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In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster. Fortunately, there are a plethora of good tools, both commercial and open source, that can shine much-needed light into your environment. Because good and free always beats good and costly, I've compiled a list of my favorite open source tools that prove their worth day in and day out in networks of any size. From network and server monitoring to trending, graphing, and even switch and router configuration backups, these utilities will see you through.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on a headless CentOS 5.2 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there is no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

The practice of law is a knowledge, information, and document-intensive profession. In many respects, lawyers ply their trade in the same way independent programmers do: we sell our expertise, experience and technical skill in using what is, essentially, the aboriginal “open” source code — the code of laws and courtroom procedure. In 2004, after practicing law for 23 years in a mid-sized downtown Seattle law firm, I opened my own boutique law practice and I decided to make GNU/Linux the centerpiece of a completely free/open software law firm environment.

Droopy is a simple Web server which does only one thing: it allows users to upload files to your computer. Useless, right? Wrong.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the Get a Mac ads have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name of the products, it's about the products behind the brand. Until they learn that, they are just going to wallow in corporate mediocrity and be subjected to well-deserved ridicule.

If you manage to freeze your system in such a way that even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn’t work anymore, the mouse is stuck on the screen any none of the key combinations will work, don’t think of the reset button just yet.

Just a month after the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the first alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 has become available. The next distro version should boot more quickly, require less power, integrate more web services and include a backup solution. The Ubuntu developers decided to move from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope, the fabled "killer rabbit" of North America.

The biggest news of the week was the final decision in the case of SCO vs. Novell in a Utah court. LXer.com summed it up this way: "Novell Wins, SCO Loses." In other news, big box retailers across the United States stocked their shelves with netbooks preloaded with Linux in time for Black Friday, the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday and traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Target and Best Buy stores displayed the ASUS Eee PC 900a for US$299 this week. Other netbooks with prices as low as US$199 are expected on shelves by Friday. In the news section, Paul Frields challenges the often-made claims that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution; openSUSE announces Zypper 1.0 and plans for Zypper 2, Gentoo Linux summarises the Gentoo Council functions and activities, sidux celebrates its second birthday, and Shift Linux announces a major shift in the direction of its Ubuntu-based distribution. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the new editor of DistroWatch Weekly is Chris Smart of the Kororaa and MakeTheMove.net fame.

I recognized I was mistaken when I thought my multiple, parallel div columns matched heights. I knew too well it was the background color of my base div hid the failure as the columns changed heights. However, it was more than simple inertia delayed efforts my correcting this too visible flaw in the menu pages. A myriad of other perplexing issues monopolized my attention. Moreover, I thought I had simple solutions stored on my system utilizing seemingly very straight forward javascript code. Furthermore, the problem of matching column heights seemed to be a well understood problem with its solution documented. Or so I thought, until my browser crashed losing all the code samples, irretrievably. I soon learned the solution was not so simple. I ended up developing my own code. Oh yes, welcome to the strange world of Javascript.

Hi All, Here's my 9th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to edit data in your directory server, but only have command line access":

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they're more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.

TuxMobil, the largest current web directory of Linux and mobile hardware, announced this month that it has surpassed the unrivaled milestone of 8,000 different installation guides in one place to help users install Linux on their laptop and notebook computers.

KPlato is a small and easy project management application, a part of the KOffice office suite. Developers of the application focus on planning and scheduling of projects. This article highlights key features of the application and shows several screenshots.

The public has decided that this should be moved to a SourceForge project, and it shall be so... after today :)

Businesses everywhere are looking to cut costs in the grip of reduced consumer spending, decreased advertising and a general slowdown of trade. Linux can aid you in cutting your infrastructure costs - no matter your platform of choice.

It's possible that Henry Ford would have hated Linux and open source software in general.

What's involved in a switch from Windows to Linux? An editor and a couple of readers posed that question after last week's column. Given the proliferation of cheap Linux-based "netbooks" it is worth a systematic look. For newbies, the more stand-alone, Internet-oriented your computing, the more likely you are to find Linux a good substitute for other operating systems. That's because your interaction with the Net is mediated by a browser and e-mail program, making the operating system less relevant. Conversely, if you're in an institutional Windows-based environment, you may find it difficult to make the transition.

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan recently picked up a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Ubuntu Netbook and pinged me for tech support questions regarding his new toy — he couldn’t get it functioning on his home wireless network. We tried a couple of different combinations of things including updating the software (the usual sudo apt-get update / upgrade routine) but to no avail. He had to call up Dell Tech support, which eventually guided him through the wireless setup and helped him debug a few wireless security issues.

Although much of the brouhaha of the OOXML adoption process has abated, the post-partum process of reviewing how SC 34 gave birth to IS 29500 continues. It's not a pretty sight.

Compiz 0.7 was released back in February and since then we've seen a series of minor updates. Now though we may have Compiz 0.8 to look forward to in the near future.