09-01-2010 in Tightwad Tech by admin
Synopsis:
In this episode Mark and Shawn are joined by Tabrez Syed and Cole Lakes of Spiceworks to discuss their suite of enterprise IT tools. Mark and Shawn also answer some listener feedback by giving a rundown of some of their favorite podcasts.
Links:
TIPS:
Tech Tip of the Week – DVDFlick – a simple, yet powerful DVD authoring tool
Teacher Tip of the Week – Scuptris – a free 3D Sculpting Software that uses "digital clay."
The Tightwad Tech is a podcast by and for those in the education field who face ever-growing demands and ever-shrinking budgets. We discuss the strategic implementation of free and open source software as well as the creative deployment of hardware.
In this show, aimed at making desktop Linux approachable and understandable to the average computer enthusiast, a panel of Linux experts and Linux newbies discuss the the joys and pitfalls of Everyday Linux.
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Thanks to Mark and Shawn for talking to Tabrez and I about Spiceworks. I just wanted to leave a note and mention that we are always open to feedback and love hearing from users. You can reach me in the community at http://community.spiceworks.com/profile/show/Cole%20%28Spiceworks%29.
Again, we recommend just downloading the app from http://www.spiceworks.com and trying it out. It's free, we promise.
We went and downloaded Spiceworks right after we recorded the show, and have been poking at it for a few days now. It's pretty impressive. We'll probably do a full review of it in a future episode. Thanks, Cole.
Thanks for coming on Cole. I did the initial install and really liked what I saw. The community is a great value add. You can find me at: http://community.spiceworks.com/profile/show/TightwadTech
There is a thread that asks what people's favorite podcasts are. I added us to that list. Feel free to swing by and give us a vote if you get the chance. The thread is here: http://community.spiceworks.com/spice_list/show/171?page=2
One of the things that wasn't emphasized so much are the amazing reports you can create in Spiceworks. Customizable and can be created for anything… tickets, users, inventory, software, whatever. Can be printed or exported as a spreadsheet, pdf. And the community, in my opinion, is just as good and maybe better than sites like Experts Exchange. I know they couldn't come out and say it on the show. I like the ads. Oh, and moving Spiceworks from one computer to another is just as easy as running the exe on the new computer, and moving files from the old computer to the new computer. Drag and drop.
The most useful function my iPad has is accessing Spiceworks. Not slighting the iPad…. it gets used extensively.
Hail King Leo. Trust your Technolust. Hak5 is on Revision3, not TWiT. Not being an elitist or anything.
I want to hear about phpVirtualBox. I think I might get away from my lovely ESXi's with vSphere.
Leslie, I’m pretty sure I mentioned that Hak5 wasn’t on the TWIT network, but I don’t think I said Revision3 specifically.
Wow, I just Googled PHP VirtualBox. It looks awesome. I’m a big fan of VirtualBox, and this remote management looks very cool. We’re using VMWare Server all over the place right now and are very happy about it.
I’m actually moving *toward* ESXi primarily because of its RAM data de-duplication capability. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be sticking with vbox.
Thanks for the great podcast.
Some feedback on your site:
Good
I like the look and feel.
Bad
The forum dose to work for me. I setup and account this went OK. Did not understand the group thing. I joined a group so I could post my message. Then I spent 10 min righting my message clicked submit and some message came up. There was nothing I could do nothing to click on. The only thing I could do was click back. My message was lost and I was logged out. I tried logging in and it did not work. I had the right user name and password. I got frustrated and gave up.
All I wanted to do was leave a simple message. For me a forum is a lot simpler solution.
Not trying to dump on you. Love everything except the forum.
Mike, I’m not sure what your issue is/was, but there is a forum post from you. So you did manage to get something up there.
Sorry for the horrible spelling. Can you add the ability to edit your comments.
Thanks
I’ve just added a plugin that should allow users to edit their own posts, provided they do it within 30 minutes of the original post time.
It was my second post that did not work. Not sure if my login timed out. What is the timeout time?
I think the standard PHP time is 10 minutes of inactivity. I’d have to check to be sure.
I deleted my account and created a new one. I will see if this fixed the problem. Thanks for the help
A note about the Spice Works url. Make sure you go to http://www.spiceworks.com and NOT http://www.spicenetworks.com. I worked for a company a few years ago. I had heard about spice works, but could not remember the exact url. Until I found the correct url, I had some explaining to do to my boss. After he saw the correct url he understood, and I got to keep my job. Love the software, about to set it up for GISD.
great software … really saves lots of time …
don’t know what else to say other then try it and see … I just wish that my server that I have it installed on was a bit more robust and didn’t have fails every other week… don’t think that it’s the software … it’s all in my faulty hardware.
I hope that they some how figure out how to put it on a linux host … i would be much happier