The open source memcached tool is a cache for storing frequently used information to save you from loading (and processing) information from slower sources, such as disks or a database. It can be deployed in a dedicated situation or as a method of using up spare memory in an existing environment. Despite the simplicity of memcached, it is sometimes used incorrectly, or it is used as a solution in the wrong type of environment. Learn when it is best to take advantage of using memcached.

Read Applying memcached to increase site performance

DTrace provides a rich environment of probes that can be used to monitor the execution of your system, from the kernel up to your application. You can perform a significant amount of examination without changing your application, but to get detailed statistics, you need to add probes to your application. In this article we will examine how to design the probes, where to add them into your application, the best locations for the probes, and how to effectively build and use the probes that you have added.

Read Adding DTrace probes to your applications

The open source Gearman service allows you to easily distribute work to other machines in your network, either because you want to spread the work over a large body of machines or because you want to share the functionality of different languages and environments with each other. In this article, you will look at some typical uses of Gearman and how it can solve a variety of issues and problems in modern applications. You will also learn how Gearman can be combined with other tools, like memcached, to help speed up your application and processing requirements.

I’ve tried to pay particular attention to using it where you might normally use RPC or web services, or when you want to execute large quantities of jobs and spread them over a number of machines or different parameters.

Read it Deploying Gearman across multiple environments

Whether you are monitoring your network to identify performance issues, debugging an application, or have found an application on your network that you do not recognize, occasionally you need to look deep into the protocols being used on your UNIX® network to understand what they are doing. Some protocols are easy to identify and understand, even when used on non-standard ports. Others need more investigation to understand what they are doing and what information they are exchanging. In this article, we will take a look at techniques for performing detailed analysis of the protocols in use on your UNIX network.

The piece specifically looks at ways of extracting more detailed information from the raw data you see on your network.

Read Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

From the article:

In today’s economic climate, everyone is looking for ways to reduce expenses. In the IT sector, one way to cut costs is by turning to open source alternatives instead of using expensive licensed products. This last part of our series explores OpenChange, which is designed to be used as an Exchange groupware server. E-mail is probably the backbone of your business; When the e-mail servers go down, everything can quickly grind to a halt. In this article, learn about the OpenChange e-mail server and whether it is ready for prime time.

Read: Saving money with open source, Part 3: The OpenChange solution offers great promise

From the article:

Wiki Server, a part of Mac OS X Leopard Server, provides this wiki functionality to all users with access to the server. Individual groups can tap into Wiki Server to create their own wikis and customize the look and feel of the wiki to suit both their content and audience. By creating their own personal wiki theme, Wiki users can apply their own style and identity to the wiki, in addition to supplying their own content.

Read: ADC—Leopard Wiki Server: Creating Custom Themes

From the intro:

On the desktop, the operating system and environment are less important than the applications that support the main operating functions for your office. Your business drives your application requirements, but most businesses will also use an office suite, such as OpenOffice, to support their core operations.

The OpenOffice suite is open source, freely available, and completely compatible with a wide range of different office suites, including Microsoft Office. It’s a compatible product, both in terms of file readability and usage, and you can try out OpenOffice with no barriers.

Read: Saving money with open source, Part 2: Tap into the power of OpenOffice

The first article looks at the Ubuntu Linux distribution. From the intro:

Part 1 discusses Ubuntu, a community developed Linux-based operating system for laptops, desktops, and servers. Ubuntu contains many applications: a Web browser; presentation, document, and spreadsheet software; instant messaging; and much more. This article explores Ubuntu’s:

• Benefits
• Updates and stability
• Desktop version
• Compatibility and integration
• Hardware support

Read: Saving money with open source, Part 1: Use the Ubuntu operating system}

Knowing your UNIX network layout will go a long way with understanding your network and how it operates. But what happens when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly reduces? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them.

Read: UNIX network performance analysis

From the intro:

When accessing a new UNIX system, or even understanding an existing one, a key part of the puzzle to how the system operates is the network configuration. There are many aspects of the network that you need to know and understand to correctly identify problems and prevent future problems. By using some basic tools and commands you can determine a lot about the configuration of a single system, and through this basic understanding, a good idea of the configuration of the rest of the network. With some additional tools, you can expand that knowledge to cover more systems and services within your network.

In this tutorial you will use some basic tools within the UNIX environment that can disclose information about the configuration of your system. By understanding these tools and the information they output, you will be able to gain a greater understanding of your system network configuration and how it works. You will also examine tools and solutions that can look at the wider network and gain more detailed information about your network, its potential security issues, and key points of information that will help you identify and diagnose problems when they do occur.

Read UNIX network analysis

To support that, I have a new tutorial about the different methods available for tracing Unix applications. I tried to concentrate on tools and techniques that don’t require access to the source, like using truss and DTrace.

From the intro:

Most developers and systems administrators know what should happen in their operating system and with their applications, but sadly, this isn’t always the case. There are times when an application has failed, or is not behaving as you expect, and you need to find out more information. By using your existing knowledge of how your application should work and some basic UNIX skills, you can trace the application to find out what is causing the problem. This tutorial will teach you the basic techniques of using tracing tools to find out what your application is doing behind the scenes.

First, the tutorial looks at the distinction between debugging and tracing, and how the two solutions differ. Then it examines some specific examples of where tracing can be used to solve problems in your application. DTrace provides elements of both system tracing and debugging, and also provides you with the ability to time and benchmark applications. Finally, the tutorial shows how to trace the information being exchanged between network computers to help find problems in network applications.

Read Solutions for tracing UNIX applications

From the intro:

There are many tools available that allow you to synchronize files across UNIX directories, but doing it effectively, and securely, takes a little bit more effort. This article looks at solutions for synchronizing files across UNIX filesystems and different computer systems securely, and at solutions that allow you to synchronize encrypted versions of your files for the purposes of backup.
File synchronization is the process of adding, changing, or deleting a file in one location, and having the same file added to, changed, or deleted at another location. This article covers three utilties, cp, tar, and rsync, that can aid with synchronization of UNIX files. While cp and tar commands have limited synchronization abilities, rsync provides you with the full range of options; however, all three have their place.

Of particular interest is a script that provides an encrypted wrapper around rsync, which I use to provide a nice secure rsync-able backup.

Read: Synchronizing UNIX files

It’s in a nice conversational style, and so far the technical material I have glanced over has been very cleanly laid out.

I’ll continue reading and hope to have a full review up soon.

This can be particularly useful if you have cameras set up in various classrooms or offices and have set times for different presentations. You can set the presentations to be automatically recorded, and use the information within the iCal event to set the data about the podcast itself. Using the system in article you can control your entire podcast process by creating new events within iCal.

If you work with podcasts on an ongoing basis, scheduling for the recording and publishing of your podcasts is critical. From an audience perspective, you want to have a regular stream of content to keep people interested in your podcasts. You also want to make sure that you are making the best use of your presenters by giving them the time and flexibility to create a podcast at a time that suits their schedule and yours.

Instead of explicitly recording a podcast and having the information submitted into the system, why not schedule podcasts recordings to take place automatically according to your organizational needs? For example, within a school or university you may have regular class sessions that you want to record and publish as a podcast.

The article demonstrates how to use AppleScript in combination with iCal to automate the recording of podcasts from cameras without having to manually create each recording. The solution will simplify the scheduling of recordings to create a suitable event within iCal and then uses iCal and Podcast Producer handle all of the complexities of the recording process.

Read: Podcast Producer: Scheduling Podcasts

When creating podcasts you dont always want to publish to one of the blogs or wiki services on your Leopard Server, or to iTunes. How about posting to YouTube?

From the intro:

YouTube has created a whole new generation of users who like to view video over the Internet, whether at their computer, their laptop or when using their iPhone. With Podcast Producer, you have many workflows available to you on your Mac OS X Server, but you can also customize workflows and publish content directly to YouTube. Follow along to build a custom workflow that will take an existing video podcast through Podcast Producer and post the content directly onto YouTube.

The solution involves a custom application using the YouTube Java kit that submits a converted podcast content to your YouTube account.

Read: Podcast Producer: Publishing to YouTube

Podcast Producer: Using the Command Line looks at the different command-line tools that are available for interacting with the Podcast Producer system.

The Server Administrator, and other tools, provide a powerful graphical user interface (GUI) to Podcast Producer. Sometimes, however, you may only be able to interact with the server over a secure shell (SSH) connection remotely using the command line. This allows you, for instance, to control Podcast Producer from halfway around the world.

This article, the third in a series, is aimed at Podcast Producer administrators. We will examine four command line tools available for controlling and monitoring Podcast Producer.

Read Podcast Producer: Using the Command Line

Podcast Producer: Writing Actions discusses the actions that make up the processing of podcasts sent to Podcast Producer into the final formats and associated blog posts, emails and other material that publishes the podcast out to the world.

From the introduction:

In order to write effective actions for Podcast Producer, you must understand the different properties that are executed from the command line. Individually, actions are discrete operations, but when chained together they provide a powerful processing environment so that the output from one action is compatible with the input of the next action within the process.

In this article, designed for Podcast Producer administrators developing their own workflows, you will learn about how to write and execute actions. Armed with this knowledge, you can easily develop your own actions to build different workflows. You will also learn about how to ensure that your actions are flexible and executable within the Xgrid environment and how to manage execution and resources during processing.

Read: Podcast Producer: Writing Actions

The first article, Podcast Producer: Anatomy of a Workflow, looks at the main system within Podcast Producer for turning your podcasts into published works, the Workflow. From the intro:

Podcast Producer, an integrated part of Leopard Server, provides a complete publishing and management system for audio and video podcasts. Your users can submit raw material into the Podcast Producer system and have the files automatically processed into a suitable format so that the podcast can be published to iTunes and Leopard’s built-in blog services.

Workflows are the cornerstone of the Podcast Producer system. Workflows define the process to convert the incoming raw material into the final content, including translating and recoding audio and video for different targets, and publishing and creating the environments, blog pages and other materials that make your podcast available to a variety of different targets. Because the workflow instructions are independent of the content, you can publish podcasts repeatedly using the same workflow to achieve consistently high quality results.

Understanding the anatomy of a workflow, from the contents and definition of the workflow environment, through to the methods of interaction with other components in Leopard Server such as Xgrid, will help you plan new workflows and organize and structure your Podcast Producer environment more effectively.

In this article, designed for Podcast Producer administrators, we will examine Podcast Producer from the perspective of a submitted job. By examining the contents and processing of a workflow, Podcast Producer administrators will learn about the significance of the different elements, and how they work together to help produce the final podcast or video cast.

Read: Podcast Producer: Anatomy of a Workflow

In this article, look at some top XML schemas that provide solutions for all sorts of problems, from the basics of Web services to data description. You’ll also cover database-like solutions that involve contacts and invoices. The schemas in this article were chosen for their usefulness and utility, plus their impact on the XML community in how information is shared and exchanged using the XML format.

Read: Ten XML Schemas you should know

Make your XML work easier with the ten tips in this article – ultimately you’ll be less prone to errors and more productive.

You love XML and the flexibility and interoperability that it offers, but you can do some things to make your interaction with XML and the tools that you use to work with it significantly easier. Picking up some basic good habits when you work with XML will ensure that you get the most efficient use out of your XML documentations and applications.

Read: Learn 10 good XML usage habits