Monitoring, recovery, and precise logs can often do more to reduce your number of outages and limit the scope of system failures than the typical panacea more hardware, more software, and more hot spares.

Need a system or two to validate a new architecture? When combined with Linux, VMware Server provides a sophisticated and highly adaptable infrastructure that allows you to test complex customer client-server software configurations on a single machine.

A number of old-fashioned tools can prevent very modern problems

What if you have only one computer, and you want to be able to run Linux as well as Windows? Well, you can -- through something called dual booting. Dual booting is an either/or proposition. You can't really run Windows and Linux at the same time. This month's column will be of most use to Windows 3.x/95/98 users. If you're running NT, you should purchase the commercial product,

Intrusion detection is critical for network security. Use Bro to catch miscreants red-handed.

SNORT looks for intrusions, while ACID can help you make sense of what’s happened after an intrusion.

Document and image scanners have become an integral part of many offices. With a scanner, you can quickly digitize photos, diagrams, and even textual documents for electronic alteration and distribution.

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.