Open Source Blog

GroundWork Monitor Community Edition

2008-08-18T19:32:00.001+07:00

GroundWork Monitor Community Edition provides a essential IT monitoring solution that enables you to maintain network visibility and control.

This is a single server deployment that leverages the strengths of 15 other open source projects such as Nagios, rrdtool and nmap. It combines the results of these projects in to a system that evaluates the status, events and performance of monitored devices and presents these results in an easy to understand web application.

This open source project distributed on sourceforge.net is available under the GNU Public License (GPL v2). It is ideal for operations who already have deployed one or more open source monitoring projects and need to expand its capability.

The Community Edition has the following features

* Easy to install wizard to help optimize the monitoring performance.
* Availability monitoring to alert if devices are up or not.
* Ability to monitor servers, devices and applications which gives you the flexibility to monitor all of the integral components within your network.
* Performance monitoring to give insight on latency before a server is offline
* Basic auto-discovery and configuration tools to help identify additional devices on the network which is a great time-saving function if your network is constantly changing.
* Built on the same open-architecture as GroundWork Monitor Professional and Enterprise, Community Edition is easy to integrate and customize.

Where can I get help with GroundWork Monitor Community Edition?

Community Edition is supported by GroundWork Open Source. GroundWork Open Source tests all of the projects that go into the Community Edition and regularly updates the project with help from the open source community.

GroundWork also provides forums so that community users can share best practices and help each other. At any time there are several hundred users participating on the forums.

Lastly, every Community Edition deployment gets one free incident ticket answered by GroundWork Open Source. It’s a great opportunity for you to experience the quality service if you were to be a commercial customer. For more information about the incident ticket, visit our support page.
Who is the ideal Community Edition Customer?

The community edition is intended to monitor up to one hundred devices – but is able to monitor more depending on the deployment and user needs. It is a great open source solution IT shops who have experience or have deployed one or more open source monitoring projects and are looking to consolidate their monitoring control into one solution. GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is also fantastic for IT shops who may not have any budget available but have the time and expertise to customize it to their specific needs.

What if you need more robust functionality than what Community Edition Provides?

That's simple, talk to us about the functionality you need and we can demonstrate the capabilities of GroundWork Monitor Professional or Enterprise for you. All of the Monitor family is built upon the same code-base so it’s simple to upgrade to another edition.

Application name : GroundWork
web : http://www.groundworkopensource.com

download :http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/downloads/

Zabbix Free Network Monitoring

2008-08-06T19:08:00.003+07:00

ZABBIX is all-in-one 24x7 monitoring solution without high cost.

ZABBIX is software for monitoring of your applications, network and servers. ZABBIX supports both polling and trapping techniques to collect data from monitored hosts. A flexible notification mechanism allows easy and quickly configure different types of notifications for pre-defined events.

New in ZABBIX 1.4

* Installation Wizard

Installation Wizard automatically checks pre-requisites, database connectivity and generates configuration file for WEB front end.

* Support of new database engines

Support of SQLite has been implemented. It allows use of ZABBIX in embedded environments.

* WEB interface improvements

Speed and usability of WEB interface has been improved very much.

* New notification methods

Native support of Jabber messaging has been introduced.

* Distributed monitoring

ZABBIX distributed monitoring is made for complex environments consisting of different locations. ZABBIX supports monitoring of unlimited number of nodes. Centralized configuration allows easy configuration of all nodes from a single location.

* Auto-discovery
ZABBIX distributed monitoring module allows easy deployment of ZABBIX systems. The discovery support IP ranges, service checks, agent and SNMP checks for efficient auto-discovery.

* Many-to-many template linkage

More flexible host-template linkage saves time and make configuration of hosts more flexible and straight forward.

* Database watchdog

ZABBIX server will automatically warn group of users if database is down and continues normal operations when database is back.

* WEB monitoring

WEB monitoring module allows flexible and easy monitoringof availability and performanceof WEB sites and WEB based applications. It supports passing of GET and POST variables.

* XML data import/export

New XML data import and export functionality is an excellent way of sharing templates, hosts configuration and items/triggers related information.

* Support of Windows Vista

ZABBIX Windows agent supports Windows Vista, both 32 and 64 bit versions.

* More flexible actions

Multiple operations (notifications, script execution) per action are supported. Choice of action calculation algorithm was introduced.

* Server-side external checks

Server-side external checks can be used to introduce custom checks executed on ZABBIX server side.

* New user permission schema

Old user permission schema is no longer support. It was replaced by new more efficient, yet simple, schema working on level of user groups and host groups.

* Support of hysteresis

ZABBIX support use of different trigger expressions for going to ON and OFF states.

* Support of slide show

Several screens can be grouped into a slide show for better presentation.

* ZABBIX server can spread load across several servers

Groups of server side processes (discoverer, poller, HTTP poller, trapper, etc) can be located on different physical servers for better performance and availability.

* Other improvements

See Release Notes for a complete list of improvements.

Overview

ZABBIX offers functionality that will make your IT resources look more transparent, and it will also help to easily identify performance and availability problems. ZABBIX greatly increases the productivity of system administrators by providing simple-to-use monitoring system.

Key features

* Open Source solution
* Runs on AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Tru64/OSF
* SQL database for storing configuration, collected data and trends
* Web interface offers minimal learning, ubiquitous access
* Instant drill down from real-time status of IT Services to historical trend and statistics
* Data visualisation and mapping
* High performance native ZABBIX agents for performance and integrity monitoring for virtually all platforms (UNIX, Win32)
* Monitoring of "agentless" environments
* Assuring and monitoring SLA for IT Services
* Monitoring of SNMP (v1,v2,v3) devices

IT Services

ZABBIX's unique technology allows you to relate your applications and underlying servers or network to a IT Service such as application, location, server, network device, region, etc. This technology allows you to correlate your business to your IT infrastructure and identify the impact of your IT infrastructure to the delivery of business service to your customers.

Data visualisation

ZABBIX provides excellent visualisation of statistical and real-time information, ranging from simple graphs to complex views containing graphs, maps and text information. All graphical information is accessible from WEB interface. The wealth of information available such as the trend analysis (days to threshold), the historical graphs and histograms allow you to make informed decisions about the weaknesses and performance of your IT infrastructure.

Application monitoring

Enterprise applications such as Oracle, WebSphere, WebLogic, Exchange, Apache, etc. can be monitored using SNMP. In many cases, agentless technology can be used, cutting down on the deployment and management costs.

ZABBIX agents can be easily extended to perform monitoring of any aspect of your applications. It is matter of writing a shell script which would return required data back to the agent.

Server monitoring

Virtually all server platforms are supported including but not limited to UNIX, Win32 and Novell Netware. ZABBIX native agents take care of CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, disk usage, network I/O, temperature of CPUs and mainboards, status of processes, etc. All real-time performance data is immediately available by WEB interface.

Network monitoring

ZABBIX supports monitoring of Cisco, Juniper, 3Com, Nortel, Foundry and other routers as well as firewalls from Netscreen, Fortinet, Cisco or Checkpoint. Any network devices (routers, hubs, printers, etc) having SNMP support can be easily monitored by ZABBIX.

ZABBIX makes possible creation of network maps which give very clear representation of monitored network infrastructure. The maps show network devices, connections, statuses of the devices, and reasons if a device is not available or has any problems.

Integration of Fault and Performance Management

The need to effectively integrate fault and performance management is becoming increasingly apparent to IT organizations seeking to ensure quality delivery of business services. ZABBIX generates real-time notification of threshold violations based on scheduled performance tests.

Application name : Zabbix 1.4
web : http://www.zabbix.com

download : Stable 1.4.6 Beta 1.5.3 Manual

New Features in WordPress 2.7

2008-08-04T12:24:00.000+07:00

WordPress 2.7 is the next major WordPress version and there are some cool new features in the works to make WordPress an even more enjoyable blogging experience. Need a sneak peek…
WordPress 2.7 is Coming

Check out the new features planned in Wordpress 2.7 - here are a few interesting ones..

* Comments API - would really let developers go creative and create new commenting power options.
* Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation - will make comment management faster. Though I recommend you try WP Ajax Edit Comments for some nifty comment management.
* Theme update api - Plugin update management has become real easy by the plugin update API. With the official wordpress theme directory powering more wordpress themes now, a new theme version update is welcome.
* Dashboard and write box rearranging - aka netvibes style. My own custom dashboard with boxes and stuff wherever I want is cool.
* Admin-only reply thing - for admin replies to comments is easy to customize via CSS anyday. But coded into comments is great.
* Sitemaps by default - though the sitemaps plugin does a great job, default sitemaps would help most bloggers get better site indexing by search engines.
* Comment threading - some people like it and use the threaded plugin, but not for everyone.
* Batch editing of posts - now we are talking some powerful stuff. Batch Categories can do some powerful category management for you too.

Prepare for Wordpress 2.7 and track new features and bug fixes in works on Wordpress Trac. But Wordpress 2.6.1 is preparing for release before that. Download the current Wordpress 2.6 and enjoy some really cool features.

Kernel release: 2.6.26.1

2008-08-04T12:20:00.000+07:00

Changelog：http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.26.1

Download：Linux Kernel 2.6.26.1

Magento version 1.1.2 is now available

2008-08-04T12:12:00.000+07:00

Magento version 1.1.2 is available for download and for upgrade through your Magento Connect Manager.

This version includes some small bug fixes for version 1.1.1:

Magento Core API fixes:
Added missing Mage_Api.xml in Magento Connect core package
Fixed wrong SOAP content type
Fixed fatal error when Soap extension is not installed

Invoices/packing slips PDF issues:
Fixed fatal errors when trying to print invoice/packingslip PDFs
Added missing fonts
Fixed displaying empty areas instead of product options
Fixed PDF layouts to no overlap columns when non-latin1 characters are used
Fixed text wrapping for non-latin1 characters in product name and options

Other fixes:
Fixed non-working store switcher
Fixed viewing sales order in admin when only virtual item were purchased
Fixed configurable product weight calculation in shopping cart and checkout
Removed php.ini from the Magento root folder
Added missing Mage_Adminhtml.csv and 404 folder in Magento Connect core package
Upgraded core/helper/string for binary-safe string operations

We are currently working on another update to Magento 1.1 scheduled to be released later this month.

More information will be posted as it becomes available.

Application name :Magento version 1.1.2

web : http://www.magentocommerce.com

download : http://www.magentocommerce.com/download

Source : http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog

PrestaShop Releases v1.0 of its Free Open-Source e-Commerce Solution

2008-08-04T11:55:00.000+07:00

Everyone at PrestaShop is excited and not a little relieved to see v1.0 stable finally see the light of day. It's not easy building professional-grade software from scratch, as any developer will tell you.

Many of our developers will now take some well-deserved time off to live their lives and recharge their batteries. They're tired of fixing bugs and are looking forward to spending more developing new features for PrestaShop. PrestaShop v1.1 is already in development and the goal is to release it in September.

Speaking of bugs, be sure make good use of our new Bug Tracker tool that debuts today. Anyone can report a bug or request a new feature; however, we do require that all bug reports and feature requests be written in English.

Below is a copy of the press release that will hit the wires on Monday. Have a great weekend!

Paris, France (PRWEB) August 4, 2008–PrestaShop, a leader in open-source e-Commerce, announced today the release of its first official stable version, 1.0, as well as the unveiling of its newly redesigned Website, PrestaShop.com.

Development began nearly two years ago, and today, a dozen beta releases later, the PrestaShop™ e-Commerce Solution v1.0 makes its debut as mature, production-ready, shopping-cart software for the Web 2.0 era.

Why PrestaShop?

In order to reach the increasing number of online shoppers, business owners have been searching for the best system for extending their activity to the Internet.

"The first generation of e-Commerce software, still prevalent in today's market, was based on the traditional 'proprietary' software model," said Bruno Lévêque, PrestaShop CEO. "This is software created by a staff of developers that is sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars and, often, requires monthly payments. Only the software company has access to the source code, so fixes and improvements can only be made by its developers, who sometimes struggle to keep up with user requests.

"PrestaShop, on the other hand, is a committed member of the open-source software movement. Anyone can download PrestaShop software, and a growing number of people do--at a rate of more than 25,000 downloads per month. This world-wide user community helps our developers fix bugs and make feature improvements at a rapid rate.

"And, like other open-source e-Commerce applications such as osCommerce, PrestaShop is free. Its license (OLS 3.0) is one of the least restrictive. And users aren't even required to register first."

A professional Open-Source solution

Some small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) cast a wary eye upon open-source software, concerned that it is too complicated to use or not sophisticated enough to handle their business needs, or both.

Igor Schlumberger, President of PrestaShop, said that while this hesitation is understandable, the PrestaShop™ e-Commerce Solution is as powerful as it is user-friendly, for both shoppers and shop owners.

"Businesses love PrestaShop because it's easy to manage their online stores," said Schlumberger. "Customers love PrestaShop because its smooth, Web-2.0 interface is pleasant to shop on. And software developers love PrestaShop because it's easy to integrate and because the user community is very active and helpful--for example, PrestaShop users have already translated PrestaShop into over 20 different languages, and it's only at version 1.0."

Scalable and modular

The PrestaShop™ e-Commerce Solution was built to grow as your business grows. Thanks to its admin tool (Back Office), it is easy to customize PrestaShop by adding or deleting functionality according to your needs. Developers appreciate the uncluttered framework and clean PrestaShop code.

Light and fast

Despite its technical sophistication, PrestaShop is very light (around 5.5 MB), it's easy to install and update, and even customers with slow connection speeds will enjoy buying from you.

Sleek and intuitive interface

On the Web, look-and-feel is make-or-break. PrestaShop not only looks good, it also guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning visitors into customers.

Sophisticated features and tools

PrestaShop is as robust as most commercial e-Commerce software. Customers enjoy such features as price reductions, gift vouchers, free-shipping minimums, recommended accessories, quantity discounts, and the chance to order out-of-stock items. On the back end, store owners control an unlimited number of products, currencies, tax settings, shipping options, and languages. (For a list of current and upcoming features, visit the PrestaShop Features page.)

Assistance for shop owners

For users looking to get more out of their online businesses, PrestaShop also offers custom-built solutions by adapting the PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution to their specific needs, such as unique functionality and professionally designed storefronts.

PrestaShop can also host customer Websites on their servers, and help create additional visitor traffic with its Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

About PrestaShop

Founded in Paris, France, by Internet enthusiasts and e-Commerce professionals Igor Schlumberger and Bruno Lévêque, PrestaShop aspires to provide the best open-source e-Commerce solution to the greatest number of business owners worldwide as the e-Commerce sector of the global economy continues to become more democratic.

Application name : PrestaShop 1.0
web : http://www.prestashop.com
download : http://www.prestashop.com/download/prestashop_1.0.zip

Source : http://www.prestashop.com/blog/article/118