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This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications, such as errors that could allow a cross-site scripting attack or cause caching problems.

Linux can be configured to log dmesg output to another system via network using syslog. It is done using kernel level networking stuff ia UDP port 514. There is module called netconsole which logs kernel printk messages over udp allowing debugging of problem where disk logging fails and serial consoles are impractical. Most modern distro has this netconsole as a built-in module. netconsole initializes immediately after NIC cards.

A week ago we looked at the brand-new ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card under Linux. This graphics card launch was unlike any in ATI's history where with the introduction of a brand new product generation, Linux users were greeted by same-day Linux support -- both through their proprietary fglrx driver and with the open-source xf86-video-ati driver. In addition, some of the board partners are opting to put Tux on their product packaging and shipping the Linux drivers on their product CDs. As we had also exclusively shared, AMD will soon be approaching a feature parity between the Windows and Linux drivers. Today we're publishing our complete review of the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB as well as delivering additional benchmarks from the Radeon HD 4850 under Linux, of course.

IOzone lets you benchmark your filesystem performance, seeing how well record IO occurs for files of various sizes. With IOzone you can see more detailed information than the read, write, and rewrite figures that Bonnie++ reports. IOzone is great at detecting areas where file IO might not be performing as well as expected. IOzone is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click install, in multiverse for Ubuntu Hardy, and is in the standard Fedora 9 repositories.

Guinness World Records has validated Mozilla's attempt to set a record for the number of software downloads in a 24 hour period. The official count of Firefox 3 downloads was 8,002,530.

Do you remember the massive press orgy a year ago when One Laptop Per Nigerian Child debuted at L.E.A. Primary School Galadima in Abuja Model Village? How the great Foreign God held high his gift of knowledge to the poor dark-skinned children of Africa, and OLPC proclaimed: "All of a sudden, School Galadima has gone from the age-old chalk-and-board teaching technology to the avant-garde one-laptop-per-child XO technology with cutting-edge features." Well let us take a look at the lessons a year of Nigeria has taught One Laptop Per Child.

Last week, Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, stated in an interview that much of the current animosity from the open source community toward Sun has its origins in the way Sun used to treat the community. Phipps, being his usual straightforward self, phrased it as Sun "screwed up," a quote guaranteed to make headlines, which it did.

The IBM AIX operating system has kept to what's important: stability, functionality, robustness. And it has done it by keeping a strong command-line interface (CLI). If you never learned to use the CLI or need a refresher on its basics, read on.

A look at various ways to secure the root account against system users and some in-use methods that seem to cause more harm than good.

IRC is one of the most used protocols for text chatting and most major projects and distributions have several IRC channels to offer help or discuss development or any other issues. XChat is a very powerful IRC client written in GTK who has been around for years and is now feature complete, low on resources, with a powerful scripting interface and support for C plugins.

AMD has released faster new ATI Catalyst drivers for Linux customers of its ATI FireGL professional graphics cards. The 8.49.7 Linux driver provides 33 percent faster OpenGL performance than the previous driver, claims the company.

Linspire is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xandros. The companies had been talking about a deal for some time, and they became more serious toward the end of last year, according to Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos. The acquisition, he said, will help Xandros expand in both the mobile and enterprise Linux spaces.

For Louis Landry, a member of the core team for the Joomla! management system, free and open source software (FOSS) is not just a hobby, nor just the technology behind Jxtended, the consulting business in which he is a partner. For Landry, FOSS is also the movement that gave him direction in life, and provides both the rationale and the outlet for his diverse interests. In fact, he is so enthusiastic about FOSS that he sounds like an evangelist for the community whenever it is mentioned.

Apple Inc.'s operating system market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company. Last month, Apple's Mac OS X accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems powering computers that accessed the 40,000 Web sites Net Applications monitors for its clients, the company reported yesterday. A year ago, Mac OS X's usage share stood at 6.03%. Also showing gains in June were Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista and Linux, which climbed 8% and 18%, respectively, to end the month accounting for 16.14% and 0.88% of the online operating system market.

The "I have a dream" release.

Sam Ramji who runs Microsoft's Open Source Lab has now confirmed on his blog that Sandcastle is now set to re-appear on CodePlex as a fully compliant open source project.This is a positive turn of events in my view. Certainly there are many within Microsoft who couldn't care less about open source, fortunately Sam Ramji isn't one of them.

OpenMoko will start selling its Linux-based Neo FreeRunner phone online on July 4th, says the company. Billed as a completely open source, hackable hardware platform, the Neo FreeRunner will receive updated software with new location-based applications in August, says OpenMoko.

Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here's why it makes good Linux techies groan when they see it.

The already vicious lawsuit involving Barracuda Networks and Trend Micro that is currently in discovery in front of the American International Trade Commission (ITC) just turned nastier. Barracuda has filed its own patent infringement claim against Trend Micro, based upon three recently acquired patents. The suit is in response to Trend Micro's allegation that its patent is being infringed by Barracuda shipping Clam Antivirus (ClamAV), the popular free software application, and appears designed to pressure Trend Micro to reach a negotiated settlement. "It's unfortunate that we have to spend time and energy and money doing this BS legal stuff when we could be spending that time and money and energy making the Internet a safer place," says Dean Drako, Barracuda's president and CEO. "It makes you sad."