Beginning Perl
I finally cracked open the Perl book. Here's my first program:
#/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello world\n";
It's a start. I built a CentOS 4.4 VM on my local machine (maxed it out at 384mb of RAM so my laptop doesn't crawl when it runs) and am updating it via yum right now.
Tomorrow when it's done downloading it's 200mb worth of updates I'll have my own little dev environment to play with.
Today "Hello World," tomorrow IPSpace replacement.
VMWare VirtualCenter + Oracle 10g Express Edition Success
I'm not sure if many people were having this problem, but someone asked on the VMWare support forums a while ago and it didn't seem to get answered.
I got Virtualcenter 1.4 setup and working with Oracle 10g Express Edition in Windows today.
I originally had a problem setting up the ODBC connection. Turns out that when you install Oracle in Windows, even though the database starts up and works, you need to reboot the server to get ODBC working. Once I did that, I was able to setup the System DSN and finish the install of VirtualCenter.
It's these small victories...
Need to Learn Perl
I need to learn Perl. Or maybe PHP, but Perl would probably be more useful.
Right off the bat, I'd work on an IP address database. We use a modified version of IPSpace that just hasn't scaled well for us.
This is what I'd like to have:
- Ease of use. Our developers need to add and delete their own entries in the system.
- The system should tie into LDAP for user authentication (for edits, viewing shouldn't require authentication.)
- The system should show who created and last edited an entry
- The system should ping check each host to make sure it's up (red icon = down, green icon = up)
- Given that we have a large number of subnets, it should have links at the top of the page to jump to the subnet that you need
- Searchable/sortable fields by owner/location/etc.
- Obviously store the data in a MySQL database
The problem is that I don't know much about database structure (so it'd be hard to make a schema), and that I have very little motivation to sit down and learn a new programming language. If this needed to be done in Atari BASIC I could whip it up in a few days, I'm sure. 
It amazes me, though, that nobody has created a piece of software that does this well. IPSpace comes the closest, but it hasn't been updated since 2004. IPPlan looks overcomplicated.
Other apps I would like to write something to replace:
Nagios - why can't there be a simple, easy FOSS network monitoring system?
RT - ugh, overcomplicated ugly garbage. Doesn't even send an email with what was done in the ticket to the requestor when the ticket is closed, by default.