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The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development.

The money originates from GNOME's participation in the Google "Summer of Code" program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google's program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google's contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google.

Implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that will impact every division of a company is an intriguing proposition. A lot is expected of such a system, and when we were tasked with this undertaking at our company, we did not want to neglect the foundation of it -- the database. As we researched this project, it became evident that we could satisfy all the necessary requirements with a combination of products: IBM DB2, Red Hat Linux, as well as Heartbeat, Mon, and ipfail. In this article, I will describe how we built a "bulletproof penguin" one piece at a time.

*buntu Dapper not only replaced devfs with udev, they removed the user documentation for managing udev (thanks a lot), with the result that hordes of users found their scanners (and other devices) didn't work after upgrading to Dapper. This Kubuntu forum thread tells how to get your scanner back, and to make it work for non-root users. It's very simple, once you infiltrate the temple and learn the secret incantation.

Part 1 included an overview of BackupPC, and some of the issues of making backups on a mixed LAN. Part 2 covered server hardware, and setting up a BackupPC server. Today we'll configure the BackupPC clients, and use Partimage and SystemRescueCD to create and restore Windows system images.

The real nuts and bolts of everyone’s IGP of choice, OSPF, are a bit complex, but strangely satisfying. After understanding how it works, we’re left wondering, “what else do we need?” Make sure to review the first part of our look at OSPF before embarking on this potentially confusing journey.

This article will cover LSA types, packet types, and area types. First, however, we’d like to dispel a common misunderstanding about dynamic routing:

Open Shortest Path First is a robust link-state interior gateway protocol (IGP). People use OSPF when they discover that RIP just isn’t going to work for their larger network, or when they need very fast convergence. This installment of Networking 101 will provide a conceptual overview of OSPF, and the second part of our OSPF coverage will delve a bit deeper into the protocol itself, as well as OSPF area configurations

If udev is driving you nuts, read this. For example, this document helped me configure my Kubuntu Dapper system to let me run my scanner as an ordinary user, rather than root-only. Dapper helpfully removed all the useful udev documentation, may their fleas be the size of Chihuahuas.

In Part 1 we discussed all manner of fascinating backup tools and strategies. Today we roll up our sleeves and build a sleek, dependable cross-platform network backup server with the excellent BackupPC. We're not going to mess around with dumb old tape drives, nor CDs, nor DVDs, nor floppy diskettes, but nice, fast high-capacity hard drives.

Computer stores are chock-full of all manner of backup software and network storage appliances of varying quality, usefulness, and ease of use. Do you really need some expensive commercial product? Probably not. Backing up Linux/UNIX systems is easy, and *nix comes with everything you need. Backing up Windows systems can get expensive, what with all those per-user and concurrent and per-machine blah blah licensing, and cross-platform backups can drive even strong admins to develop substance abuse habits. But don't run out and start one just yet, even though you'll be able to afford it, because this two-part series is going to show you how to perform the two primary types of backups the easy and cheap way: data files on a mixed LAN, and custom operating system images for fast bare-metal restores.

here we go again- same dung, different day
No doubt many of you saw on Slashdot the article "Microsoft Talks Daily With Your Computer" or in Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article for eWeek titled, Big Microsoft Brother, about allegations that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage validation tool phones home daily to report information to Microsoft about you on each boot. Lauren Weinstein broke the story on his blog. Microsoft has now put out a statement, asserting that the Windows Genuine Advantage tool is not spyware, that they're going to change it some, and that one thing that distinguishes it from spyware is that they get consent before installing it. I question the accuracy of the statement.

David Berlind did a fabulous job of discovering that in fact the tool has two parts, one of which is new, the Notification part, as you can see in his helpful series of screenshots. First, he explains how the applications actually work. His research indicated to him that Microsoft asks permission for only one of the two, but the wrong one. I think it's muddier even than that, after reading the EULA. Thanks to Berlind's work, I see a legal problem with consent, which I noticed by reading the EULA. I also see a problem with the statement Microsoft has issued with regard to what information it collects. And something in the EULA needs to be explained, because it doesn't match Microsoft's statement

Posted By: agillis
Date: 2006-05-31 20:40
Summary: Trixbox 1.0 released

Development on Asterisk@Home has ended. We have created a new product called trixbox. Like Asterisk@Home trixbox is a complete Asterisk PBX including, a Linux OS, Asterisk PBX software, a web GUI, and many other useful add-ons. trixbox will focus on both the business and home user and will have more features including automatic upgrade capability. As with Asterisk@Home trixbox can be quickly and easily installed in under one hour.

This has not received much attention, and will probably cause confusion. You heard it here first.

Red Hat and its many clones and offspring, like Fedora, CentOS, White Box Linux, and so forth have long had a simple built-in mechanism for cloning installations on diverse hardware: Kickstart. With Kickstart you can easily create a customized configuration, set up an installation server, plug a new PC into the network, and perform an unattended network installation. SUSE has AutoYaST. Debian users have not been so fortunate. FAI, the Fully-Automated Installer, works beautifully when it's set up correctly. But learning to use FAI is not so easy.

from the dumb-and-dumber dept:
Networking manufacturer D-Link has settled a dispute with a Danish administrator Poul-Henning Kamp over the way its kit queries internet time servers...The address of Kamp's NTP server - which is run on a non-profit basis and allocated only minimal bandwidth resources - was hardwired into the firmware in various D-link products.

The Internet is a wild and unruly place. When people talk about Internet governance, the conversation is normally related to IP allocation and domain name management, rather than censorship or control. The Internet actually is tightly managed with regards to network allocation. This edition of Networking 101 will clear up those mysterious organizational acronyms and explain what their purpose really is.

As our fetish for monitoring tools begins to subside, we realize that one of the neatest monitoring tools available has nearly been forgotten. Cacti is “a complete frontend to RRDTool,” as they say, which makes SNMP and script-based monitoring very worthwhile. In this article we’d like to talk a bit about Cacti and how it can be used to create some excitingly useful graphs of various data

Last week we used ping and tcptraceroute to pinpoint connectivity problems, and nmap to spy on users. Oh yeah, and to map entire subnets with a single command. Today we'll look at ways, when your users crab about "the network is slow", to determine if it's network or server troubles

Our list of Unix books, papers, and usenet postings continues to grow, so much so that I thought it best to move it to its own page, so we can organize it and continue to work on it on its own page. With that end in mind, Groklaw member grouch has collected all the comments you've left on the original article, and he's put them all together in one list.
Nice bit of work, Grouch!

Linux has everything you need to do any kind of networking, plus it has eleventy-eight hundred different software utilities for network monitoring and troubleshooting. Today we'll learn how to pinpoint connectivity problems and how to map your network and all running services. This is handy not only for keeping tabs on everyday activities, but also to catch users running illicit hosts and services.

Last week in part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

By default, Asterisk@Home sets up OpenSSH to run after installation, and to accept root logins. Accepting remote root logins is not the best security practice..

Pamela Jones unfairly raked Linspire over the coals with this article, Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom. PJ, when you're right (which is most of the time) you're awesome, and when you're wrong you're awesomely wrong. Here is why.