Damn Yankees - Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Loved (and Hated) Team

In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut.

What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called "a Rubik’s Cube in his brain"? These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office.

The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—"feeling lucky"—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that "I begged him not to do this."

Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and realizes that a Senate candidate’s gaffe about baseball in a Massachusetts special election will dash the big dream of his first year.

In Alter’s telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more "points on the board" than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount.

Build real-world, end-to-end network monitoring solutions with Nagios

This is the definitive guide to building low-cost, enterprise-strength monitoring infrastructures with Nagios, the world’s leading open source monitoring tool. Network monitoring specialist David Josephsen goes far beyond the basics, demonstrating how to use third-party tools and plug-ins to solve the specific problems in your unique environment. Josephsen introduces Nagios “from the ground up,” showing how to plan for success and leverage today’s most valuable monitoring best practices. Then, using practical examples, real directives, and working code, Josephsen presents detailed monitoring solutions for Windows, Unix, Linux, network equipment, and other platforms and devices. You’ll find thorough discussions of advanced topics, including the use of data visualization to solve complex monitoring problems. This is also the first Nagios book with comprehensive coverage of using Nagios Event Broker to transform and extend Nagios.

• Understand how Nagios works, in depth: the host and service paradigm, plug-ins, scheduling, and notification
• Configure Nagios successfully: config files, templates, timeperiods, contacts, hosts, services, escalations, dependencies, and more
• Streamline deployment with scripting templates, automated discovery, and Nagios GUI tools
• Use plug-ins and tools to systematically monitor the devices and platforms you need to monitor, the way you need to monitor them
• Establish front-ends, visual dashboards, and management interfaces with MRTG and RRDTool
• Build new C-based Nagios Event Broker (NEB) modules, one step at a time
• Contains easy-to-understand code listings in Unix shell, C, and Perl

If you’re responsible for systems monitoring infrastructure in any organization, large or small, this book will help you achieve the results you want–right from the start.

David Josephsen is Senior Systems Engineer at DBG, Inc., where he maintains a collection of geographically dispersed server farms. He has more than a decade of hands-on experience with Unix systems, routers, firewalls, and load balancers in support of complex, high-volume networks. Josephsen’s certifications include CISSP, CCNA, CCDA, and MCSE. His co-authored work on Bayesian spam filtering earned a Best Paper award at USENIX LISA 2004. He has been published in both ;login and Sysadmin magazines on topics relating to security, systems monitoring, and spam mitigation.

Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Best Practices
CHAPTER 2 Theory of Operations
CHAPTER 3 Installing Nagios
CHAPTER 4 Configuring Nagios
CHAPTER 5 Bootstrapping the Configs
CHAPTER 6 Watching
CHAPTER 7 Visualization
CHAPTER 8 Nagios Event Broker Interface
APPENDIX A Configure Options
APPENDIX B nagios.cfg and cgi.cfg
APPENDIX C Command-Line Options
Index