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NewsVac: News from around the Web

• Absolute Nonsense - More Weekend Unix and Linux Levity 4 days, 4 hours ago
  
  This week, I stumbled upon Two sites that had me working overtime trying not to laugh out loud at my desk. Nonsense humor isn't for everyone, but I find it the most enjoyable kind. It's goofy, it's random and once something gets me going I sound like I'm having a massive asthma attack while I'm trying to force myself to not laugh. Thank God I do this during my lunch break, when nobody cares to stop and see if I'm okay.
• Monitor Linux / UNIX DNS Server / Network Traffic In A Real Time 4 days, 5 hours ago
  
  dnstop is a great tool when maintaining a DNS server. Log file can give out required information but dnstop is just like top command for monitoring dns traffic. It is a small tool to listen on device or to parse the file savefile and collect and print statistics on the local network's DNS traffic. You can see information about all DNS clients, DNS queries and much more with this tool.
• The Linux Saga: boot loader, initrd & Sys V 1 week, 2 days ago
  
  Linux was filling up the memory. The boot loader was fetching more and more kilobytes of code. Thoughtlessly, without emotion. But what kind of emotions can we expect from a boot loader, honestly?
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin 3 weeks, 1 day ago
  
  Many reviews have been written about OpenSolaris since its release, but all of them barely tread beyond the desktop aspect, with the obligatory screenshots of the GNOME environment and a high-level description of only the major features most are already familiar with, or at least have heard of.
• SCO goes down and Sun’s in Trouble 3 weeks, 1 day ago
  
  The decision is in, and SCO has gone down in defeat. The U.S. District Court in Utah has ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell, the keystone case in SCO’s long, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Linux.
• Why Is So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows 1 month ago
  
  This is just a rant (hopefully it will be regarded as pertinent and non-'laming') on why Windows users try Linux and return frustrated to Windows after several hours or days. I won't praise Linux and the way it works, I won't even compare and say 'here Linux is easier because ...', instead I have a few questions for all of you who blame Linux for not being and behaving like Windows. The following issues address the problem to the Windows users who had their first computer with Windows pre-installed and were simple beginners not only in the computing world, but in Windows as well.
• Speaking UNIX: Just a few clicks 1 month ago
  
  The IBM AIX operating system has kept to what's important: stability, functionality, robustness. And it has done it by keeping a strong command-line interface (CLI). If you never learned to use the CLI or need a refresher on its basics, read on.
• Sun sheds light on its open-source future 1 month, 1 week ago
  
  "Sun UK's chief open-source officer, Simon Phipps, has a high-profile role to play as the company aims to complete its move to 100 percent open software development. Echoing the words of James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, Phipps said that, after more than a decade of Java development, the time is right for "the next chapter" in software programming .... "
• Simple Perl Script To Ease Console Server Use On Linux And Unix 1 month, 1 week ago
  
  Well, it's been a good long time (almost a week) since I've posted anything but numbered lists of, hopefully, useful information. It's about time for a little scripting. So, just to maintain my sanity (if not your own - assuming you follow this blog a bit, for which I thank you), today I'm putting up a little Perl script I wrote to maintain connections to a simple Cyclades console server. It can be re-worked fairly easily to connect to multiple console servers of any kind.
• Unfairly indicting Sun for its SCO testimony? 1 month, 1 week ago
  
  Pamela Jones rightly takes umbrage that Sun apparently stood by while SCO attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. PJ writes:
• Solaris Express Community Edition Build 91 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  
  It's been a while since last looking at a Solaris Express Community Edition release (SXCE Build 75 to be exact) and since then Solaris Express Developer 1/08 and OpenSolaris 2008.05 have been released, which are both based off the same SXCE "Nevada" code-base. With Solaris Express Community Edition Build 91 having been released this past week, we took this opportunity to see what new work is going on within this Solaris community.
• SCO gets more time to file Ch. 11 plan 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  
  The bankrupt SCO Group got more time to file a new Chapter 11 reorganization plan as it awaits a pivotal federal ruling on whether it owes licensing fees to Novell over disputed Unix code.
• More Fun With Security Through Obfuscation On Linux And Unix 2 months ago
  
  A few months ago, we ran a post on security through obfuscation, regarding ways to make your code less comprehensible to folks who didn't understand it as well as you do. While, at the core, this does nothing to actually "secure" your code from anyone with the patience to unravel it, it can be useful for keeping folks who know "just enough to do a lot of damage" from messing with your scripts ;) And, on another level, it can be a useful stalling technique, since you'll be making anyone work to figure out how your script/code works before they can change it without risking destroying it.
• OpenSolaris: Shows Promise, Needs Work 2 months, 3 weeks ago
  
  Last week, on my country's Liberation Day, Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the much awaited first official fruit of Project Indiana. It delivers many of OpenSolaris' major features, such as DTrace, ZFS, containers, and more, in a Linux distribution-like package. The goal is to allow more people to experience Solaris. A few reviews have since hit the web.
• Unison - file synchronization tool 2 months, 3 weeks ago
  
  Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.),distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync,Reconcile, etc).
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