Month: June 2008

  • Identity Management Systems

    I’ve spent the past couple of days looking at IBM Tivoli Identity Manager (ITIM). One of our customers uses this product and wants us to be able to work with it. It’s pretty cool, but somewhat painful to get running. It’s a Web-based application so, naturally, it’s built on top of IBM Websphere. It needs…

  • Crusty Programmer Story 1

    If you read my About page, you’ll know that I’m a crusty old programmer (COP). I may be 48 years young (as of January 2008), but I’m 144 years old in programmer-years. A year of intense programming ages you at 3x normal. (I suppose that, more accurately, I’m 15+33*3=114, since I didn’t start writing software until I…

  • Best Practices: Logging

    I have written about system logging once or twice already. Earlier this month, I contrasted Windows and Unix event logs. A couple of posts ago, I mentioned logging as a “best practice” that’s frequently done poorly. In this post, I describe what I believe are currently accepted best practices for log collection, retention and analysis.…