Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH. It is an interesting alternative to Teamviewer although it does not aim at matching features.

We call it clientless because no plugins or client software are required.

Thanks to HTML5, once Guacamole is installed on a server, all you need to access your desktops is a web browser.

draw.io is an open source technology stack for building diagramming applications, and the world’s most widely used browser-based end-user diagramming application.

KeyChest of Enigma Bridge is a certificate expiry monitoring service. It uses internet databases and checks configuration of your servers. KeyChest dashboard gives you all the information you need for operational teams, as well as performance charts (KPIs).

KeyChest can enroll all your servers and domain names within minutes. It will also continuously discover new certificates within domain names you set as "Active Domain". It is how we believe monitoring should work - automatically.

TextBelt is an outgoing SMS API that uses carrier-specific gateways to deliver your text messages for free, and without ads. The service is fairly reliable and has sent over 100,000 texts.

Lantronix Spider provides secure KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) server management over an IP network. Unlike any other product on the market, Spider offers a flexible, scalable and affordable CAT5-based remote access KVM solution in a cable friendly, compact “zero-footprint” package.

The IP8000 is a PCI card implementation of a control unit that provides "over-IP" access and control of the server it is installed in. The IP8000 allows multi-platform access and control of the server from remote locations using a standard Internet browser or with stand-alone Windows and Java applications

One of the problems we needed to solve for our customer was how to package and distribute the appliance. We quickly determined that an OVF or “Open Virtualization Format”-based approach had the potential to give us the greatest portability, and I set to work figuring out how to implement it. Our build process made use of VeeWee, Vagrant, and Chef. We knew we could export some kind of appliance.box package compatible with VirtualBox from Vagrant, but how this related to OVF wasn’t clear.

I’d like to share a few of the things I learned. This is not by any means a comprehensive guide or list to the vast world of virtualization technology, but hopefully it can save someone else some time in making sense of this portion of the virtualization ecosystem.

This paper has one goal:

Create an easy to use, fully redundant platform for virtual servers. 

Oh, and do have fun!

irt-back is a python application that uses the libvirt API to safely shutdown, gzip, and restart guests.

The backup process logs to syslog for auditing and virt-back works great with cron for scheduling outages. Virt-back is in active development so feel free to give suggestions or branch the source.

virt-back has been placed in the public domain and the latest version may be downloaded here: https://bitbucket.org/russellballestrini/virt-back
Installation:

Le FRench SysAdmins Group (FRsAG) est un groupe d'échange d'informations, de techniques, de conseils entre administrateurs systèmes et architectes techniques francophones.

Baïkal offers ubiquitous and synchronized access to your calendars and address books over CalDAV and CardDAV. Baïkal implements the current IETF recommendation drafts of these industry standards for centralized calendar and address book collections

A thread on the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list last month asked about how to find out what processes are making outgoing network connectsion on a Linux machine. It referenced Ubuntu bug 820895: Log File Viewer does not log "Process Name", which is specific to Ubuntu's iptables logging of apps that are already blocked in iptables ... but the question goes deeper.

Several years ago, my job required me to use a program -- never mind which one -- from a prominent closed-source company. This program was doing various annoying things in addition to its primary task -- operations that got around the window manager and left artifacts all over my screen, operations that potentially opened files other than the ones I asked it to open -- but in addition, I noticed that when I ran the program, the lights on the DSL modem started going crazy. It looked like the program was making network connections, when it had no reason to do that. Was it really doing that?