Microsoft networking protocols such as SMB, NetBIOS, and CIFS are used everywhere. Open source developers need to understand how they work in order for Linux to become a mainstream operating system.

Sun Microsystems cannot ignore the open source community, and the open source community cannot ignore Sun. While Sun's history with open source is slightly checkered, the times do seem to be a changin'.

What makes a successful open source company? If there's one corporation worth examining to answer this question, it's Red Hat. Since awakening the financial community to the open source phenomenon with its remarkable IPO in August of 1999, Red Hat has steadily been writing the book on how to build a Linux business. Linux Magazine's Adam Goodman, Robert McMillan, and Chris Somerville recently caught up with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik to discuss the lessons learned during his company's first year and a half as a public company. Szulik, a mild-mannered Bostonian who had recently shaved his head for a charity, has seen a fair bit in his first year at the helm: A dozen acquisitions, executive flight (CFO and CTO), and a stock that soared to $300/ share and then plummeted to 1/30th of that value. But in the end, he says, it's the future, not the money, that motivates him each day.

Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and its successor RIPv2 are the glue that makes the Internet work. Here's how.

It seems that one of the skills required of an actor is the ability to memorize a script. I had assumed that learning a script is of greater importance to stage actors than film actors, because stage actors must deliver their lines and follow their stage directions correctly the first time. However, acquaintances that are in the business assure me scripts play a central role in both types of acting.

With the recent downturn in the economy and the drop in Linux companies' share prices, an uninformed observer might believe that the sun is setting on Linux. They would be wrong. Unfortunately, the expectations that had previously been set for Linux are analogous to parents expecting that their teenager successfully complete college before graduating from high school. Few, if any, possess the maturity to make that jump.

Making sure that users' electronic mail gets sent out and delivered is one of the system administrator's most important jobs, and it's also one that becomes extremely visible should things go wrong. Inevitably, administering e-mail is time-consuming and frustrating, at least intermittently.

For the last several months in this column, we've been looking at programming with Linux's threads library, pthreads. However, we have taken for granted the work that is actually done under the covers by the pthreads libraries. So this month's Compile Time will dissect Linux pthreads themselves to discover exactly what it is that makes them tick.

I wrote a Web page the other day and realized that I wanted footnotes. I wanted to keep the main message in the main text and have annotations for some of the side points. It's easy enough to do, right? Just put some text in a table at the end, use those cute little sup tags around the footnote numbers, and hack away.

I want to get a bandwidth usage graph for my machine, but don't have a switch with SNMP. Can I get this directly from the Linux box?

GreatBridge PostgreSQL 7.0.3

Microlite BackupEDGE 7

Compaq ProLiant DL320 and DL360 Servers

Services. In the past few years, as Linux has developed into a more mainstream operating system, a new axiom has emerged -- you can't make much money selling the OS itself, but many companies can make money by selling their services around the OS.