·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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While I was messing around with several other things, Lindsay managed to brush her teeth, finish her bath, turn down her bed, turn on her lamp, get into her pajamas and get into bed with a book without any help from me.  I said You are such a big girl, you don’t need any help, do you? to which she smiled and replied Nope!

So to tease her a little, I asked How about mommy and I will move out and you can have this house all to yourself? She thought very seriously for a few seconds and said If you can give me a machine that makes pancakes for breakfast, I think I’ll be OK and then a few seconds later added Oh and one to make spaghetti for dinner!

Jenny does a good job of recording some of Lindsay’s funnier comments in her blog, but there was one “sparkling” moment that tickled me recently.

Early one morning when it was still dark, Lindsay came running down the hall to our room.  She was wearing her Kit nightgown (a la American Girl stuff) and came crawling into our bed.  You know how you can generate a lot of static electricity when it is cold?  Well, as Lindsay crawled up between us, she got her nightgown bunched up.  It let off a bunch of crackling sounds and you could see it popping in the dark.

Lindsay gasped and whispered excitedly “Wow!  I accidentally sparked my nightgown!”  I got quite a chuckle out of that one.

Digital signage is a hot topic in higher education and elsewhere.  Information is king and the more ways you can put it in front of more eyes, the better.  Of course, there’s all kinds of signage options from expensive to free… but you know which way I lean!

Concerto is free, open source digital signage software.  It is a web based solution with a web interface for configuring your displays and content.  The final product is simply a specialized web page designed to be displayed in a full screen browser.  Here’s a shot of the web interface where you upload image content and an example of what you can produce with it (click for larger versions):

Concerto is a pretty slick system with lots of features.  Management of content is designed around the idea of feeds, where you assign feeds to each area of the screen.  You can set up groups of users and give permissions to control particular feeds.  One feature that I especially like is being able to designate an emergency feed.  Any content placed in this special feed overrides all others, essentially taking over the display to broadcast an emergency alert.

Concerto comes with several attractive screen layouts – ours above is based on one of the default ones with the colors changed.  You can design your own background and provide an XML file to define the coordinates where the content should appear, but the documentation for doing so is thin.

Concerto has a live CD “player” that you can configure to boot and launch a signage display.  Their discussion forum is very active, though hosted on Google Groups which I find to be a feature-poor discussion medium in comparison to Yahoo Groups and others.

Like any other open source alternative, Concerto does require a little elbow grease and is not without a few issues.  Here’s some tips that might help if you choose to pursue it:

• An RSS feed is a great resource to include in your signage display – our campus news rolls on the right side of the screen you see above.  However, the web interface currently offers no way to set up an RSS feed as content for your displays.  Instead, you have to manually poke some information into the database.  Look in the discussion forums for instructions on how to do this or let me know if you need some help.
• The Live CD is great as long as you have video hardware that matches its drivers.  But, don’t get caught up in having to use the CD.  You can simply point a web browser at Concerto and get the display, and you may not even need HDMI to drive a TV monitor.  Many newer monitors have a VGA input that can handle a full 1080 lines of input to maximize your display.  So, there are many options for driving your signage displays from old PCs to thin clients.
• Likewise, you don’t have to use TV monitors to show good looking digital signage.  A vanilla PC monitor can do the trick and may even be preferred for a smaller venue.
• Make sure you shop for commercial grade monitors if you plan to run your signage displays all day long.  You may wear out your off the shelf TVs pretty quickly.

On a side note, it is getting more and more difficult to come up with witty puns for the titles of my posts…

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Here’s a later update… we roll an RSS weather feed from rssweather.com in the ticker section, and we now use a feed of shortened versions of our news articles on the right side.  Some articles are long, so the shortened version fits the signage format better and has a static prompt at the bottom to “visit our news website for more”.  Below, we created a mobile version of our signage installation for use in our athletics facility so that it can be moved into the lobby during ballgames and events.

If you do any sort of network administration, then you have surely heard of Nagios.  It has been around for a long time, having gone by the name of NetSaint years ago and it now offers a commercial version with more bells and whistles.  Nagios is our first line of defense for alerting us to problems on the network.

Where Cacti is a more complex tool for graphing traffic patterns, Nagios simply sends e-mails when something is down.  But, don’t let me sell Nagios as being too simple.  It can be configured to monitor during specific time periods per device and you can create different groups of people to be alerted for different items.  Nagios understands dependencies so it won’t alert you about every switch in a building being down when it knows that they are connected via the main switch for that building – you’ll only receive an alert about that main switch.  Nagios plugins allow you to monitor many different services such as POP, IMAP, SMTP and HTTP as well as disk space, CPU load and other metrics on remote machines (the latter examples via ssh or a Windows service).  It keeps some overall alert history and uptime statistics, as well.

Here is a host list view in the Nagios console… (click for larger version):

…and an event log view (click for larger version):

The key to utilizing Nagios effectively is in crafting its configuration files.  While there are a few tools out there such as NConf to help you generate config files, you may be better off just writing them on your own.  Once you get a few under your belt, you can easily copy and paste or even write your own scripts to maintain them.  The online documentation has some decent examples to get you started, or your old pal Jason can send you some of his.

Many IT shops use both Cacti and Nagios for “double barrel” network monitoring.  While Cacti can indeed provide some basic down/up notifications for network devices, the granularity of configuration available in Nagios offers some good features for front line alerting.  There are other monitoring tools out there such as Zenoss that try to combine the features of these two stalwarts, but the jury is still out for me on how they stack up.

Saw this cake at a party… the dog is icing over peanut butter cake and the rug is a big sugar cookie.  Outstanding!