August 2002

Storage Consolidation — Part 2 — Product Selection

Peter Baer Galvin

Part 2 discusses product selection. There is quite a bit to consider about storage arrays, SAN switches, and tape drives and libraries. The wrong choices among those options could cause serious pain in your SAN down the road. (reprinted with permission from Sys Admin magazine.)

Review: BRU v17.0: Reliable Backup

Jon Holman

Holman determines whether v17.0 continues the tradition of reliable backup offerings from BRU.

Examining the CIW Server Administrator Exam

Emmett Dulaney

Dulaney examines the CIW Server Administrator exam (1D0-450), the second step in the journey toward certification as a Master CIW Administrator.

Linux and Windows 2000 Integration Toolkit: A Complete Resource

Ross Brunson

How complete is this "complete resource"? Find out in Dulaney's review.

Tool of the Month: MlView

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

Zonker looks at an XML editor/validator called MlView. MlView is an XML editor/validator that has some features that may be of interest to anyone working with XML documents.

Finding Broken Links with linkcheck.pl

Ed Schaefer

This month Bob Orlando submits Perl script linkcheck.pl to find and check broken links.

Storage Consolidation — Part 3 — Implementation Details

Peter Baer Galvin

Last month, Galvin's column discussed product selection. Storage arrays, SAN switches, tape drives and libraries, and replication all have options to consider and tradeoffs to weigh. This month, the rubber meets the road as Galvin's column addresses implementation. (reprinted with permission from Sys Admin)

Review: StarOffice 6.0

Marcel Gagné

Regular Expressions: Yes You Can

Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz

Review: A New Kind of Science

Joe Casad

Wireless Security Essentials: Defending Mobile Systems from Data Piracy

Russell Dean Vines

Writing a book on wireless security is like writing a book on safe skydiving — if you want the safety and security, just don’t do it.  Hard-wired (cabled) networks have been around for decades and they are still for the most part insecure.  Wireless networking (focusing on 802.11), which has been around for only a few years, is clearly an insecure technology.  With that, there is currently not a lot to write about when it comes to effective wireless security. Wireless Security Essentials: Defending Mobile Systems from Data Piracy confirms that there is little to say on this topic because although it is 345 pages in length, only about 75 pages deal with wireless security.  Of those 75 pages (pages 135 – 207), about 15 pages discuss vendor products. 

The Open Road: wget and Debian 3.0

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

This month, I talk about the wget utility and the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux release.

Host Hardening and Intrusion Detection -- The Open Source Way

Thomas Weeks

Security consists of multi-tiered hardening and monitoring methodologies that exist as outer shells of protection, and more central, inner layers. The outer shells consist of systems such as router configurations, firewalls, and Network Intrusion Detection Systems (or NIDS), which form common methods for securing and watching entire LANs or WANs. This article will examine and illustrate the implementation of the inner shells, or host-centric layers of server security.