By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published August 25, 2011
AMD set out to prove that through collaboration with platform vendors and today's multi-core processors, virtualization doesn't necessarily mean a performance penalty.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published March 01, 2011
If Sudo is part of your toolkit, and it should be, it's time to upgrade and start taking advantage of the new features in this latest version.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published February 28, 2011
Not everyone is comfortable with a command-line interface. If you're writing
scripts for users who prefer to work from a GUI, check out Zenity, a GNOME utility
that provides simple GUI dialogs from a shell script.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published February 22, 2011
The London Stock Exchange switches to Suse Linux, and the Financial Times asks
if this is indicative of a bellwether trend. A case of stalwart paper being behind
the time, or do some enterprises truly believe Linux is just for start ups?
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published February 21, 2011
Making a break from Microsoft Exchange? The groupware suite Open-Xchange looks good from a licensing and cost perspective, but how does it stack up from an end-user perspective?
By Kenneth Hess
| Columns Article Published February 17, 2011
SAN has many advantages over DAS in your data center. Here are 10 reasons to consider making the leap from local storage to a SAN.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published February 15, 2011
Microsoft and Nokia have teamed up in the hope of at last conquering the smartphone
market. Many are calling this a last ditch effort for both the phone maker
and the OS vendor to have any sort of presence in this complex market. Here's why the venture is likely to fail.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published February 14, 2011
Want a quick and easy way to write to system logs? Check out logger, an shell utility that works with syslog. Don't let its ease of use cause you to overlook its value.
By Amy Newman
| Columns Article Published February 10, 2011
VMware added a lane in its highway to the cloud with three new cloud provider partners and vCloud Connector, which bridges the private cloud to the public cloud.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published February 08, 2011
Wrap your arms around the five biggest changes in the latest release of Debian -- everything you need to know about version 6 of the open source server OS.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published February 01, 2011
Want to deploy Linux on your servers without pulling your hair out? There may
soon be an app for that. A consortium of Linux developers representing the major distros is developing an app installer system that will allow users from any distro to browse an application store, read ratings, and click on a button to download and install an application -- much like Apple's model.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published January 31, 2011
Having a working email system in place is key to the lifeblood of most system
administrators. Those looking beyond Outlook will find much to like in Mutt,
particularly OfflineIMAP, whose functionality is exactly as its name implies.
By Kenneth Hess
| Columns Article Published January 27, 2011
Security is the primary reason you should never consider deploying any these 10 workloads to a public cloud.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published January 25, 2011
Bye-bye, Xserve. Is the Cupertino gadget-maker getting ready to admit defeat
and axe its OS X Server product line altogether? A key indicator will be whether
a server edition of OS X Lion, the next version of OS X, is released this summer.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published January 24, 2011
Coming up with good passwords is never easy. Enter Pwgen, a utility that generates random (but pronounceable) passwords.
By Amy Newman
| Columns Article Published January 20, 2011
Dell and HP announced new software offerings designed to make managing virtual environments easier. Is the future for server manufacturers virtual?
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published January 19, 2011
2011 has only just begun, and already there is plenty going on in the world of OS software. From Apple OS X Lion to Microsoft Windows 8, here are the top 5 noteworthy OS developments.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published January 18, 2011
Initially developed to limit resource usage in the Linux kernel, cgroups can do much more than that. Unfortunately, as handy as they are, cgroups are neither straightforward nor user friendly. Scaling the learning curve to set up and manage them is well worth it, however. These basic tips will get you started.
By Kenneth Hess
| Columns Article Published January 13, 2011
If 2011 is 'The Year of The Cloud,' then it's time to get serious about cloud-based services. Will it be private cloud, public cloud, or a mixture of the two for your organization?
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published January 10, 2011
Cgrpoups is a feature initially developed to limit resource usage in the Linux kernel. But it can do much more, including tweak memory, bandwidth and CPU usage of system processes as well as deny access to system resources.
By Paul Rubens
| Columns Article Published January 04, 2011
As part of the sale of Novell to Attachmate, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC have done the unlikely: They've joined together under the CPTN banner to acquire more than 800 patents. Is the OSI right to be concerned that this could be the beginning of the end?
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published January 03, 2011
Yum Plugins make it easy to extend the open source tool's functionality. The security plugin and the priorities plugins are a great place to start.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published December 27, 2010
Yum is one of the most widely used package management tools, but many users don't know that Yum has a plugin system to extend its capabilities. Learn how to add some very useful features by extending this open source tool.
By Drew Robb
| Columns Article Published December 22, 2010
2010 was the year of the big box appliance. Oracle Exadata II, Oracle Exalogic and EMC Greenplum are but a few examples. IT historians, of course, will point out that this market was begun by such firms as Netezza and Teradata.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Columns Article Published December 20, 2010
Looking to avoid Cron? Hcron and the at utility are two tools that make it easy
to bypass Cron in favor of other open source software alternatives.