Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

For years, HP has been slowly edging towards releasing a pre-installed Linux for general users. This week, the company finally announced that it would be releasing Novell‘s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 2 on its low-priced business class HP Compaq dc5850. This new desktop offering is aimed at SMB (small-to-medium sized businesses) and […]

Will a Linux certification help you get a Linux job? The answer is: “Probably.” There are a host of Linux certifications. They range from the high-end Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Novell’s Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE ) to ones that are appropriate for entry-level Linux system managers, such as the Linux Professional Institute’s […]

It’s not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it (Red Hat keeps its grip on Fedora). But, now Novell is loosening its apron strings on its community […]

Your street address doesn’t change unless you move, but your e-mail address is another story. It can change at an Internet Service Provider’s whim or even disappear entirely. Once popular local Internet addresses like clark.net, digex.com or home.com, closed their e-post office doors long ago. Is there any way you can get a permanent e-mail […]

End users have it easy with spam. They only have to delete a few hundred messages a day. For real spam misery, try being a network or e-mail administrator, with tens of thousands of daily spam messages clogging up your network pipes or mail server’s storage. Fortunately, an old approach, mail server authentication, which has […]

It was in early 2000 that most people became aware of the dangers of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks when a series of them knocked such popular Web sites as Yahoo, CNN, and Amazon off the air. More recently, a pair of DDoS attacks nailed The SCO Group’s Web site, which many people thought […]

I hate spam. You hate spam. We all hate spam. But none of us hate spam as much as ISPs and business network administrators do. Alexis Rosen, president and co-owner of Public Access Networks, which runs Panix, one of the oldest ISPs, concedes that while spam may “not be as bad as Adolph Hitler, it […]

It’s no longer just about IBM. SCO has now officially declared war on all business Linux users. SCO announced that all commercial Linux 2.4 and higher users must buy a UnixWare 7.1.3 license tailored to support run-time, binary use of Linux for all business uses or face the possibility of a law suit. If a […]

If you believed Microsoft a few years back, Active Directory was the answer to all your network users and system resources universal directory prayers. Ha! Upgrading from NT domains to W2K Active Directory (AD) was as scary a job as a network administrator could ever want to avoid. It was a horror show of a […]

You’ve been thinking about Gigabit Ethernet for a long time now, haven’t you? Perhaps you’ve even installed some server-to-server gigabit network links, although price tags of over a grand per port have likely kept you from deploying it to the desktop. That was then, this is now. Today, you can get gigabit switches at prices […]