Showing headlines posted by cjfsyntropy

Debian's Drupal package supports putting all your Drupal sites under one install of the package. This requires some attention to detail to make a policy robust enough to support any customization that a site may need. This write-up explains how that much flexibility can be achieved with the stock Debian Drupal package on multi-tenant systems.

KVM and XEN are both better than you think. To help clear out some of the misunderstandings about the status of FOSS Linux virtualization technology, Elizabeth Krumbach details the tools that deliver five advanced virtualization features that are evidently not yet widely known.

A detailed overview of an infrastructure to build a FOSS cluster for high availability (HA).

This in depth review of Stanford's excellent course "Introduction to Databases" (covering XML, RDBMS, SQL, OLAP, and NoSQL) focuses on the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools that are center stage throughout. In addition Stanford's new approach to OER (Open Educational Resources) is critiqued.

Inexpensive Linux based Pacemaker clusters can provide a cost effective way keep a file server operational even if one system fails. Read this business case analysis.

A detailed step-by-step with screenshots on how to use the Debian installer to support remote installations via SSH.

Since Xen is not included in Linus' kernel, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat and others are moving to KVM for virtualization. This post details one way to move your Xen infrastructure to KVM with minimal downtime.

We recently learned that because of the complexities of software licensing, it isn't clear to small business leaders just how straightforward it is to integrate proprietary code and applications with FOSS. None of the main documents on FOSS licensing explain the issues in the kind of clear high-level terms that can guide business people. Hopefully this article can help fill the gap.

Improving Debian Policy and support of upstreams, and trying to get Sage, a FOSS mathematics system, back into Debian were some of the initiatives that I pursued after attending DebConf10.

The cloud values Internet-based computing above all else, but maybe the comprehensive flexibility of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) would provide a better vision for the future of computing?

Elizabeth shares what she learned at the 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the Open Source Business Conference about emerging best practices for contributing to FOSS. Namely, openly engage and work with the community.

Elizabeth walks readers through the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ecosystem describing how and why contributing can help your organization.

After describing the nature and importance of source code for business-oriented readers, the case is made for learning programming with Python. A plethora of free on-line resources for getting started programming in Python are provided.

Although SMTP blocking of e-mail spam is a best practice, many anti-virus products include the dangerous option of blocking when a Received header is on a blacklist. But it is possible for a legitimate, secure system to have its e-mail blocked by this boneheaded technique. Do not use it!

LinuxForce has compiled a list of 49 news articles documenting milestones of the Debian GNU/Linux project in 2009.

There are probably more than 250,000 Free and Open Source Software tools available to solve problems. How can an administrator support the largest subset possible? Debian provides the most cost effective way.

This piece explores some relationships between FOSS and the three tactics recommended for computer security by Richard Schaeffers of the NSA.

A recent article in Communications of the ACM argues that "continuous upgrading" is crucial for software maintenance. This piece argues why FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) can and should be continuously upgraded and notes how Debian and Ubuntu have made the process fairly smooth.

Any project can reach a crossroads. Sometimes this leads to forks. Although FOSS communities strive to prevent forks, they can be positive.

The issues of customization and upgradeability are often in conflict. Software developers and systems administrators need to address both issues inter-accommodatively. I cite three examples to show how FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is leading us toward an ideal of "eternally regenerative software administration".