mysqlreport makes a friendly report of important MySQL status values. mysqlreport transforms the values from SHOW STATUS into an easy-to-read report that provides a much more in-depth understanding of how well MySQL is running. For this and many other reasons, mysqlreport is a better alternative (and practically the only alternative) to manually interpreting SHOW STATUS.

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Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

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Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. If you and your friends, family or business contacts are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. You can even call landlines and mobile phones at really cheap per minute rates (and there’s no setup or subscription fee).

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