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A good password has the problem of being difficult to remember. And sometimes you might need to get in to a system where the root password is long forgotten (or left with the system administrator before you). Luckily there are ways of getting access to systems without having the password. This is of course in a sense also a security risk. That's why you should always be aware that having unattended physical access to a computer system means the same as having root access to the operating system. Unless the information on a system is encrypted, it's only as save as the room it's in.

Oracle picks up SUN for $7.4 billion and gets MySQL in the bargain. Did the world's most popular open source database just get put on life support. Or have it's plug pulled?

Web servers are one of the many public faces of an organization and therefore are potentially an easy target. As a public resource, a Web server is like "shark bait" for some. But it doesn't have to be: Learn how a Web server can be public and safe at the same time.

So, if you’re like me and have voided the warranties of all the other electronics in your house, but have yet to sink your teeth into your poor little Western Digital MyBook World - likely cowering in the corner pleading for you to put down the screwdriver - here are some helpful resources on getting the most out this handy little NAS box that just so happens to be running BusyBox linux.

I had to read this story Lenovo analyst: Linux on netbooks is doomed" several times because I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. Was this really Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst saying things like "You have to know how to decompile codes and upload data"?

Sun Microsystems — and what would happen to it — has been in the news for some weeks, amid rumors, then negotiations, then rumors, again, concerning the flailing company's future. The now-infamous IBM purchase and its spectacular failure earlier this month exponentially increased speculation — speculation that was put to rest this morning when it was revealed that database-giant Oracle will be adding Sun to its solar system.

Both Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL, and Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and until recently, VP of the Sun database group, have both commented on Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and MySQL. Observers had noted that Oracle may not be interested in pursuing development of MySQL, despite Oracle's announcement saying MySQL would join the ranks of its other database products.

It's tempting to speculate that Oracle's bid for Sun Microsystems is a convenient way to kill off open-source database wonder, MySQL. But MySQL's former chief executive, Mårten Mickos, sees things differently. If anything, Oracle badly wanted MySQL.

Why is it so hard to get governments (especially local government) to use open source software? Here are some ideas discussed during my keynote today in Oslo at GoOpen 2009 for practical steps various people, from citizens to policy wonks to representatives, can do to help get open source in actual use and delivering on its promise (and I know it's not easy):

The audio recordings from the presentations at SCALE 7x are finally available. The links for the talks are on the Conference Schedule. If there's no link for a session, it either means it wasn't recorded, or the recording wasn't usable for some reason.

Microsoft knew this day was coming. This was the reason it desperately wanted — no, needed — to take down Netscape in 1996. Netscape wasn’t just trying to build a program for reading text and photos across a network of connected computers. Netscape was trying to build a new platform - the ultimate platform - to run software and share information instantly and on a global scale. And no one understood that better than Bill Gates.

Highly-paid executives who led their financial institutions into failure get to keep their jobs and handsome paychecks, while the grunts who do the work get canned. Meanwhile, governments everywhere are reacting in their usual manner, by drafting galactic-sized reams of new rules and regulations. Which will supplement and not replace the old galactic-sized reams of rules and regulations. The burden of this record-keeping is going to fall on IT staff-- are you ready?

License proliferation has been a hot topic amongst the open source community for the past couple of years. I am happy to report that the Eclipse Foundation and IBM have collaborated to do our bit to help by superseding the Common Public License (CPL) with the Eclipse Public License (EPL). This means that the CPL will no longer be considered an active open source license.

Synergy. Total IT solutions. Some folks in the channel media are falling all over themselves calling the Oracle-Sun deal a “slam dunk” for solutions providers. Um, The VAR Guy begs to differ. Here’s why.

In one of the worst marketing moves for an upcoming operating system I can ever recall, Microsoft has said that it will limit to three the number of applications people can run simultaneously on many Windows 7-equipped netbooks. I can't think of a better way to kill demand for the new operating system. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will sell a Starter edition of Windows 7 on netbooks. That Starter edition will only allow people to run three applications at the same time. If they want to run more, they'll have to pony up with more money, although the article didn't say how much more money they'd have to pay.

Enomalism ECP (Elastic Computing Platform) provides a web-based control panel that lets you design, deploy, and manage virtual machines on one or more host systems (in the case of multiple systems, we speak of a cluster or cloud). This article shows how you can use Enomalism (also know as Enomaly) to manage KVM guests on one Fedora 10 server.

The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released & is now updated to version 4.6.1. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems.

For those that missed it, Xfce 4.6.1 was released this week. It features a series of bug-fixes and minor improvements atop the recently released Xfce 4.6.0 code-base...

In a recent survey by Packt Publishing, 70% of software developers said that they have donated time, money, or both to open source projects. However, with large projects like Wikipedia receiving over one million dollars from just three charitable foundations last year, the question remains whether open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive.

The enterprises, vendors, developers, analysts, and journalists I speak with regularly are mostly pretty savvy about the basics of open source at this point. Even if they're not licensing geeks or otherwise expert in all the minutiae and subtle implications of open-source development, community, and usage, they generally have the important basics down.