SNMP is the universal protocol for monitoring network devices of all sizes. We look at SNMP's role and show you how to start gathering data.

Have you been thinking of running Linux on that new laptop? Find out some important things that you should know before you start installing.

Recent additions to the world's most popular DNS server help to insure that DNS spoofing-based attacks will become a thing of the past. Find out how to beef up security on your network.

Jabber stands on the brink of becoming a general-purpose mechanism for allowing people, devices, and programs to interact. How will it play with .NET? Jeremie Miller, Jabber's inventor, offers his thoughts.

On a cross-country plane trip, you sometimes reach an altitude from which you can see where you've been. This month's column on the topic of loops is a high-altitude point in our exploration of the bash shell. Much of what has been explained so far is a prerequisite for understanding loops. Computers are powerful because they can quickly and accurately perform repetitive operations, and the loop is the shell construct that puts this power right into your hands.

When I saw that Linux Magazine recently accepted paid advertising from Linux's arch-nemesis Microsoft, a.k.a. Evil Empire to End All Evil Empires, I expected a minor backlash from some of the less enlightened and more politically high-strung readers. But the knee-jerk reaction, as shown in the Letters pages in the October issue, was so strong and utterly clueless that it actually shocked me, despite the fact that I've seen more than my share of the Linux faithful in action. Even though that reaction was limited to a very small percentage of readers, it clearly has some serious implications for the future of Linux and, to a lesser extent, the open source movement.

For reasons that I don't really understand, November seems to be disk month for me. A year ago in this column, we looked at the Linux Logical Volume Manager, which allows you to combine and subdivide sets of disks in arbitrary ways. This month, we will consider disk striping while focusing primarily on how this is provided by the Linux disk striping facility.

Last month we started a discussion on network programming. However, in the interest of getting through an entire example of a client and a server and how they communicate, we omitted many details. This month, we'll examine our examples more closely to gain more knowledge about network programming. Specifically, we will discuss how to get IP addresses from hostnames and hostnames from IP addresses. We will also take a look at the difference between little-endian and big-endian machines and find out why "endianness" matters in network programming.

The traditional File::Find module included with Perl is nice. I use it frequently. However, it's got this interesting feature -- or rather limitation; it wants to be in control until it has found everything of interest. Now, that's perfectly fine for most applications, but I've occasionally wanted to turn a hierarchical search "inside out." That is, I'd set up the search, including the start directories and the "wanted" criteria, and then repeatedly call some function to get the "next" item of interest. This is similar to how you could call the find program externally:

Is There a Good Way to Grant root Permissions on a Limited Basis?

At first, Linux developers were all about the purity of free software. Then, for many of them, it was all about becoming millionaires. Now it's just about trying to land a new job before their Linux company bites the dust.

Yellow Dog Linux 2.0

Avocent DS1800

This is a very difficult editorial to write. Normally at this time of the month, I've got all kinds of things to say about the tech industry in general and Linux's place in the grand scheme of things. But this month is different.