Imagine all of the processing power within your enterprise - from every large and small server and cluster in every datacenter, to every networked personal computer - all available to work on solving the day's business problems. That's the notion of an enterprise grid, and if the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) fulfills its mission, a company-wide computing farm will be a reality.

How would you like to run several operating systems at once on the same physical hardware with virtually no performance overhead - and for free? That's the promise and the purpose of Xen, a relatively new open source project that turns one piece of hardware into many, virtually. If you're looking to cut costs or maximize usage or both, follow the path to Xen.

Whatever the size of your project, the chore of managing issues - bugs, feature requests, even programming assignments - can be aided by a good issue tracking system (ITS). One of the newest tracking systems is Scarab. Easy-to-install, easy-to-use, and built to be customized, Scarab may give scaly, old Bugzilla the boot.

Last month, I expressed boredom with the personal computer. Beyond gigahertz, gigabytes, and wireless, I complained, personal computers sold today look and feel a lot like those sold ten years ago.

I've started to have a sort of love-hate relationship with Fedora. On the one hand, I like the fact that the Fedora Project keeps their distribution constantly up-to-date, making all of the latest and greatest advancements in KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, and so on available to me. On the other hand, Fedora can sometimes be as stable as Anne Heche strung out on peyote.

Backing up data isn't exactly exciting, but like washing laundry, everyone needs to do it. On Linux, you can back up your files using an almost-bewildering array of choices, from self-composed shell scripts, to expensive software packages. But how about a simple, open source, easy-to-use, set-up-and-fuggedaboutit tool?

Last month's "Tech Support" showed how to monitor resource utilization with Cacti. This month, let's use vmstat to track down any bottlenecks that Cacti might have found. Part of the procps package (which contains many other useful utilities such as ps, top, w, and kill), vmstat reports statistical information about process status, memory consumption, paging activity, block I/O operations, interrupts, context switches, and processor usage. vmstat is available from http://procps.sourceforge.net and is licensed under the GPL. While you can download and install the latest version of procps, it's a standard set of utilities found in almost every Linux install.

A year ago, the November 2003 "Power Tools" column (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-11/power_01.html) looked into some lesser-known tools for editing text: the line editors ex and ed, and the stream editor sed.

It's a coincidence that last month's "On the Docket" discussed the dangers of software patents just as a troubling headline appeared: according to an exhaustive study by the Public Patent Foundation (http://www.pubpat.org), the Linux kernel infringes 283 patents.

Believe it or not, IT departments shudder at the words "Let's deploy Exchange." Although Microsoft's email server is virtually ubiquitous, that doesn't mean it's popular with those that have to manage it. So before your boss writes a hefty check for Exchange and sentences you to countless hours of hard labor, speak up and suggest one of the many open source substitutes that are just as robust as Exchange -- and are free!

This month and next, we'll look at the most significant addition to MySQL 4.1: native clustering. This month, let's start with an overview of the new clustering technology, see how it's been integrated into MySQL, and understand the benefits it provides. Next month, we'll cover the steps necessary to get a cluster up and running.

Managing packages can be a tricky undertaking, even with package tools like the RPM Package Manager (RPM), the package management tool used by Conectiva, Fedora, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Yellow Dog, and many other distributions. With RPM, you may try to install a package, only to find that it depends on others you don't have. Or, you might discover that your packages are several versions out of date and then have to track down and install potentially dozens of updates to fix security and other problems with the old packages.

Last month, I talked a bit about mod_perl, and how I used it extensively on my web server. But I was reminded by a few of my reviewers that I've yet to provide a good overview of mod_perl in any of my columns! Time to fix that.