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A little over a year ago, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI, http://www.sgi.com) announced a new 64-bit supercomputing platform called the Altix 3000. In a break from its tradition of building large machines with MIPS processors running the IRIX operating system, the Altix uses Intel's Itanium 2 processor and runs -- you guessed it -- Linux. Unlike Beowulf-style Linux clusters, SGI's cache-coherent, shared-memory, multi-processor system is based on NUMAflex, SGI's third-generation, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture, which has proven to be a highly-scalable, global shared memory architecture based on SGI's Origin 3000 systems.

While CVS is the de facto standard for revision control in the world of Open Source, that doesn't mean CVS is popular or perfect. To some developers, CVS is simply a necessary evil. But now there's an alternative to CVS. Read on for a look at the just-released Subversion 1.0.

In the near future, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio will become the first municipality in the country to receive broadband over power lines (BPL). The service, which promises at least one megabit per second download and upload speeds, can be accessed via any electrical socket using an adapter that closely resembles a large cell-phone charger. The technology is proven, the Federal Communications Commission is endorsing it, and unlike DSL or wireless, BPL can go anywhere that power goes. And BPL is cheap: the basic one mbps service is priced at $29.95 per month.

Following the very successful inaugural Open Source Software Africa conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, last year conference organisers Trade Conferences International(TCI) this week announced that they will be hosting the 2nd Open Source Software Africa event next month.

Women'sNet, a non-profit women's organisation based in Johannesburg, is hosting a SADC(Southern African Development Community) regional workshop to build awareness and use of free and open source software (FOSS) in the non-profit sector, and women's organisations specifically. The workshop will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 6 - 10 September 2004.

The two previous editions of "Tech Support" introduced software to help you monitor the security of your Linux system. March's column showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, and last month's column explained how to detect rootkits and loadable kernel modules (LKMs) with chkrootkit. This month, let's see how to monitor and analyze your system logs with Logwatch

Samba 3.0 adds a new feature, Unix extensions, that adds support for Unix filesystem features to the SMB/CIFS protocol, and the 2.6-series Linux kernel provides client-side support for these features in the form of a new filesystem driver known as cifs. Using these tools, you can gain access to many Unix filesystem features that would have otherwise been lost using the older smbfs mount code or the smbmount command.

Sunbelt Software recently upgraded its Sunbelt Network Security Inspector (SNSI) to version 1.5, adding Linux system support, IP-based scanning, port and Windows service scanning, vulnerability searching and new configuration and scanning wizards. Platform extensions bring its continually updated database to 3,100 vulnerabilities.

CNET News.com is reporting that two new flaws in the way Mozilla handles security certificates have been discovered. The more serious vulnerability allows a site to appear to have a security certificate when it does not (bug 253121). The other hole makes it possible for an attacker to overwrite the root certificate authority certificates, causing an error message to appear whenever the user tries to access a (genuine) secure site (bug 249004). Both bugs have now been fixed, but updated end-user releases of Mozilla products are not yet available.

This tutorial (Part 3) is ideal for those who want to improve their knowledge of fundamental Linux administration skills. We'll cover a variety of topics, including system and Internet documentation, the Linux permissions model, user account management, and login environment tuning.

Life online is certainly getting complex. As if spam, spim, crackers, and worms weren't enough, you now have to worry about dragons, thieves, spells, and Sith lords. It's almost enough to make you pull the RJ45 plug. But don't. Dragons aren't a new Windows exploit (yet), and you don't need to protect your hard disk from the Sith. And while you might run into such beasties online, have no fear: you'll have a trusty axe, light saber, or passel of pigs to protect you.

You know Linux is easy to run and is as stable as houses. I know that, too. But does your friend Joe Windows know it? Chances are he doesn't.

I remembered someone recently talking about how Perl-Tk can create nice graphical user interfaces. I'd never spent much time learning Perl-Tk, so I considered this the perfect opportunity to tackle the learning problem via a practical problem. I cracked open my recently acquired Mastering Perl/Tk from O'Reilly, and started reading.

Let's look at some powerful things you can do on a command-line. Even if you don't want to do exactly these things, you're likely to get some ideas for related uses. This "related-ness" ability of the shell and its command-line -- letting you combine tools to do just what you need to do -- is the very spirit of "Power Tools."

Half of Australia wrote in to tell us that today's issue of The Sydney Morning Herald features an opinion column in which technology correspondent Graeme Philipson recommends Mozilla Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer. The actual article itself is short but it is strikingly splashed in the promotion box under the print newspaper's main masthead (as a PDF of today's Herald front page shows).