I’ve just finished reading “Learning Nagios 3.0″ by Wojciech Kocjan and published by Packt Publishing, and this is a great book for anyone interested in nagios. This is a beginner level book that introduces nagios to new users interested in monitoring their infrastructure, but it will also present advanced features that even more experienced sysadmins can benefit from. All these in a pretty compact book, at 301 pages.

The topics are as follows:

• Introduction
• Installation and Configuration
• Using the Nagios Web Interface
• Overview of Nagios Plugins
• Advanced Configuration
• Notifications and Events
• Passive Checks and NSCA
• Monitoring Remote Hosts
• SNMP
• Advanced Monitoring
• Extending Nagios

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This post is sponsored by FindMyHosting – a free and very comprehensive web hosting directory featuring the most popular web hosting companies and thousands of customer reviews.

I’ve been asked to review this site and give my impressions about it. The truth is that I don’t have much experience with shared hosting as most of my experience is with dedicated servers from various hosting companies, and anytime I had a friend asking about where do I recommend him to host his small site I didn’t knew where to direct him. This is why I thought that such a webhosting directory as FindMyHosting would be a great start for anyone looking for a shared hosting account to host his new site. We can search from a long list of hosting company and get them ranked by users reports (nice). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just finished reading Lighttpd by Andre Bogus and published by Packt Publishing, and this is a great book for anyone interested in lighttpd. This is a good read and it will explain all the features of lighttpd and how you can use it from just serving static files to a complete apache replacement. And all these in a pretty compact book, at 223 pages.

The topics are as follows:

• Introduction to Lighttpd
• Configuring and Running Lighttpd
• More Virtual Hosting and CGI
• Downloads and Streams
• Big Brother Lighttpd
• Encryption: SSL
• Securing Lighttpd
• Containing Lighttpd
• Optimizing Lighttpd
• Migration from Apache
• CGI Revisited
• Using Lua with Lighttpd
• Writing Lighttpd Modules

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This post is sponsored by Canadian Web Hosting – Hosting in Canada. VPS and dedicated servers. 24/7 Toll free support.
I’ve been asked to review and give hosting advice many times. Still, this is the first time I will publish something like this on my blog, as opposed to do it for a client and help him choose the best datacenter for his business.

Pricing: 4 / 5
Features: 3 / 5
Reliability: 2 / 5
Customer support: 4 / 5
Web Site: 3 / 5

Overall: 3,2 / 5

Canadian Web Hosting is a Canadian owned and operated web hosting business that has been online since 1998. They provide low cost web hosting solutions without compromising quality. Their servers are located at Harbour Center in downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada.

This review will focus on pricing, features, reliability, customer support and web site. Read the rest of this entry »