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Welcome
Welcome to a new site, designed to provide information and interviews with Linux Professionals.
Linux Server Security
Frequently you will hear about how secure Linux is as an operating system. Although a lot of the security of the OS comes from the many eyes examining the code and the strong developer spirit that means software is frequently updated and improved, it doesn’t automatically mean that Linux is automatically secure out of the box.
You still need to ensure some good basic security practices and principles. If you are securing specific applications and services then there are still steps to follow, other software to install and some tricks and traps for the unware. All of this is covered in detail in Linux Server Security, by Michael D Bauer.
A review of the book that I did for Free Software Magazine has just reached the Free Software Magazine website.
Regular Expression Recipes, by Nathan Good
I’m a regular expression junkie - I think one of the main reasons I love Perl so much is because it’s just so darn easy to go ahead and regexp either with a substitution or match to get the information I want. It certainly makes certain parts of my job easier. Getting them right though can be difficult, so it’s great to see this book using regular expressions by Nathan Good, which I reviewed recently for Free Software Magazine.
The book is excellent and well worth buying if you use regular expressions frquently in your applications. You can read the full review on this link, or simply buy the book on Amazon.com.
The review recently made it to the front page of the magazine, and is now free to be read by non-subscribers.
More on free and open source software
Following on from my recent post about using the right terms for FOSS two articles have popped up at O'Reilly.
The first What is Free Software?, unsurprisingly answers the questions about what free software really means. There's also a full discussion of the introduction of open source into the conciousness.
The other article looks at ways in which you can encourage Open Source Advocacy in the Enterprise. There are some good points made here, including how the secuurity and stability can be a good way of encouraging their use, and how to go about finding suitable alternatives.
StarOffice 8
In case you missed it, StarOffice 8 has been released.
I'm still downloading my trial copy at the moment (I have a CD on its way), but based on previous experience it should be impressive. As somebody who sits in Word processors of various kind (including Word, OpenOffice/StarOffice and my favourite for online work oXygen which happens to natively support DocBook and transformations into PDF and HTML).
StarOffice means I can spend more of my time in one application, while still keeping the Office compatibility that my publishers like.
FOSS: using the right terms
Despite what my desk looks like this morning, I am generally a very tidy and organized person. I have folders everywhere, physical and logical, and I'm fairly fastidious about where I file my stuff.
That's why I hate it when people use incorrect terminology to describe things. I know we all do it; I've done it myself in situations where the line is not distinct, but in anything that I've written of article length or greater (I'll excuse blogs), I like to get things right.
The problem in the free and open source community people frequently use the wrong term.
So I was interested to see this post by Eric Boutilier on the new FOSS.IN Conference. In short, the story behind the post that they have changed the name of an open source conference in India, and then then mis-represented what Linux and FOSS is with some of the website descriptions. Including the classic that Eric mentions:
Migrating from commercial software
I'm sure we all remember the colourful discussion on Exchange and open source alternatives (start here for my final post on the topic) that took place between myself and Alex Scoble just a few weeks back.
Lots of interesting comments, from both sides, came out from that discussion, and like all good debates there were no real winners.
Now, there's another active conversation (I use the term loosely) on the topic taking place on Slashdot after the release of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Inevitably some of the same topics are coming up - including the down, and up, sides of Exchange's data model, hardware requirements and flexibility. All of them come with fiarly good comments on observations from both sides of the fence.
Attitudes to Rita = attitudes to IT management
Thankfully the damage caused by Rita was not as significant as people had feared. It has caused huge amounts of damage in some regions, but compared to the damage that was feared had it hit Houston.
What was interesting is the response from the people this time to get out of the the areas most likely to be affected. I have however seen a few interesting comments from those who stayed, including the statement from one woman who said that the potential threat was overrated and that she was glad she had stayed. Especially compared to having to spend hours in queues of cars getting out of, and then back into, the city.
Get up to speed on Grids
I love grid technology; I've been using it for years without really knowing what it was, and now I spend part of my time explaining to people how it can best be used and hot to develop grid based applications.
Sometimes explaining the benefits is difficult, often explaining the fundamentals is even more complicated because the basics of how the grid system works is completely different to how we have been using computing power for the last 30 years.
In reality of course it is only an evolution of the computing technology that is available. In the early days we used monolithic mainframes, then we moved to desktops, through client server, and we've even dabbled in terminal services (something I pondered about earlier this week).