Passive Checks and NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor)
(Nov 22, 2008, 04:33 UTC) (9 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Packt: "Nagios also offers a tool for sending passive check results for hosts and services over a network. It is called NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor). It can be used to send results from one Nagios instance to another. It can also be used by third-party applications running on different machines to send passive check results to a central Nagios server."

The Sound of Empire Falling
(Nov 21, 2008, 22:03 UTC) (1255 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
Armed and Dangerous: "I predicted years ago that what would eventually do Microsoft in was white-box PC makers defecting because they needed to claw back profit margin as the Windows license became the largest single item in their bills of material. And here’s the confirmation I've been awaiting:"

Red Hat Fedora Linux: 9.5 Million Users and Growing
(Nov 21, 2008, 21:17 UTC) (548 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
InternetNews: "Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution has now tallied its user base, and it's a number that on the surface would make it the largest installed base of any Linux distribution, with at least 9.5 million users and possibly as many as 10.5 million. Fedora competitor Ubuntu Linux currently claims to have 8 million users."

5 Ways To Beat The IT Budget Blues
(Nov 21, 2008, 20:33 UTC) (398 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Ken Hess's Linux Blog: "These desperate times call for desperate measures but don't worry these measures aren't nearly so desperate and they just might help you fix that ailing IT budget. All you need is a little creative thinking and some good people behind you--and these 5 things (in order of importance)."

A Graphical Way to MySQL Mastery
(Nov 21, 2008, 18:03 UTC) (745 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "MySQL GUI Tools is a suite of graphical desktop applications for working with and administering MySQL servers. The suite consists of three tools: MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Migration Assistant (available only on Windows). We'll look at the first two to see how well they let us manage MySQL without using the command line."

Final Judgment in SCO v. Novell: SCO Loses Again
(Nov 21, 2008, 16:33 UTC) (1426 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Groklaw: "The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last."

Deploy on Linux or Stay With XP - Hasta la Vista
(Nov 21, 2008, 15:03 UTC) (1624 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
Computerworld: "One of the goals of the survey was to examine the influence of SharePoint and the Microsoft stack on the open source community."

Mandrake Linux Founder Back With a Virtual Desktop
(Nov 21, 2008, 14:03 UTC) (1017 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
InternetNews: "Whatever happened to the founder of Mandrake Linux? He's back on the scene with a new open source startup and looking to break some ground with its first offering called a Virtual Desktop solution."

Open Source 101: An Executive Guide to Open Source
(Nov 21, 2008, 13:03 UTC) (731 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
CIO: "The success of open-source software has been remarkable, forcing even the largest commercial software vendors such as IBM , Hewlett-Packard , Oracle and Microsoft to acknowledge its influence and, in some cases, adopt its methods. It seems likely that most companies with information technology departments of any size are familiar with - if not actively using - open-source products on a daily basis."

U of Tennessee Blocked P2P Sites Before RIAA Law
(Nov 20, 2008, 22:33 UTC) (601 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
CNet Digital Media: "Truth be told, the state of Tennessee didn't need a lot of prodding from the recording industry to pass a law that requires universities and colleges to filter for unauthorized music downloads."

Speed up Your Internet Access Using Squid's Refresh Patterns
(Nov 20, 2008, 22:03 UTC) (1141 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux.com: "Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth."

How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go?
(Nov 20, 2008, 17:33 UTC) (819 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
OStatic: "While I remain in agreement with many observers who see the economic downturn as potentially very positive for open source, I have to wonder whether we're going to see some of the leadership open source companies swallowed up in all the financial carnage."

Some Open Source Attacks on Windows May be Unfair
(Nov 20, 2008, 16:33 UTC) (1766 reads) (5 talkbacks) (feedback)
ZDNet: "Over the course of a month Apple’s downtime was 2 minutes, putting them in the middle of the pack. Microsoft's? An hour and 19 minutes. This proves what, exactly?"

Linux Distros and Apple Beat Microsoft's Homepage Uptime
(Nov 20, 2008, 16:03 UTC) (1357 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Royal Pingdom: "All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month."

Linus Torvalds' Old Company Acquired and Gone
(Nov 20, 2008, 15:33 UTC) (1710 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
TGDaily: "The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linux Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta’s journey is over."

Apple's New MacBooks Have Built-in Copy Protection Measures
(Nov 20, 2008, 15:03 UTC) (1369 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
AppleInsider: "The Intel-developed technology is called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and aims to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across a variety of display connectors, even if such copying is not in violation of fair use laws."

Ulteo Unveils the First Open Source Virtual Desktop
(Nov 20, 2008, 08:03 UTC) (1355 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Ulteo: "Following its commitment to desktop virtualization solutions, Ulteo, an Open Virtual Desktop Infrastructure company, announced today that they were releasing the first installable version of their Open Virtual Desktop solution for enterprises."

Authenticate Linux Clients with Active Directory (Technet)
(Nov 20, 2008, 04:03 UTC) (1180 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LWN: "Microsoft's Technet Magazine has a lengthy article on authenticating Linux clients with Active Directory. "Originally, Linux (and the GNU tools and libraries that run on it) was not built with a single authentication mechanism in mind. As a result of this, Linux application developers generally took to creating their own authentication scheme."

Tip: Simple Regular Expressions For Reviewing Log Files
(Nov 20, 2008, 01:33 UTC) (1266 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LinuxPlanet: "LinuxPlanet Classics: With a few simple regular expressions you can quickly search your logfiles for problems, nasties, and even good news. These regexps are also useful for all kinds of text searches"

On Feedback
(Nov 20, 2008, 01:03 UTC) (534 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
jonobacon@home: "This has been something on my mind for a long time - how can we see the great many interconnecting lines between different parts of community. In effort to make progress this area, I have worked closely with my team to build some metrics to understand our community."

iBGP: Synchronizing the Internet
(Nov 20, 2008, 00:33 UTC) (718 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LinuxPlanet: "Last week in our classic Networking 101 series we learned about Border Gateway Protocol, the networking protocol that powers the Internet. This week Charlie Schluting leads the dive into iBGP-- Internal Border Gateway Protocol-- to learn how to connect all those BGP routers together, and how to route between thousands of computers without going nuts."

The Green Penguin - Where Does Your E-Waste Go?
(Nov 19, 2008, 22:33 UTC) (663 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux Journal: "What happens frequently is that a less-than-reputable outfit will pack your e-junk onto a container and ship it off to a developing country with lax environmental and labor laws, where it will wreak havoc on the environment and poor people."

Will Flash Ever Be a Standard?
(Nov 19, 2008, 21:03 UTC) (1553 reads) (5 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux Developer Network: "Yesterday, I caught wind of some good news. It was the kind of good news that is immediately good for me and ultimately good for Linux. It was announced by MLB Advanced Media, major league baseball's online division, that video on MLB.com would no longer be delivered via Microsoft's Silverlight format but instead with Adobe Flash technology."

Patent Hassles for OpenMoko
(Nov 19, 2008, 20:03 UTC) (1237 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LWN: "When users asked about what was going on, the answer that came back was: "The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some patent trolls. Google for Sisvel."

Microsoft, Novell See Profits in Partnership
(Nov 19, 2008, 19:03 UTC) (569 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
InternetNews: "Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers."

Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?
(Nov 19, 2008, 17:16 UTC) (3448 reads) (6 talkbacks) (feedback)
NixCraft: "Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I've 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?"

SECURITY: Liability for Software When Life is at Stake
(Nov 19, 2008, 17:03 UTC) (926 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
BoycottNovell: "With roughly 320,000,000 zombie PCs out there, how can any sane person put Windows in mission-critical settings like a hospital? Well, that's just what some people do."

Dell and Staples Launch Computer Recycling Program
(Nov 19, 2008, 15:33 UTC) (726 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
Direct2Dell: "Beginning today, any Dell-branded equipment can be dropped off for recycling at any of 1500 Staples stores in the United States for free recycling."
Link fixed--ed.

The Linux Licensing Labyrinth
(Nov 19, 2008, 15:03 UTC) (701 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
LinuxInsider: "The land of open source software is awash in an often confusing array of various licenses and rules regarding what is and is not allowed once someone has written a piece of code. It's enough to scare some vendors away from FOSS altogether, and that can be a problem when it comes to creating open source drivers. Fortunately, some vendors are coming around."

Novell Releases GroupWise 8
(Nov 19, 2008, 13:33 UTC) (1074 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
ZDNet: "Novell has released a new version of GroupWise, its answer to Microsoft's ubiquitious Outlook/Exchange collaboration suite."

The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later
(Nov 19, 2008, 12:33 UTC) (1329 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
InfoWorld: "Two years ago this month, Microsoft forged its controversial partnership with Novell that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect Suse Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft."

Open Source Business Cluster Launched in New South Wales
(Nov 19, 2008, 07:03 UTC) (685 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
IT Wire: "Headquarters in Sydney, New South Wales, an Open Source Business Cluster was announced. The aim of the cluster is to more effectively market, deliver and provide support for Open Source technology to business and government agencies."

SECURITY: Zeroshell Delivers Big Network Services in a Small Package
(Nov 19, 2008, 02:33 UTC) (1116 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
LinuxPlanet: "What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance."

Linux Printing: A Curious Mix of Yuck and Excellence, part 2
(Nov 19, 2008, 00:03 UTC) (1372 reads) (3 talkbacks) (feedback)
Linux Today Blog: "why do print jobs disappear without a trace, then reappear days later? Printing multiple copies, if you had hit the print button in frustration multiple times. Is this printer really online and working? Does it have enough toner and paper? If there is a problem, why won't it tell me in a reasonable way? Why isn't there an obvious, easy button for "cancel the print job plz, kthx"?"

Open Letter: Independent Conformance Testing Needed for ODF and OOXML
(Nov 18, 2008, 23:35 UTC) (964 reads) (2 talkbacks) (feedback)
ruminations on the digital realm: "She sees the need for independent testing in order to make sure governments and their citizens don't head into a new vendor-lock, this time as a result of poor implementation of open standards."

Unemployed? Five Reasons to Build Your Resume With FOSS Contributions
(Nov 18, 2008, 22:35 UTC) (1020 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
Community, Incorporated: "If that's the case, shouldn't we be expecting a "Golden Age" for open source, with all the idle programmers and IT folks at home with time on their hands? I can think of several reasons why unemployed IT folks should consider digging into an open source project over catching up on their soaps in the interim:"

Q&A: Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation
(Nov 18, 2008, 19:35 UTC) (938 reads) (1 talkbacks) (feedback)
PC Authority: "Free software means software that respects users' freedom. More specifically it means you as a user have these four essential freedoms:"

Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge
(Nov 18, 2008, 19:05 UTC) (1211 reads) (3 talkbacks) (feedback)
TorrentFreak: "French record labels have received the green light to sue four US-based companies that develop P2P applications, including the BitTorrent client Vuze, Limewire and Morpheus. Shareaza is the fourth application, for which the labels are going after the open source development platform SourceForge."

Red Hat, Inc.'s Matthew Szulik Named Entrepreneur Of The Year
(Nov 18, 2008, 17:35 UTC) (644 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
MarketWatch: "Szulik was recognized for turning Red Hat from what some called a questionable idea into a billion-dollar business. "Matthew Szulik follows a proud tradition of pioneering entrepreneurs who overcame skeptics and brought a novel, seemingly improbable business idea to market successfully..."

From Windows Capable to the Linux Laptop
(Nov 18, 2008, 17:05 UTC) (1719 reads) (0 talkbacks) (feedback)
ZDNet: "I think you can draw a straight line from the Vista Capable brouhaha to recent introductions of laptop Linux by HP and Dell, once Microsoft's most loyal OEMs."

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