Learn about buffer overflow exploits and how to avoid them.

A distro for mad scientists, books on clusters, and something top-secret.

As much as we like to malign Windows and enjoy schadenfreude whenever Microsoft falters, the (unpleasant) truth is that Gates’ software golem isn’t going out of business any time soon.

Skype, a company started by the founders of KaZaA, the peer-to-peer file sharing network, seeks to bring VOIP technology directly to your PC.

Boy, do I hate the holidays. Tacky Christmas decorations strewn over lawns, holiday mind-control music piped into shopping malls, and the last minute need to drive the economy with conspicuous consumption. People are irritable, depressed, and frustrated, and they vent by giving you really horrendous gifts — like the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL, http://www.sun.com/cddl/), a wonderful, new, GPL-incompatible license that Sun Microsystems will use to distribute Solaris as open source.

There’s a new VOIP kid on the block, and you really should take a look at it if you’re interested in making free (or really, really cheap) phone calls over the Internet: I

Microsoft has a new indemnification program. Yawn.

This month’s column focuses on building and using Beowulf Distributed Process Space (BProc) software used by the commercial Scyld Beowulf and the Clustermatic Linux distributions for high performance computing (HPC) clusters.

The tale of jCIFS is a Romeo and Juliet story: two technologies find each other on the Internet and come together despite a feud between their parents. Only this time, there's a happy ending.

If you’ve ever had to write a portable application in C, you’ve likely run into the same problem faced by countless other programmers: no matter how much you try to stick to a well-defined application programming interface (API), the program just doesn’t work the same on every platform.

While POSIX does a passable job of providing a portable API for most Unix and Unix-like platforms, POSIX either doesn’t exist on other operating systems or is so full of bugs as to be unusable. Moreover, POSIX isn’t always the best choice. Non-Unix platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, have their own APIs that are better mantained and perform better on that platform.

So, to make something portable, you could write, rewrite, and tweak your code several times — at least so the code compiles on several platforms. Or, you can use the Apache Portable Runtime (http://apr.apache.org/) the same library that makes the ubiquitous Apache HTTP server portable. If it’s good enough for Apache, well, enough said.

One of the problems with running a network that contains both Linux and Windows systems is maintaining multiple account databases. One way to integrate these disparate systems is to use the Windows account database maintained on a Windows NT domain controller (or a Windows Active Directory controller or a Samba server) for both Windows and Linux systems. Unifying accounts is fairly easy for the Windows systems, but for Linux, you must make several configuration changes. However, the result can work reasonably well, and greatly simplifies cross-platform account maintenance.

Surprisingly, securing a site’s production environment is a task that many ignore until it’s too late. But the task need not be so onerous. Several LAMP tools can help shore up security.

When things seem tedious, it's time to get the computer to do more of the work.

m4 is a powerful macro processor that's been around for more than thirty years. Here's the first of two parts, introducing its many magnificent talents.

Whether your Linux server is under your desk or in a co-location facility clear across the country, virtually all system maintenance can be accomplished simply by logging in. ssh and tools such as up2date, apt-get, and any text editor make remote Linux system administration a snap. Remote maintenance of a Windows server can be (almost) as easy, using rdesktop and tsclient, two open source clients that can replace the traditional system console.

News from ApacheCon and just how many bugs are in the Linux kernel?