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Mapserver  is probably the most popular Open Source web mapping platform (even though Geoserver is getting much of the limelight nowadays). One of the advantages that Mapserver has against Geoserver is that its configuration is pretty easy because it consists of a flat text file (Geoserver instead uses a xml-backed repository). Because of this kind of repository managing a Geoserver farm becomes complicated when changes have to be replicated across all hosts and the services restarted to pick up the changes. To address this issue there have been recent efforts to build a multi-master replication mechanism plugged into Geoserver. While this is pretty cool (and it's done by an Italian company of which of course I'm proud of, being an Italian myself) I think it's even cooler to see how easy it is to manage Mapserver configuration files in a similar cluster environment. The Mapserver setup is as follows: a cluster of mapserver servers serving WMS through a number of ma...

I have written and would like to share with the world a groovy script that can be used to drive VCB backups without additional third party software. One of the most common gripes with VCB is that it doesn't integrate naturally into the VMWare management solution. Of course one can always buy a license for the integration module of his backup software, but that costs additional money. Some people then resort to script VCB so that additional licenses are not necessary but that, of course, requires scripting skills. Which also means reinventing the wheel just another time. This has happened to me too recently and I decided that ok, I would reinvent the damn wheel, but this time I would also make sure that the blueprint goes public! So I wrote this groovy script which I creatively named Simple VCB which does some nice things like: handles more than one esx, vcenter or vsphere server so that you don't have to split your configuration and schedules in more than one scrip...