Software Developed at Kiva Networking

During the heyday at Kiva Networking, which was about 1997-2002, open source software development was something encouraged for the system administrators. Several programs where made for use by Kiva internally and also by other people on the net. Most of the programs where written by Matt Liggett, Chris Dent and Adrian Hosey and released on a website called Systhug.

Some of the notable programs

• McFeely - By Matt Liggett. A remote job queuing system mainly for safely running commands remotely from an automated setup. The name came from the mailman in the children's show 'Mister Rogers Neighborhood'. Mark Krenz is working on a replacement for McFeely called Newman.

• Kiva::User - By Adrian Hosey. This was a set of modules written in Perl that allow for turning system accounts and other attributes into software objects. The objects can then be compared and automatically inject jobs into mcfeely to ensure that something has happened to bring an object to a certain state. This was used to do administrative tasks on users at Kiva like create users, disable them, change their type, etc.

• mod_extract_forwarded - By Adrian Hosey. This is a module for Apache that reads the X-Forwarded-For header that may be added to a web request by a web proxy and makes that available as an environment variable or as a logging option to mod_log.

• Tkload - By Chris Dent. A program that graphically shows the load average on several un*x based systems at once on your X desktop.

External links

• Systhug website (used to be at www.systhug.com until the domain expired)