All about recap and historical information

recap was started as a script known as rs-sysmon at Rackspace circa 2007/8. It was originally authored by Managed-Support System Administrators on the US (Austin, TX)-based M8 Linux team with Carl Thompson and Jacob Walcik and other then-members of the team as initial developers/contributors.

As of late 2012, the package known as rs-sysmon has been installed on (X (we need a count on this!)) dedicated servers and remained in a local RPM repository accessible only to Rackspace dedicated-servers.

With the growth of cloud-based servers, this package was wanted by Support System Administrators of our Managed Cloud team. The request was simply "Please make rs-sysmon available to Rackspace Managed-cloud servers."

With approval and code-review (many thanks to Benjamin Graham for pushing this process through!,) we were able to:

1- Rename rs-sysmon as recap:

1a- dropping 'rs' as code should hopefully outlast any company name (even though all Rackers hope that the Rackspace name will live forever!)

1b- dropping 'sysmon' as it wasn't really a system-monitor! A sysmon provides live-reporting; this tool was designed to recap previous events for further-troubleshooting. We thank Chad Wilson for the name suggestion! (the only other program found at the time was RECAP, a Firefox browser plugin used specifically for PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.

2- Release the code to github as an open-source project.

We hope that this code:

-will be developed by as many people as possible, and it continues to be developed for many years.

-will be picked up by EPEL and packaged for distribution as an RPM for RHEL and/or CentOS-based systems.

-will be picked up by other Linux distributions such as Debian-based, Gentoo-based, Pacman-based, Slackware-based, as well as others!