How do we manage those OS’s. Well if VPS’ then VMWARE and other tools have replication features. Then there is always the old favourite kickstart, as well as dd and acronis.

For monitoring we use UberSmith. http://www.ubersmith.com. It rocks. Tried ZenOss, GroundWorks and Nagios. They all sucked for our needs. We also use Dell Open Manage to monitor hardware health and Cacti to monitor some networking variables. We used to use Cacti to do server metrics too – but Uber does that as well now.

I am curious about my company too. I never know why the office is always empty at 12:01PM and 6:01PM…. :-s

Business is great thanks to the complete lack of local competition in the enterprise level arena. Even IBM and HP and SUN who may have good engineers with a project team that has one laowai walk in to do the pitch. The work is always done by locals and they never have any good architects. So as China continues to develop and students continue to study CISCO and Microsoft and JAVA and not UML and OOA/OOD and Linux/Distributed computing/utility computing principles – Business will continue to do well.