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A few weeks ago I wrote about installing Apache in a chroot jail, a technique that can reduce the potential damage from a compromise of your server by preventing an attacker from gaining access to your server's root filesystem. In this article I will look at how to configure the Apache server environment to protect your Web site.

The latest version of PHP has a range of new features designed to improve performance and scalability, as well as improve integration with common Internet standards. PHP is an embedded Web scripting system often employed with other open-source technologies such as the Apache Web server and the MySQL database to create dynamic, data-driven Web sites. Around 16 million domains use PHP, although many of these are based at shared hosting facilities, reflecting its typical use in smaller scale projects

Since 1998, when Netscape decided to open-source its flagship Netscape Communicator suite and call the project Mozilla, the software has developed into a modern, flexible collection of applications, including the Mozilla browser, email client, chat client, and Web page creation tool, as well as the dedicated Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client. To get a deeper understanding of Mozilla and the direction it is heading in, I spoke to Chris Hofmann, the Mozilla Foundation director of engineering.

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 users can now unblock a blocked popup from the Show item on the Tools -> Popup Manager menu or the context menu item on the pop-up indicator icon in the statusbar. Mozilla Mail now has a Global Inbox which allows you to manage multiple POP3 accounts from the same folder hierarchy. Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 has initial support for the new Netscape Plugin API extensions annouced in the recent press release. See the Scripting Plugins in Mozilla document for more information."

A day after Raleigh-based Red Hat announced that it would restate its earnings from the past three years, at least two law firms said Wednesday that they have filed class-action lawsuits against the Raleigh-based Linux reseller.

My first experience with Slackware Linux came with version 9.1, after 4 years of using various versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. I disliked the general direction these distributions were moving in and didn't see their increasing focus on the "big end of town" as auguring well for either myself or clients of my small one-person IT consultancy business. I quickly became a Slackware convert and have since used it exclusively for all my server deployments. Check in for more and 15 screenshots from Slackware 10.

It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic.

This quick tip will take 2 minutes (or less) for you to perform, and will give you astonishingly improved results out of SpamAssassin.

Books that teach programming often start out trying to hide all of the messy details of programming. And they succeed -- at keeping programmers from knowing what is really going on. A new book from Bartlett Publishing changes all that.

A group of former Red Hat employees have formed a start-up called Specifix that aims to lure customers who have customized software needs their former employer couldn't accommodate. Specifix, which is based in San Jose, Calif., and has development sites in Raleigh, N.C., plans to offer versions of Linux that are as compatible as possible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company said. The company plans to start showing its software, Conary, on Wednesday.

The other day I attended the Chat with the Internet Explorer team. While I found it interesting and the fact that Microsoft is opening itself up more to the public by allowing developers to blog and allowing more public exposure at their conferences I will say I was very disappointed in the chat. Microsoft totally ignored the issues and the questions that really mattered were deflected and basically passed on for something more that Microsoft wanted to talk about.

To promote security, most organizations should maintain separate production and testing environments. Production software begins its life in a testing or research environment. These environments sometimes consist of actual labs on a private network, isolated from the rest of the environment in almost every way (partly as a security measure). Inside the lab are machines that act as representative parts of the production network environment. For example, there may be a machine running Apache, MySQL, DNS, and NTP; another machine on the other side of a router running sendmail and an "internal" DNS server. There will be client machines, of course, and printers, wireless access points, and NIS/NIS+/LDAP servers, which may be acting upon live data.

ReactOS is an open source (GPL) operating system built to be compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. ReactOS is currently just a development platform; it is not a useful desktop system for the average user in any way, but it has potential.

Australia's Open Source industry body OSIA has said alternative solutions based on open source software can help governments and corporates halt illegal copying of software, according to a media release from the body. A Business Software Alliance (BSA) survey released earlier had said 36 percent of all the software installed on computers worldwide in 2003 was downloaded illegally.

HP's recently launched 441 solution - which effectively offers four PCs in one - is already a hit in centres such as the Limpopo i-Community centre in South Africa and is destined to appear in many other "developing" countries in the coming months. The 441, consisting of four keyboard-mouse-screens running on one computer, ships with Linux and is specifically targetted for the education market.