Laen Aggregated

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
..An open protocol for messaging systems.

Some implementations of AMQP:
* Apache QPID
* RabbitMQ
* OpenAMQ

And some more information about it:
* http://www.amqp.org/

0142 – Workgroups
This is for sending messages to roles. Several entities may join a Workgroup queue, and other entities may request chats with the workgroup (which then routes to the different entities when the chat is accepted by one of them). So, for alerting, we can send to the “alerting” workgroup, which will route to an appropriate AlertAgentBot.

0095 – Stream Initiation
For setting up a binary stream between two entities. This is cool because it could let us push all system checks to the nodes over the JabberNet. So we have a core stub ManagementAgent on each managed node, and it just logs on, and bootstraps itself.

0137 – Publishing SI Requests
For publishing available binary streams (using pubsub). So now our binary distribution nodes can publish available code, and our ManagementAgent stub can see what’s available for pulling.

0135 – File Sharing
Provides a way for entities to publish files to other entities. This looks kinda like what 0137 does, except farther evolved.

Combined, a bootstrap would be something like:
* Agent starts
* Agent checks local cache for code, loading what’s necessary.
* Agent receives pubsub list of available code
* Agent downloads (and caches) what it needs.

0136 – Message Archiving
For using the Jabber server as a persistent message store. Provides a method of adding, updating , and removing items from the store. This could be used as an audit log for the Agents.

Solaris patching is, frankly, a pain.

Patch Check Advanced makes it less painful– even pleasant.

It’ll automatically download the patch list from Sun, correlate it against what you have on your system, and present you with a list of what needs to happen. You can tell it to install all recommended patches, all security patches, or all the patches that don’t require a reboot (saving those for special occasions).

Extremely cool tool.

Two new photos, both taken from my living room window.

Not photoshopped. Just a fortunate reflection: