Unix News

FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL, more ...

AIX provides a vast array of commands to handle user and group management. This article discusses some of these core security commands and provides a list that you can use as a ready reference. The behavior of these commands should be identical in all releases of AIX.

This tutorial explains how to install Django on a Debian Etch server. Django is a web framework that allows to develop Python web applications quickly with as much automation as possible. I will use it with Apache2 and mod_python in this guide.

Have you ever needed a software RAID solution for a low-end server install? Perhaps you've wanted your workstation to take advantage of the redundancy provided by a disk mirror without investing in a hardware RAID controller. Has a prior painful configuration experience turned you off software RAID altogether on Unix systems? more ...

Ever wonder why your computer doesn’t give you a hug? How about a slap on the back for a job well done? Computers have evolved over time to become effective and efficient tools, even integral parts of our daily lives. Yet there is one vital component missing—the human touch. read more..

Like almost all things in life, good security costs good money. It has to be that way, because there are simply not enough skilled security specialists to look after all of the networks that need their attention. An unfortunate result of low supply and high demand is the migration of highly skilled personnel to clients who can meet their salary requirements. This leaves a lot of small and underfunded networks in the hands of less experienced administrators, who might not know how to design, configure, and monitor these networks' safety mechanisms, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from unscrupulous people looking for inside information, free warez storage, zombie hosts for DDoS attacks, or systems they can simply destroy for fun of doing it, more ...

This lecture will be about firewalls and related functions, starting from a little theory along with a number of examples of filtering and other network traffic directing. As in any number of other endeavors, the things I discuss can be done in more than one way. Under any circumstances I will urge you to interrupt me when you need to.

If you develop device control applications on different platforms, you know that Windows and Linux have different ways of doing device control, and migrating applications from one to the other can be a pain. In this article , we analyze how device control works in both operating systems, examining everything from architecture to system calls and focusing on the differences. We also give you a migration sample (in C/C++) to demonstrate the migration in detail.

This is a tutorial on using Perl's warn and die signals. It is based on a post I made some time ago, here, but covers more of the details and raises more of the pitfalls. In this tutorial I attempt to separate the warn and die signals from the OS signals, explain how they are used and what they can be used for, and explore the problems that can come up. At the end you will find a list of additional documents you should read. Note that I write this under the risky assumption that you are using Perl 5.6. This does not exclude you if you have an older version of Perl, as I believe everything holds for Perl 5.0 with the exception of -W and the warnings pragma

The new standard in wireless networks--802.11g--offers speed, security, and performance. It is also the most widely employed standard in corporate internal wireless LAN networks. You can transfer data at up to 54Mbps using 802.11g (which is five times the speed of older 802.11b wireless networks). And wireless LANs provide some obvious benefits: they always provide on-network connectivity, they do not require a network cable, and they actually prove less expensive than traditional networks. Wireless networks have evolved into more affordable and logistically acceptable alternatives to wired LANs. But to take advantage of these benefits, your wireless LAN needs to be properly secured. more ...

Everyone knows that you should be behind a firewall whenever you go online. However, not everyone knows that it's easy to create a personal firewall for a FreeBSD (or PC-BSD or DesktopBSD) system. This article shows how even a casual home user can get a firewall up and running in about ten minutes.

Since kernel 2.6.17 there is support for a new type of SD/MMC card reader. I had trouble initially to get it working. It seems to be quite often in notebooks and is built by at least Texas Instruments, Ricoh and Toshiba. read more...

The Unix system is itself logically divided into two pieces, the kernel and the utilities. The Kernel is the heart of the Unix system and resides in the computer's memory from the time the computer is turned on and booted until the time it is shut down. read more..

These tutorials will cover some of the basic commands which are common to most of the Unix shells available and some applications. Thus, when you are finished with these tutorials, you will be able to interact with any Unix system as seamlessly as if you had a windowing system available to you.

There may be little that's new about using Jumpstart to install Sun servers, but setting up a new jumpstart server is something that I do rarely enough that I want to make the process simpler and more reliable. more ...

Technically, this script could be used for any server which accepts connections over telnet (Which this script is set up to use, even though I'm pretty sure I fought the good fight arguing against it). read more..