Best of the blogs: Two datacenters. Two different cities. Two weeks time. No this is not some geek’s retelling of a Dickens novel. Instead, Paul Venezia is deep into APC hardware management. “On the plus side, I wrote several new tools and plug-ins to manage all of the APC gear that went into both sites with Nagios and Cacti,” he explains. The Nagios plug-in checks the most pertinent data on the ACRC and ACSC units, as well as the main sensors on the NetBotz units, and the load on each phase on the PDUs. Columnist’s corner: You knew it was a matter to be faced at some point, and that time might be now. Kill IM, or at least control it. “If you’re running e-mail and a working phone system in a general office environment, IM is a geek-toy luxury. Simple as that,” Oliver Rist espouses. The problem, though, is that plenty of, if not most, sites won’t fit into that “general office environment” to which Mr. Rist refers. For many a company IM is already entrenched whether by invite or not. “But you can’t ignore it. Ignoring just makes it worse tomorrow.” GripeLine: Unprepared for the overflowing anger many longtime Veritas customers have over what he calls its “ridiculous copy protection maze,” Ed Foster reports that “Symantec is forcing them to run.” Some of the company’s largest customers, in fact, are more than just a little hot under the collar. Businesses “tend to be far more tolerant of having to jump through a few hoops than your average consumer, so this level of frustration with Veritas licensing portal does indeed indicate something is very wrong.” Symantec owns Veritas licensing mess. The news beat: Symantec — speak of the devil — is finalizing its next major AV update, code-named Hamlet, and says that next month it will release the public beta schedule. Intel is laying off up to 1,000 people at its New Mexico fab. And Tibco scoops up SpotFire for its enterprise analytics software. Technology Industry