November 2003
Brian GollsneiderAvocent has a history of making products that get the job done with no fuss. The SwitchView 4-port USB KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch and the SwitchView IP (KVM over IP) products reviewed in this article certainly continue this tradition.
Emmett DulaneyAre you unable to stomach the cost of purchasing and managing Microsoft's latest version of Exchange Server? Do you want GroupWise functionality, but don't want to use NetWare just for that? Do you want to convert to a totally Linux shop, but are uncomfortable with the thought of devoting your life to sendmail? Stalker Software's CommuniGate Pro messaging server is the answer you're looking for.
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierI tend to categorize tech books in one of four categories — excellent, adequate, poor, and so horrible you'll want to bludgeon the author. Intrusion Detection with Snort, which is part of the "Bruce Perens Open Source Series" from Prentice Hall, achieves adequate, but could have been better with a little more detail. This is what you'd call a concise look at Snort. The book contains only seven chapters and five appendices.
Ed SchaeferWiley Publishing has published Mastering Shell Scripting, by Randal K. Michael, under their Wiley Professional List — Practical and reliable resources for IT professionals. The author, a Unix administrator for Coca-Cola Enterprises, shares his 10 years of varied systems administration and shell scripting experience solving real world problems
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierThis month, I want to cover programs — the first is a program called Powertweak Linux, which allows the user to tweak system settings and view information system information. The second program is the XFce Desktop Environment. I've been using XFce off and on for a number of years now, but I'm really hooked on XFce 4.
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierThe Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) 2.3 is in the final stages of approval, so I wanted to take a look at the new FHS and see what's in store. If you're unfamiliar with the FHS, it is a standard that suggests a general filesystem layout for Unix-type systems, including Linux distributions and *BSDs. Since I am primarily a Linux user, I tend to approach this from the Linux perspective, but it would be nice if both Linux vendors and *BSDs were to adhere to a single standard.
Adam DenenbergIn today's economy, monitoring devices via SNMP is crucial to determining where bottlenecks may exist, and where we may have placed too much capacity. Many network-monitoring tools have evolved to handle SNMP data, but these have all been based around the work of one tool -- MRTG. MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) allows you to visually graph and trend anything imaginable out of SNMP, no matter what the data represents. MRTG has been around for about a decade, and most systems or network engineers are probably graphing something with it. While MRTG is an important tool, RRDTool (another tool written by the author of MRTG), is going to be the main focus of this article.
Emmett DulaneyTechnology is constantly evolving and bringing with it a requirement for new skills and abilities. With the purpose of certification being to verify that an individual has an authenticated level of acumen/proficiency, there is never an end to the stream of new certifications that vendors release or update. This month, the focus is on new and upcoming certifications that should be of relevance to UnixReview readers. There are three distinct categories: engineer-level, desktop, and security certifications. I'll follow the discussion of each category with a few predictions on what I see coming down the pike.
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierThe old adage "don't judge a book by its cover" is a good one, but what about judging a book by its cover blurbs? Sometimes a perfectly fine book is out of sync with its marketing materials, and therefore proves to be somewhat of a disappointment to those who purchased it after reading the description on Amazon or glancing at the cover while in their favorite bookstore. This is the case with Linux Power Tools, which seems to promise a guide for Linux experts seeking more power. (It helps if you imagine Tim Allen's voice saying that last bit.) The back cover notes that the book targets intermediate to advanced users who have "mastered the basics and are itching to go beyond." Instead, it's a perfectly good guide to basic and some intermediate Linux topics that would be a great addition to any budding Linux geek's library. But it's not a book for power users by any stretch, nor will it show you how to "supercharge your Linux system."
Cameron LairdRead this book. Think of it this way — programmers and administrators partition themselves into two sorts: those who regard testing as second-class work, and those who need ammunition against the first. Testing Extreme Programming does the best I know for opening the eyes of the former and offers plenty of practical value the latter can apply immediately.
Ed SchaeferThis month, Scott Rochford presents his Perl script dispus. This personal productivity tool simpifies disk traversal and space usage analysis.
Emmett DulaneyI'm often faced with the need to test new software and often new operating systems for compatibility and reliability before taking them live. I have a limited budget so I'm usually create a test environment from pre-existing equipment. Disheartened at the prospect of starting from scratch for each new installation and permanently wiping out what's already there, I now rely on partition managers to provide the flexibility to create test environments.
Randal L. SchwartzHow fast does your Perl run? I hope that, most of the time, the answer is "fast enough". But sometimes it may not be. How do we speed up a Perl program? How do we know what's making it unacceptably slow?
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