Author Archive

Configuring your network requires a ton of tedious work, unless you take advantage of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.

Winston sat in the darkened room. All around him lights blinked and flashed. Regardless of what he did, Big Brother knew. There was nothing he could do without Big Brother being aware. When Winston did something that Big Brother did not particularly like, alarms would sound, and people would come storming into the room.

I am regularly confronted by Windows NT users who are overwhelmed by how much
information they can collect and process using the Windows NT Event Viewer. It is so nice, they
maintain, that occurrences (events) are sorted by system, system security, and applications, and
that entries can be filtered and searched.

Many new Linux users have trouble with device nodes for a number of different reasons. For the uninitiated, it is often difficult to figure out exactly what device node is needed for a particular task. Part of this is because the device node names aren’t exactly intuitive, and part of it is because it’s not often obvious which device node is the one you actually need.

If you were to install nothing but the Linux kernel on your hard disk, it would not do very much. A surprisingly large part of Linux’s power and flexibility come not from the core of the operating system or from the applications that come with it,
but from daemons. These special background programs are typically run without user intervention, and provide everything from printing to file services to access to Web pages.