Do you support Oracle databases? Are you looking for a tool to give you insight in to its performance? Check out Spotlight on Oracle from Quest Software: http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-oracle/

I ran across this webcast today – Some interesting details about how to deal with massive amounts of data and how to serve large amounts of small data and managing multiple copies of databases across datacenters.

“High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook”
By Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology, Facebook
Recorded at Calit2 Auditorium, University of California, San Diego

See the webcast at: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/JeffRothschildFacebook.asx

If you have remote offices (even internationally) and need remote hands support, consider using one of the consolidaters such as Crater Communications (http://cratercommunications.com).

Essentially you hire/pay Crater to find a qualified resource in the local area. Billing rates are the same or less than you would be able to find on your own, and it removes all the time/hassle involved in locating local resources on your own. All your disputes are handled centrally and if you’re not happy with the on-site staff assigned to you, Crater will find someone else.

These guys are especially good at finding emergency staff and can have someone on-site in under 4 hours almost anywhere in the world. Your mileage may vary.

If you have PCI requirements or just want to have a consolidated host based IDS system, you should check out OSSEC at http://www.ossec.net

From their website: OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System. It performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.

It runs on most operating systems, including Linux, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Windows.

It’s open source and available for free. There’s commercial support available for a fee.

I was reminded today of the Zeltser Cheat Sheets – short documents to walk you through the details of a particular topic like malware analysis or or indident response. Check them out at http://zeltser.com/cheat-sheets/

I also like the networking stack cheat sheets put out by Packet Life… check them out at http://packetlife.net/library/cheat-sheets/

See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356618,00.asp to read about why Google has decided to provide DNS services similar to OpenDNS.

Point your DNS Forwarder to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to try it out. Be aware this, like most things Google, is currently “experimental”.