Building an extensible enterprise-class network requires the right tools and forethought. This article, the first of two parts, introduces the possibilities and issues of large-scale network design.

Though it's no longer trendy, CORBA is alive and well in Linux. The rumors of CORBA's demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture is alive and well, and provides valuable services.

At the end of April 2004, Red Hat will discontinue its support and maintenance of Red Hat Linux, leaving a good number of users in a lurch. While some users will likely switch to SUSE or Debian or others, the Fedora Project promises to take up where Red Hat's left off. But is Fedora a viable option? Here's a hands-on trial of Fedora Core 1.

As this month's Linux Magazine goes to press, the mainstream media and the technorati (the geek paparazzi) are widely reporting on the Open Source Development Labs' creation of a Linux legal defense fund. Briefly (and you can read more details in our "Report from the Front" on page 8), OSDL's fund will subsidize the legal expenses of any Linux end-user that's threatened by broad intellectual property claims, such as SCO's assertion that code in the Linux kernel infringes its copyrights. OSDL plans to raise $10 million for the fund; the fund's been seeded with $3 million by IBM, Intel, and others.

A year and a half ago, we selected the Galeon web browser as "Project of the Month" (http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-07/potm_01.html). Galeon used the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla and layered tons of useful features on top of it. It wasn't the leanest browser around, but it had nearly every feature you could want and was proving to be quite popular.

Every time you go on a long trip, it's always great to come back home. That's how it is with my return to Linux Magazine. After two long years, I'm back in the business of writing a column, and I'm as happy as a clam. I'm clearing off my old dusty desk, restocking its drawers with Penguin Mints and Instant Ramen, and firing up every piece of computer hardware that can run Linux that I can get my hands on.

In last December's column, "Wildcards Gone... Wild" (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-12/power_01.html), we looked at ways to match groups of files in a hurry, with a minimum of typing, by using shell wildcards. Last month, we saw some of the wilder things that the Z shell, zsh, can do to make computing easier. This month we'll mix those two topics and look at some of the most powerful zsh wildcards and similar, related features in other shells.

Printing via Linux has always been a bit tricky, but the situation is improving in many ways. At the forefront of this change is the shift from the old Line Printer Daemon (LPD) printing system, as implemented in the BSD LPD or LPRng servers, to the newer Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). CUPS is now the default printing system of most Linux distributions, as well as with some non-Linux systems, such as Mac OS X.

This is the third and final column in a series on shared memory parallelization using OpenMP. Often used to improve performance of scientific models on symmetric multi-processor (SMP) machines or SMP nodes in a Linux cluster, OpenMP consists of a portable set of compiler directives, library calls, and environment variables. It's supported by a wide range of FORTRAN and C/C++ compilers for Linux and commercial supercomputers.

Unix is traditionally very text-oriented: configuration files are plain ASCII, commands are issued via the shell, tools provide feedback via stdout, and daemons and other system services record status in logs.

Master/slave replication first appeared in a beta release of MySQL back in 2000. In the three or so years since then, replication has become an essential feature for most of MySQL's high-end users. And contrary to many assumptions, MySQL's replication is quite easy to use, especially when compared to the replication systems that are part of high-end commercial databases. This month and next, let's take a look at MySQL's replication feature and the various ways you can put it to use.

Back in one of the very first issues of Linux Magazine (September 1999, available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/1999-09/perl_01.html), I wrote about the Spew language. Given a description of text, sentences, and paragraphs, Spew generates random prose based on that description. The grammar is specified using a simple BNF-like format, with extensions to give weighting to more-favored choices.

As several recent high profile compromises have reminded us, Linux isn't immune to security vulnerabilities. While you should always do everything you can to secure your Linux systems, you can also put measures in place to quickly detect a break-in. One useful "alarm" system is Tripwire.