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By the way, you all should be using one-time passwords on public terminals, too. If you run Linux, install the S/Key PAM module. FreeBSD supports OTPs out of the box.

Learn from the Horses' Mouth

But Outlook has to stay. Primarily because no other application is able to do synchronization with PDA:s (both PocketPC and Palm devices) in a decent way. It's a shame that such a basic feature seems so hard to implement in OSS clients.

Mail is easy to replace. Exchange already supports IMAP, and throwing in an OSS IMAP-server (Cyrus for example) is a piece of cake. Tell everyone to configure Outlook to use the new IMAP-server and you're done.

Address book functionality _should_ work with an LDAP-server like OpenLDAP. Read this.

The calendar thing is the hard part. Outlook supports publishing iCalendar data via WebDAV and FTP, but that's just FREEBUSY-info wich Mozilla Calendar ignores, and Mozilla publishes complete iCal-events which Outlook ignores. Great. Sure, there are closed source plug-ins for Outlook that could do the job, but we're after a completely open source solution at the server end.

I think we're going to replace what we can anyway and just skip the calendar part right now. Hopefully some software will evolve that we can drop in for a complete calendar solution some time in the near future.

• Ultima Online 2
  
• Freedom Force
  
• Humongous's "Backyard Sports" series
  
• Disney's ToonTown
  

Bingo.

Don't think that O'Reilly doesn't know this either. Check out how many books, articles, and so forth they have published since OS X came out. I had the privilege a few months ago to have a sit down with the current editor of the Apple books, and from the way he talked it seems that O'Reilly is nothing short of ecstatic about the OS.

O'Reilly, IMHO, publishes by far the best books on the market. This is because they have excellent editors and scouts (for lack of a better word) to find very intelligent, very insightful people to write their books. I suggest people check out there dev sites more often; they are treasure troves of info

The O'Reilly Network

MacDevCenter.com

OnDotNet.com

OnJava.com

OnLamp.com

openp2p.com

osdir.com

Perl.com

XML.com

Comments down the page praising Prolog!

I have to use it every day and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out. It's too damn freaky and recursive. For example, finding a member of a list:

member(X,[X|T]).
member(X,[_|T]):-
member(X,T).

FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it. There's a lot of documentation available, and I thought I'd just share with you my experiences with FreeBSD.

Which version to install.
4.x or 5.0? 4.x is the stable series and 5.x is in development. It suffers of what's been called a chicken and egg problem described here. Think of 5.x as Linux 2.5 series. 5.1 when released(scheduled for release in june)to will be the start of the new stable branch. If you want stability choose 4.x. Bleeding edge? 5.0.

You can download the ISO's from here:

You generally only need to download the first ISO

Installation:
The installer is text based, but dont let it scare you off. The partition layout is a little different than what you may be used to but it's all described in the FreeBSD handbook here

The installation will leave you off with a pretty basic system and you're ready to install:

Ports
Ports is a very powerfull way of installing new programs and manage installed programs. You almost never run into dependency hell. A very powerfull tool to help manage ports is portupgrade. A short introduction is available here and to ports in general here

Documentation.
FreeBSD requires some time to get to know but the FreeBSD Handbook, provides a great introduction to FreeBSD. Sites also worth a visit is Freshports.org to keep you updated about new ports, and BSD dev center

If you give FreeBSD an honest try it will pay off. Most of the applications avalible for Linux also compiles on FreeBSD, and in general I find it more easy to find documentation, thus making it more easy to maintain.

FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it. There's a lot of documentation available, and I thought I'd just share with you my experiences with FreeBSD.

Which version to install.
4.x or 5.0? 4.x is the stable series and 5.x is in development. It suffers of what's been called a chicken and egg problem described here. Think of 5.x as Linux 2.5 series. 5.1 when released(scheduled for release in june)to will be the start of the new stable branch. If you want stability choose 4.x. Bleeding edge? 5.0.

You can download the ISO's from here:

You generally only need to download the first ISO

Installation:
The installer is text based, but dont let it scare you off. The partition layout is a little different than what you may be used to but it's all described in the FreeBSD handbook here

The installation will leave you off with a pretty basic system and you're ready to install:

Ports
Ports is a very powerfull way of installing new programs and manage installed programs. You almost never run into dependency hell. A very powerfull tool to help manage ports is portupgrade. A short introduction is available here and to ports in general here

Documentation.
FreeBSD requires some time to get to know but the FreeBSD Handbook, provides a great introduction to FreeBSD. Sites also worth a visit is Freshports.org to keep you updated about new ports, and BSD dev center

If you give FreeBSD an honest try it will pay off. Most of the applications avalible for Linux also compiles on FreeBSD, and in general I find it more easy to find documentation, thus making it more easy to maintain.

Winners were announced in three categories: Commercial for industrial/medical/transportation/other; Commercial for military/aerospace/COTS;

I second the vote for Python.

Python has already found a place in some high-schools - and has been a wild success. It's popularity exploded far quicker than they imagined. I became a python convert after about 20 minutes of following a few excellent tutorials one rainy sunday afternoon. I found myself writing incredibly useful little scripts for almost an entire week. Try it and you'll see how easy it is to learn. It should be a piece of cake for intelligent kids.

Other people have mentioned Visual Basic. Well, okay - but Visual Basic doesn't concentrate on the guts of the programming. Students are more likely to splat buttons down on a form than produce anything useful in terms of knowledge of program flow, code and algorithms. I should know - that was exactly what I did when I was learning (at the age of about 14, I'm now 26) - I found I did so much more with QuickBasic for DOS than I ever did with VisualBasic 1.0 (in which I'd sit there designing huge GUIs that I excessively tweaked, promptly lost interest in and never wrote any code for them).

Those who love UNIX (and UNIX-inspired operating systems) will surely adore Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger. For decades, a mysterious sect of bearded wizards has dominated the inner sanctums of our network infrastructures, inspiring the awe of onlookers by crafting clever scripts and piping output in ingenious ways most of us never even thought of. This small but marvelous book attempts to steer apprentice wizards in the noble direction of clever system administration, with examples taken from experience in O'Reilly's own LAMP networks.

The book begins with a refreshing introduction (by esr) detailing what it means to be a hacker. No, not the hax0ring w4r3z d00dz of frequent media attention, but the aforementioned bearded variety who spend most of their waking effort forging uncommon techniques for solving otherwise dull problems. Kudos to Mr. Flickenger (and O'Reilly) for not only acknowledging the difference, but celebrating it.

As the title would indicate, the audience of this book is the administrator in charge of a server--that is, a Linux box performing only a couple of dedicated tasks, probably of a network-oriented nature. Although Linux enthusiasts from the desktop realm are not part of the intended audience, they will almost certainly pick up a thing or two from the material anyway.

The book is organized into the following sections:

• Sever Basics is a variety of general purpose tips that don't fit into the other major categories. Some of the more interesting items include:
  • Persistent daemons with init
  • Building complex command lines
  • Using xargs with tricky arguments
  • Effectively using sudo
  • Makefiles for automating administrative tasks

  I think the real magic of this chapter isn't necessarily the tips themselves, but the creative process behind them; the author is demonstrating a methodology for dealing with common problems by introducing clever solutions. This will ideally inspire the reader to deal with other problems in the same creative manner.

• Revision Control. Servers with multiple administrators may benefit from using a revision control system to handle changes to configuration files. This section illustrates using RCS, with examples of checking config files in and out of the system. This provides a segway into using CVS for controlling revision of large software projects.
• Backups becoming a nuisance? Approach them from a new angle by implementing some of the tips from this chapter. Examples including automated incremental backups over tar, rsync, and ssh; archiving with pax; and even some very creative (if not a little scary) ideas like piping your backups over ssh directly into cdrecord. The UNIX philosophy is illustrated well: simple tools working well together as an efficient solution.
• The Networking chapter covers material that is no doubt already familiar to security-conscious Linux users. However, iptables newbies (or those transitioning from ipf or pf) will appreciate the netfilter primer and discussion of masquerading (NAT) and TCP port forwarding. Some tunneling and encapsulation techniques are also detailed here.
• Monitoring details the use of syslog, and a great deal more. Networking aspects are given ample attention, without any redundant information in respect to the previous chapter. Some simple tips are given (like using lsof to track down elusive processes) as well as more advanced ideas (like a short shell script to perform an IP fail-over.)
• SSH tips: are you still tapping out a password every time you hop to a new machine? If you administrate more than a few, this can be distracting and tedious. This chapter illustra

I can't wait! I've been following a series of articles that he wrote for O'Reilly OnLamp.com. (Like this one) Very well written, and they address practical stuff.

I'll leave that as a start.

I was waiting for the results of the NDP leadership vote here in Canada - my igloo has an ADSL connection, eh! ;^)

Ironically, this article just happens to show up on O'Reillynet on the same day. That seems just a little too tidy to me; I smell a conspiracy (or a script kiddy with right-wing political leanings)

It will read iTunes playlists. The server (open source, written in Perl) can be run on OS X, or on a Windows or *nix machine. No built-in wireless or amplifier, but it's the slickest and smallest component in my stereo setup now, at the cost of running an ethernet cable into the living room.

For me, the big advantage of the SliMP3 is the ability to interact with the large vacuum fluorescent display via a remote control from anywhere in the room. It would be less fun having to get up to read an LCD display (which looks tiny on the HomePod), or having to go to the computer to build a new playlist.

RTFA (the previous one)

There is something similar to this. It's called SpamShield, and it's a Perl module that watches for a big spike in incoming connections from a particular IP. I hope to get it set up soon on the mail server I help maintain. Further details at their website:

www.spamshield.org

and at this article on OnLAMP:

Spamshield: A Perl-Based Spam Filter for Sendmail

I couldn't get to article linked to in the story. found this one though that looks like the same thing.

Too bad unionfs won't be supported in Linux until the 2.7 kernel series.
Here is a good description of how unionfs works on BSD.
Basically, unionfs allows one or more directories to be superimposed over each other giving the appearance of just a single directory.

A good intro to IPv6 can be found here.

Heck you don't have to go that far, just read The Top 10 SANs vs. NAS Decision Factors by the author of the ORA book. Or sign up and read the book online at Safari.

Me too. :)

I work for a Fortune 50 (no, there isn't a 0 missing off that) company and we use PHP quite a bit internally. I also do some freelance web work in my spare time with a friend who is a designer with no coding experience, and even he can get the basics of an interactive site together using PHP (provided I go in afterwards and secure things afterwards - sorry, Joss!) :)

PHP is fast, easy to use, feature-rich and well documented. Development of most simple interactive pages almost feels like cheating because there's generally a built-in function for anything you need to do. Now with the availability of database abstraction and templating most of my old complaints about it have been addressed and I find myself working with it more than Perl.

But name anyone who makes money running a huge website (Slashdot excluded, they don't make money) with MySQL

At Boston.com, MySQL and other open source technologies are used extensively, both for our live site and for back end infrastructure. I, for one, am not worried about the company going out of business any time soon. In addition, we run third party software, both open source & proprietary, that is able to effectively use MySQL as a storage mechanism (in addition to Oracle, which we'd rather not shell out that much money for thankyouverymuch). And in the future we'll be making use of Zope -- open source, Python based content management software -- for much or all public web content.

I mean, you're kinda right to point out that a lot of people like pointy clicky Windows-ness in their software, and that's fine. But there are other ways to go about this, and those other ways can be *much* cheaper and *much* more trustworthy, if not being beholden to vendor control of buggy source code is an issue to you (and it should be). Even paying support contracts to some of the organizations supporting open source software you can still come out way ahead in your business expenses, *and* you have more control over what the software is doing, which itself is priceless.

You aren't going to install a new database just to run a website when you already have one.

Well that depends, doesn't it? What if the security risk of exposing your corporate database is a higher cost than you'd rather bear? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a deployment tier of cheap, expendable LAMP [ Linux / Apache / Mysql/PostgreSQL / Perl/Python/PHP ] servers sitting between your safe little intranet and the big, scary world out there? What if your big expensive mainframe database systems were set up a decade or more before it occurred to anyone that this stuff ought to be globally accessible over thw web? Again, wouldn't it be easier & safer to put up a cheap proxy tier that is designed to work well over the web rather than screwing around with the old internal system?

Again, I don't want to seem like I'm just trying to shoot down your argument. Your concerns are valid -- open source is not a panacea. But at the same time, it can play a very effective role, either as part of the overall picture [putting LAMP machines in front of the big Oracle / mainframe] or, if you're brave enough, as the whole of the overall picture. Such a decision isn't necessarily corporate suicide. If you've got the expertise -- and hey, any interested college or high school kid can start playing around with the professional quality open source stuff for free if they want to, so the pool of experience developers is big & growing fast -- then licensing costs and often-dangerous code obscurity falls out of the picture. It's doubleplus good :)

linuxinsider

linuxtoday

firstlinux

linuxsecurity

and somewhat linux related but definitely awesome...

oreilly's meerkat

oreillynet and not so much news but definitely up to date...

ONLAMP

Have you considered using FreeBSD Traffic Shaping? ("man ipfw").

here is a story to a problem that sounds identical to yours. A hosting company (using a virtual host) has a customer who uses exessive bandwidth, and they wish to throttle it. After trying mod_throttle, they went with a better solution.

If your not using FreeBSD, i am very suprised. Perhaps you should look into it.

D.

IPv6, Meet FreeBSD
Connecting to IPv6 with FreeBSD

Graham

If we assume for the moment that they had thought of consulting an attorney when they first embarked on this project, would it have made a difference? I mean, seeing as the DMCA didn't actually exist in '98, how could they have made some plan to defend themselves against prosecution under it.

This is addressed in the last part of the article:
(emphasis added)

Crittenden: We probably should have talked to a lawyer years ago to get an opinion on whether what we were doing was legal or not. I'm not sure how much it would have helped in this case. But it might have gotten us into a conversation with Blizzard much earlier, and perhaps in a less confrontational way.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Big_Scary_Daemons.html

Yep, that is the name of the page.

Michael Lucas lives in a haunted house in Detroit, Michigan

Maybe we could move the ghost to Seattle?

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

[SGL has a] script that locates the latest stable source code for the application, downloads it to your system, configures it for your machine, compiles, and installs it. Pure magic.

Sounds familiar...

C-X C-S

O'Reillynet Published a great article on IPv6 on FreeBSD recently. I'd be surprised if there aren't similar things for Linux.

good article here. not a goatse link. really.

The article makes quite an interesting read. I enjoyed reading it, and if you want even more information, read this.

Here's a printer and human friendly version, for those of you, who don't like half-screen animated ads inside the text you try to read.

A GUI front end does exist and it is quite easy to use. Check out this article by Dru Lavigne.
A Look Through the Ports Collection

OpenBSD is a good solution for anyone with a 486 and 8MB RAM. It is fairly simple and easy to use. (If you are familiar with Unix).
You can find all kinds of examples of how to set one up like here.
Older distro's used IPF, but as of 3.0 they use pf. You can read about pf here.

OpenBSD has gone 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. Pretty impressive.

But hey, only use it if you are SERIOUS about security AND don't want to pay anything.
Although you should consider helping fund the project out of the kindness of you ./ heart...;-)

Interesting that not one of the competition winners seems to be involved in the QM effort - and it does not look to me as if QMTest uses many of the ideas from the original testing entries (Disclaimer: I did read them all, but it was a long time ago).

Projects like this need a good communicative leader and as far as one can tell from the (old) web site things changed a great deal when Greg Wilson had to step down.

It does look as if CodeSourcery are keen to make a buck out of their involvement; perhaps it should be regarded as a win for open source software that some projects have been spawned away from the Software Carpentry umbrella. There's an article here: Software Carpentry Spin Offs

There's a good article at onlamp that talks about where all the IP's went and why things have gotten so stingy. A sad story about misallocation in the early days of the net (do companies like GE or Xerox really need 16 million addresses?)

It sounds like Russ Mitchell is airing intraoffice politics to the world. Perhaps there is more than one agenda here. However, the high profile of Wired make his gripe a point worth addressing.

Michael Lucas did this quite well in his recent article on Selling BSD (as an idea) to managment. The short of it is to behave well and act mature even if you're not.

Perhaps this is a call to raise the bar on the various "Certified [RH/SuSe/etc] Engineer" exams. I know more than one MSCE that nearly earned a free trip down the stairs. I'd hate to see that start happening to the corresponding Linux techs.

Exactly. The *BSD's do exactly the same thing with their Linux compatibility layers. All the code behind that is BSD-licensed, not GPL'd.

There's an excellent set of articles at the O'Reilly Network on just how they accomplish this.

802.11b transmits at 2.4 GHz, the same spectrum as microwave ovens. The cards use less power than a mobile phone. Cisco warns that their PCMCIA card should be more than 2 inches from your body, and the access point's antenna should be at least 6 inches away from anyone. I hold my laptop on my lap. (That is where the name came from, after all.) If I get cancer on top of my right thigh, I know who to blame.

it's amazing how many questions can be answered just by reading the article...here is what you are looking for. and toronto? why, that's where the maple leafs are from!

The O'Reilly network has coined a term that they call LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python. See this article on the O'Reilly network for more information. Understanding the applications mentioned under this monika seem to me to be essential to a being a web programmer these days.

This very obviously is an extension of wrong-minded approach to managing content online. The future is in client-side transformations and page construction, lightening the load on servers (so anyone can run one) and making caching mechanisms more effective. XSLT is one method of doing this. Mozilla is working on TransforMiiX, Internet Explorer has MSXML, and Galeon uses Daniel Veillard's excellent libxslt for transforming stuff on the client-side. Using the document() function lets any XSLT stylesheet basically get parts of the complete page from all over the web and compile them into one document on the client side. Doing this work on the server side not only doesn't improve the oh-so-basic LAMP method of dynamic web service; it actually pins people down to a specific server capability that is rare, immature, and ultimately useless.

The poster who pointed out the relatively new O'Reilly OnLAMP site hit the crux of the matter, in my opinion. Tim O'Reilly's more interested in driving and promoting promising new technologies than creating them. (I suspect that's why the company has invested in Digital Creations, the people behind Zope.)

On the other hand, the Python, Java, and Perl advocacy (with books and conferences) are dedicated to promoting existing technologies. Either way, it seems that Tim's focus is on evangelizing good technology.

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