The nice thing about all these monitoring tools (hobbit, bb, nagios, zabbix) is that they have an agent for _most_ systems. How about the other systems? Do they come with a snmp interface? Is this a self-discovery interface? does it accept mib-files? Because in the end, you like to monitor _all_ systems, even the ones for which there is no agent and the ones that cannot handle an agent, like printers, switches, routers and other attached stuff. Look at HP with their server-agents: they add entries to snmp which is already available in the os. Then your own snmp-based monitoring can also monitor the HP-special parameters. That's the way it should be: Use an available standard, then you can get much higher. And for the microsoft operating systems: wmi is not the standard. »

When I started with unix about 20 years ago, vi already was a steep learning curve but it was there on every unix machine. The alternative at that time was emacs, which had a more relax learning curve but a steep installation curve as it was (and stil is) not available on every installation... Then `vi` has some more advantages: If you know vi, specially the : commands, then you know `ed` (which effectively is what you use with the : commands) and you know all ed's deriviates as `ex` and `sed`. I see the regexp as available in ed is still unbeaten. It is the major reason why I keep comming back to the commandline to use vi. btw: I've just seen a msWindows Powershell and W2008 presentation. I wonder if edlin is available, notepad still is there... »

If you ssh from unix to unix, there is a dedicated port forwarding for the X11 (windowing) communication. Hence, if you want the windows from the other machine on your local desktop, just peek for the X11 forwarding and use that, donnot re-invent the wheel by forwarding port 6000 manually. »

Nice composition. Some things things to add: The above is (as far as I can see) based on bourne-shell and deriviants like ksh, bash and such. The c-shell (and deriviants like tcsh) have a different aproach on how stdio is handled. My experience tells that I prefer the bourne-shell in scripting and the c-shell on the commandline. There is a page on 'useless use of cat' (just google for that). As far as I remember is it using stdio. »

It is clearly stated that a jeos-guest needs ide-disks and cannot coop with scsi disks. That indicates for me it does not work on VMWare ESX, since guests on ESX only get scsi-disks and no ide-disks... Can we expect that the next ubuntu release has an option on the server-installation to get a jeos system? »