Sun Solaris 10 on AMD

With an OS long prized by government organizations like the US Navy, US Army, Air Force Research Labels, the Department of Defense and many others, Sun has listened and learned from its government customers. Solaris 10 11/06 incorporates Sun's most advanced security features to date, many of which have been optimized for AMD architecture.more...

Running MS Office and IE on Linux

Wine began its life in 1993 as a way to run Windows 3.1 applications in Linux. Wine may well have had the longest beta period in history at 15 years, however version 1.0 was recently released in June 2008.
In this article, I show you how to install Wine, Microsoft Office 2003, and Internet Explorer using my Red Hat derivative system (CentOS 5.1) as the host. You can give your system some Wine by compiling from source code, or by installing pre-compiled binaries from your distro’s repositories.

LDAP Authentication In Linux

This howto will show you howto store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. I will not show howto install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependant.

How To Set Up A Cisco Lab On Linux

After a quick search I found the wonderful Dynamips project that goes beyond what other simulators do by running actual Cisco IOS images, as well as the PEMU project which allows for running of Cisco PIX images. To integrate the various pieces of software...more.

Installing A FreeBSD 7.0 DNS Server With BIND

As FreeBSD is known as one of the most stable and reliable operating systems, I decided to publish some useful articles for it, mixing it with services we need on daily bases. This tutorial shows how to set up a FreeBSD based server that offers DNS services.

Connection testing with Perl

The script itself uses a series of commands to set up the socket, starts to LISTEN on that socket and sends the simple "You have connected" message to systems that connect to it, read more..

Getting Started With SSH

There are a few useful options you can pass to OpenSSH to increase your verbosity, compress and speed up your ssh connection, and change your SSH cipher to something faster and more secure;
'-v' switch. This option will allow you to see debug output for outgoing SSH connections. Specifying '-v' multiple times increases the verbosity level (maximum level 3).more...

Building and Installing PL/Perl

If the --with-perl option was supplied to the configure script, the PostgreSQL build process will attempt to build the PL/Perl shared library and install it in the PostgreSQL library directory.
Because PL/Perl is a shared library, the libperl library must be a shared library also. A Red Hat Database installation meets these conditions; however, if you use another PostgreSQL source and have problems, more...

Gentoo Perl Herd Guide

This document assumes a base understanding of general ebuild structure and techniques. For more information, please see the following link.

The new and improved Vim editor

If you've worked on IBM® AIX®, another flavor of UNIX®, or Linux®, you've more than likely used the vi editor. Since its conception in 1976, vi has become a staple for anyone wanting to edit files. How could someone make a more powerful editing tool than vi, you may ask? The answer is Vim, and this article provides details on the many enhancements that have made Vim a highly used and acceptable editor in the world of UNIX and Linux.

ANSI C with Unix

This book is intended as a sophomore level university text book. The coverage of subject material assues that the reader has a working knowledge of higher level languages in general and is familiar with a reasonable modern program development environment. The purpose of the book is to introduce those already familiar with programming to a more system-oriented language that provides the programmer with a greater degree of freedom (and therefore responsibility).

Class::DBI Intro

When working with databases there are several solutions on CPAN that deal with Object Oriented access to database tables that either avoid completely or minimize the use of SQL. Unfortunately most of these modules have a rather large learning curve, not necessarily the module itself, but all the precursors to it.more..

Solaris Network Administration Scripts

Here's a little script I was working on back in the college lab last month. I was facing a very trivial solaris administration problem. I've installed SXDE 1/08 on 120 systems in one of our biggest computer labs long back (more on how I did that later). Now I needed a way to do certain tasks on each of those systems like changing the boot order, changing the solaris GRUB splash image, setting the hostname for each system based on its current IP address...,more.

10 essential tricks for admins

Learn these 10 tricks and you'll be the most powerful Linux® systems administrator in the universe...well, maybe not the universe, but you will need these tips to play in the big leagues. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

OpenAFS installation on Debian

The purpose of this article is to give you a straight-forward, Debian-friendly way of installing and configuring OpenAFS 1.4.x, the recommended production version of OpenAFS for UNIX. By the end of this guide, you will have a functional OpenAFS installation that will complete our solution for secure, centralized network logins with shared home directories.

The importance of UNIX in SOA environments

These are exciting times in solution architecture . . . that is, if you embrace the challenges of learning and implementing technologies such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services, mash-ups, portals, and the like. For business executives, project managers, sales execs, and various resource managers, SOA and the myriad of new tools and technologies about which you must make immediate business decisions may seem impossible to keep up with. The goal of this article is to explain how...more.

Ext2 Disk Data Structures

The first block in any Ext2 partition is never managed by the Ext2 filesystem, since it is reserved for the partition boot sector (see Appendix A). The rest of the Ext2 partition is split into block groups, each of which has the layout shown in Figure 17-1. As you will notice from the figure, some data structures must fit in exactly one block, while others may require more than one block. All the block groups in the filesystem have the same size and are stored sequentially, thus the kernel can derive the location of a block group in a disk simply from its integer index. more...