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It happens at some point whether you are a sysadmin, server programmer or even the generic application developer: you will have to connect to another system somewhere and pass data. On the off chance that one has to really get into the dirty details of network connections there is a way out; connect and select. In this text a look at getting the action of connection testing off the ground to a solid host/port connect check .

1. There are no linux viruses This is a myth, there are linux viruses. Not many, not as harmful but they do exist. 2. A virus scanner uses to much resources. You don't need to run a virus scanner all the time, if this is what bothers you. Having one at hand couldn't hurt. 3. Viruses in Linux are harmless, as they can't access root.

Economic downturn weighs heavily on Linux--but should it?

Ask a network administrator in any large organisation to compare Linux with network operating systems like Windows NT or Novell Open Enterprise Server, and chances are he'll admit that Linux is an inherently more stable and scalable solution. Chances are he'll also admit that when it comes to securing the system from outside attack, Linux is possibly the most difficult of the three to work with.

The maintainer of the Linux stable series has released kernel version 2.6.29.1. It contains nearly 50 fixes and minor enhancements for the ten day old Linux 2.6.29 which saw Tuz the Tasmanian devil stand in temporarily as mascot. In the release mail, kernel hacker Chris Wright specifically points to fixes in the network subsystem which some users of 2.6.29 had problems with.

Today a friend of mine wanted to know how he can check the status and or speed of multiple Network Interfaces/Ports on a device ( Switch, Router, Server, etcc ) using SNMP. Specifically he wanted to know if the Interfaces/Ports are Operationally Up or Down and also if it is Administratively. Then he also wanted to know the speed of the Interfaces/Ports that were Up or Down. Now you can easily get this information through SNMP or if you have a monitoring tool like Zenoss. But he wanted a command line script that would run fairly quickly and either print the results to STDOUT or that he can pipe the ouput in an email. So I decided, ok I'll wite you a quick script in Python that will get you that information. FYI, I'm thinking of making this script compatible with the Nagios API. If you want this feature please let me know...

Here are 5 add-ons which should be essential for any Firefox user.

This posting follows up recent discussion at xen-users mailing list regarding functionality of virt-install and virt-manager after Gitco’s Xen 3.3.1 Hypervisor Upgrade on CentOS 5.3(2). Via the posting bellow i try to demonstrate that Gitco’s upgrade of libvirt-python, python-virtinst,qemu packages and Xen Hypervisor itself seems to be a nice job with no serious issues keeping libvirt and virt-install (virt-manager) utility pretty stable at runtime. I also state that suggestion of use xen-tools & rinse on Xen Systems with libvirt abilities doesn’t look to me right way to manage vs utilizing debootstrap on Debian and Ubuntu Xen hosts, providing libvirt for the KVM only.

Microsoft may view its legal settlement with TomTom as a patent victory of sorts but it’s a hollow and meaningless win in the eyes of some in the open source community. Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt said the settlement announced yesterday was anticipated and expected and he is “nonplussed” with the result. He said Microsoft’s effort to build a series of tiny “totem” patent cases to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about using Linux is futile. "This [settlement] says nothing about the validity of the patent ..... the community provided support in the best way possible and that support facilitated an interim settlement," he said, adding that the commercial success of mobile Linux will not be derailed by legal posturing. - Paula Rooney, ZDNet

The Gnome Foundation has laid out a roadmap saying it's time to depart from incremental updates. The team said it's realized it's not enough to simply organize a collection of individual sub-projects and that a project-wide roadmap is needed. Gnome is the default environment of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, and initially the goal was for a version 2.30.0 - that will now become 3.0 due next March. Responding to growing criticism of Gnome's "lack of vision," the team said its 3.0 release will focus not only on streamlining the platform, but "revamping the user experience."

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren't cool enough, it's portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive. Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn't bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

The "Quiet Revolution" continues. While the main media and mainstream tech entities slumber, GNU/Linux is gaining ground. This decade-long struggle is not far from being proclaimed "an overnight success." Here is exactly how it is doing so.

For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.

I've got to hand it to Dmitry Brant, the man writes a mean utility. DiskDigger (free) is more than the usual undelete utility offered gratis as a leader product. It goes "beneath the file system" (Dmitry's line, which I plan to borrow regularly in the future) to recover data on a sector-by-sector basis from hard drives, thumb drives, etc. Think of these sectors as little boxes containing data that are arranged in tracks/circles on your hard drive.

Nearly a year ago Nexuiz 2.4 was released and it offered impressive graphics along with a new menu design, improved networking performance, reduced memory usage, and many other enhancements to this open-source game. The developers behind this first person shooter have now outdone themselves again with the release of Nexuiz 2.5. This latest release of Nexuiz brings even better graphics capabilities along with a new HUD, network communication improvements that cut the bandwidth in half, smarter bots, even better graphics, and several new maps. In total more than 3,000 changes make up Nexuiz 2.5!

Open call for nominations: Whether you’re a systems administrator in a datacenter, a software developer, or just really like to use the latest open devices we want your feedback.

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd.

John “J5? Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.

Following the series like 14 most popular text editors for Linux or 10 file managers for Linux, next is an overview of the best audio players available in Linux. I will only review the GUI players, leaving tools like mp3blaster, mpg123 or ogg123 for some other time. To begin with...

Conficker seems to be the theme of the week. So, with the crisis abated for the moment, I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss an issue near and dear to my heart – patch management.