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Unlike the bad old days, modern hard disks are quite reliable. We use them in multitude on our workstations and servers. Standalone, RAID, SCSI, ATA… whatever configuration you may have, there is a common thread. Chances are, your hard disk is enabled with S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) This underutilized tool can improve your overall reliability, coupled with the right utilities.

Any way to increase your insight into a drives health is critical if you are concerned about uptime. According to a citation in Wikipedia from Seagate:

Mechanical failures, which are usually predictable failures, account for 60 percent of drive failure.

Distilling this idea to the core, all drives constantly monitor for an impending failure. In a user environment where reboots are a regular occurence, your bios may catch this failure in time. However, when using a unix/linux server, you will want to keep a watch on any hints from the drive. Enter Smartmontools.

In true Sourceforge nature, crossplatform instructions are included for smartmontools. This small utility simply polls your drives for any failure state indicators at specified time intervals. From here, you can instruct the daemon to log your events and issue notifications via email. Full instructions available on a superb writeup on Howtoforge.

Our friends from across the pond have been remaining true to the cross-platform community. Skype 2.0 for Linux has at long last been released.

The free favorite of the VOIP clients has finally upgraded its suite to include a missing feature. For years, both XP and OSX clients have included video capabilities. Now their Linux client has caught up. This is a huge win for the Linux desktop community. Based on the QT 4 gui library, the Skype for Linux client has a clean look that becomes integrated with modern desktop managers.

Being a regular user of Skype, I’ve come to rely on cost savings from computer-to-computer video calls. It has also been a lifesaver recently when hosting conference calls. The mingling of Skype-out and internet calls in a single conference is a beautiful thing. Oh, and who doesn’t love having extra euros on hand for those occasional land line calls? There has never been a better time to resurrect the aging workstation from your closet. Client processor requirements on Linux: 1GHz. Time to get that dedicated Skype box up and running.