New Products

Heroix just announced version 4 of Longitude, the firm's agentless performance monitoring and reporting software. The application is intended to monitor an enterprise's entire IT infrastructure, including OS, Web, database, J2EE, messaging, infrastructure, and user and business metrics, all out of the box and without agent software on monitored computers. New features in version 4 are a new centralized event monitor; a customizable, real-time statistics dashboard; expanded monitoring coverage to any SNMP-based device via a graphical studio; an archived report portal; and consolidation of Windows Event logs. Platforms monitored are Red Hat, SUSE Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Windows. A 14-day free trial is available at Heroix's Web site.

www.heroix.com

eZ Systems recently released version 3.9 of eZ Publish, the company's open-source, ready-to-run enterprise management system and framework. eZ Publish is an application for creating Web sites, on-line stores, intranets and extranets. New features in 3.9 include an intuitive front-end editor (Web site interface), enhanced shipping manager, extended LDAP user-group mapping, support for translating class attribute names and more. The product is available in either out-of-the-box or tailor-made solutions for the varying needs of clients. GPL'd Linux and Windows versions are available for download at the eZ Systems' Web site.

www.ez.no

In our community, Samba is the way to go to turn your Linux or UNIX system into a file-and-print server for Windows network clients. Now in its third edition, Using Samba is the book “officially adopted by the Samba team” says the publisher. Further, it “delves into the internals of the Windows activities and protocols to an unprecedented degree, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each feature in Windows domains and in Samba itself.” This third edition covers Samba 3.x features, such as integration with Active Directory and OpenLDAP, migrating to Samba from Windows NT 4.0 domains, delegating administrative tasks to non-root users, central printer management, virtual filesystem plugins and others.

www.oreilly.com

If battling botnets gives you nightmares, the new book Botnets: The Killer Web App may slay those pesky nocturnal dragons in your head. The book's mission is to arm you with useful information on botnets, zombie armies and bot herders, answering questions, such as “What are they? How do they spread? How do they work? How can I detect them when they don't want to be seen? What tools are available to fight this menace?” The main tools covered here are open source, with a focus on the network monitoring tool Ourmon.

www.syngress.com

We've been given the lowdown on Liferay's new version 4.2 of the Liferay Portal, an enterprise-class, open-source portal framework. One of the key features in the updated edition involves integration with the ServiceMix Java Business Integration engine, which acts as a single point of connection for disparate enterprise applications, simplifying the integration, upgrade and substitution of siloed applications, such as CRM, ERP and ECM. Additional new features include a jBPM workflow engine, an Ajax-based chat messaging solution, Alfresco integration and a new parallel portlet rendering engine. Liferay is available for download from the company's Web site.

www.liferay.com