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Now, before I go any further, let me make a few things clear:

• Spiceworks is an ad-supported program. By removing the ads, you are depriving the development team of their funding. In essence you are stealing the software from them.
• Spiceworks is not open source software. This means that you are not allowed to modify the code for your own uses.
• Removing the ads is probably illegal.

So, why am I posting this? Well, for a few reasons:

• I was having issues with the ads loading - they were timing out, making each page take 30+ seconds to load, and making the software somewhat unuseable.
• Many tech people have adblocker software that is blocking the ads already.
• This is to illustrate a point that I plan to make in an upcoming post.

That said - here is a quick way to remove the ads in Spiceworks. What tools do you need? Nothing. You need notepad, and the Windows Explorer.

An immediate observation I made when first looking at Spiceworks is that it is written in Ruby on Rails. All other things inside, that immediately indicated that somewhere, there was an .rhtml file which contained the layout code to include the ad block.

So, immediately, I performed a serach of the program directory, and found all the .rhtml files.

The two which you need to edit are:

• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_ads.rhtml
• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_sidebar.rhtml

To remove the ads, simply open both the above files in notepad. Remove all the contents from _ads.rhtml, leaving it completely empty. Remove everything within the “adbox” div tag.

If you would rather place your own ads in the sidebar, or the other content of your choice, perhaps links, or other content, you can also edit

C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\ads\adiframe.rhtml

replacing the contents within the tage with whatever you want to appear there. You could even place your own ads into the spiceworks install if you wanted.

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Now the point of this post is not to rant and rave about how good Spiceworks is like some cheap PR release, or paid post. Rather, in implementing Spiceworks, and seeing their architecture, and the unique way that they market themselves, it got me thinking about a few issues in Software development and marketing that I will flesh out a bit in my next few posts. But, I figured an introduction to the rpogram, and what it does is probably good background material…

At the beginning of the summer, my employer was thinking about setting up a type of network/system monitoring solution to keep track of the 50+ systems we ahve in our office and shop. We looked into a couple of options at the time, and started to set up IRM. IRM (Information Resource Manager) was a great program for what we needed, or so it looked. Of course, the setup was monstrous, with hours spent handbombing in information and data, copying CD-keys, tons and tons of work. We stuck with it for a few days, and finally put that project on hold due to other deadlines coming up etc. etc. etc.

Fast forward to yesterday. A friend of mine on an IRC channel a frequent sent me a link to Spiceworks.com. I looked at Spiceworks, and it is really slick - just need to download it and install it, and it automatically scans your network, picks up systems, determines which OS and software is installed, which services are running, etc. It alerts you to any problems in your network, monitors drives for space, or out-of-date antivirus information and more. Best of all, it’s free!

Actually, not true - the best thing is the Spiceworks is written in Ruby on Rails…

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