CeBIT speeches & OpenExpo stands, Twitter alerting & Nginx file caching

Mar 22 – 26 hopped from CeBIT speeches to OpenExpo stands, temperature alarms with Twitter to notebook performance boosters and file caching with Nginx.
With barely two weeks in between, we moved on quickly from the CeBIT to the OpenExpo in Bern on 24-25 March. Julian opened the second day with his speech on ‘IT Service Management with Open Source Software’ while a bunch of Icinga team reps were chatting busily at their project stand.
Starting the stream of advice, Martin tipped off a little Twitter feature from his new range of Wiesemann & Theis monitoring hardware. Through just a few clicks on the accompanying web interface, alerts can be set to be sent by SNMP-Trap, Syslog, FTP, email and now also per tweets.
Peter also shared his latest hardware kick, a new SDD drive to boost his new Dell notebook buy. In orchestra with a somewhat faster processor, Windows 7 instead of Vista and 4GB rather than 2, Peter was glad to have to wait no longer than 25 seconds for his baby to boot up.
Finally Bernd E contributed his file caching tip – Nginx a powerful web server cum reverse proxy originally developed for a Russian website. The exciting feature for him was the possibility to bundle various remote services as a caching instance, and store the corresponding file system contents on the server. This way, the contents are not in a cache file or structure, rather in a real shadow copy just as in Squid. Available under BSD, check out the wiki for more tips and tricks.
Tying up the last loose ends of the CeBIT 2010, Manuela uploaded presentation slides for Julian (Monitoring large IT Infrastructures), Bernd (Icinga – the Nagios fork) and Michi’s (Learning Nagios with Linux-Magazin Online Training) speeches. For those who missed the live stream during the event, all speeches can now be found in Linux Magazin’s online archive. Happy viewing!