System Administrators of Windows Domains out of a window enviroment all day, it will help those who still prefer Linux as the day-to-day machine.