In Through The Out Door

An interview with John De Goes in which he argues: “The tools market is dead. Open source killed it.” The software developer turned president of N-BRAIN explains the effect that open source has had on the developer tools market, and how this forced the company to release the personal edition of [...]

IBM Developerworks’ recent analysis of how the NSA built SELinux to withstand attacks. The article shows us some of the relevant kernel architecture and compares SELinux to a few other approaches. We’ve discussed SELinux in the past. Quoting: “If you have a program that responds to socket requests but doesn’t need [...]

Can the Linux community get over its “not invented here” ideology which has often hindered its ability to adopt technological improvements from outside sources? I keep saying myself, I hope so. But recent events have shown me that we have a long way to go until we become a culture of [...]

Sun platform strategist Ian Murdock presented OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live. The platform looks promising, but serious advantages of adopting it on the desktop remain elusive.
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[From Sun touts big plans for OpenSolaris as first release nears]

If you’ve administered any remote Linux machines then you are already familiar with SSH, but you might not know that you can use SSH for much more than just connecting to a shell on a remote system. By using SSH’s port forwarding features, you can set up encrypted tunnels for many [...]

David Axe has an excellent contribution to Wired’s Danger Room on the military struggles to leverage open source medium for networking ideas and discussion. His suggestion caught my attention. I’m not saying that Army forums should be totally unprotected from insurgent snoopers. But they should be expanded, and loosened, to allow [...]

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a general security model that simplifies administration by assigning roles to users and then assigning permissions to those roles. Learn how RBAC in SELinux acts as a layer of abstraction between the user and the underlying TE model, and how the three pieces of an SELinux [...]

bsdphx writes “OpenSSH developers Damien Miller and Markus Friedl have recently added a nifty feature to make life easier for admins. Now you can easily lock an SSH session into a chroot directory, restrict them to a built-in sftp server and apply these settings per user. And it’s dead simple to do. If [...]

No royalties to pay in interop deal?
The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network services.…
[From [...]

The unification of XML and SQL relational data has taken another significant step forward recently with the introduction of significant new XML functionality in mySQL, the world’s most popular open source database. In versions 5.1 and 6.0, mySQL adds the… [From XML Moves to mySQL]

It’s been a decade now that the very first version of the GNU Privacy Guard has been released … [From GnuPG's 10th birthday!]

Two Storage Engine Updates

Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible

Xen or VMWare?

Two days after VMWare had one of the most successful IPOs on recent years, and one day after XenSource announces that it is being acquired by Citrix. Money is flowing into the two major virtualization players at a rate we haven’t yet seen, what are your feelings about using Xen or VMWare on Linux?

Sourceforge Enterprise EditionDid you know you can download SourceforgeEE for 15 users for free. You’ll find it on Sourceforge.net and it comes in a VMWare appliance. That version will accommodate 50 users if you want to pay for more than 15 seats. From an enterprise point of view, the cost is quite reasonable.

Sun Says File Systems are Important Differentiator:Sun Microsystems was originally known as a workstation vendor, and it became best known as a maker of servers and their associated Solaris Unix operating system…. Sun still believes that file systems matter, and its Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and the expanding role it could play in the IT industry are proof of this belief. Given the features inside ZFS, it comes as no surprise that Sun is excited to see other companies and open source projects pick it up. According to Jeff Bonwick, who is a co-creator of ZFS with Moore and the storage chief technology officer at Sun, the open source FreeBSD variant of BSD Unix already supports ZFS in its distro and the NetBSD is adding ZFS support through Google’s Summer of Code effort, whereby Google pays young nerds to do coding for a summer job. The future “Leopard” version of MacOS X Server also has ZFS support inside of its beta versions, but it remains to be seen if the file system will make it into the final release of Apple’s server operating system.

GPL 3 officially released:After four drafts and extensive public review, the long-awaited revision of the GPL has finally been released. Version 3 of the GPL clarifies aspects of the previous version, aims to block patent covenants that could limit unencumbered redistribution, and protects users’ rights to modify GPL-licensed software on embedded systems.Read More…

Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux distributions.

Filesystem Encryption Tools for Linux:Crypto filesystems keep your data safe - even if someone steals your computer.Linux offers a number of encrypted filesystem options - each with a different approach to the encryption problem.Encrypted filesystems may be overkill for family photos or your résumé, but they make sense for network-accessible servers that hold sensitive business documents, databases that contain credit-card information, offline backups, and laptops.

Microsoft promises not to sue Linux peopleLOL !!!