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1. Jl Since 1994 The 0 APRIL 2008 ISSUE 168 PLUS N A URNAL lt EENI THEE Cfengine for the Set Upa PXE Server and Boot Kickstart Images Eliminate atPuppy Tape Backups with i Bacula and FreeNAS 0 0928 1 03 102 VMware Server 2 0 Beta Rockbox A Il 04 4 S HiPerSTATION 8000 System Highlights e Optimal multi threaded application performance utilizing 8 eight native Quad Core AMD Opteron ITTTTT E I EEE processors PrPreeeee irr Terr Up to 256GB of DDR2 667 memory eee eeessecsssesces Next generation dual x16 PCle technology offers scalable eee eesecssessssee graphic bandwidth pee ees asenacoe cn 2B of storage cee eeccsessssese Designed to be quiet enough to utilize in an office SEE IIT treet environment the noise of server version EE LE 6 E E i L a E E E a Ideal for usage in Computer Aided Designs Visualization and Digital Content Creation eet eeeaaese sae G eeaeaaat TEMS pivcoeroesies www hpcsystems com 888 725 3472 It s a small world after all Your organization is global and so is your IT infrastructure Some days that means you need to operate and solve problems in 12 time zones With Avocent you can solve most any crisis that the network gremlins can throw at you with es out leaving your desk or using your passport Avocent infrastructure sol
2. Dave Taylor is a 26 year veteran of UNIX creator of The Elm Mail System and most recently author of both the best selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts and Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours among his 16 technical books His main Web site is at www intuitive com and he also offers up tech support at AskDaveTaylor com Follow him on Twitter if you d like twitter com DaveTaylor ASA COMPUTERS Want your business to be more productive The ASA Servers powered by the Intel Xeorl Processor provide the quality and dependability to keep up with your growing business Hardware Systems for the Open Source Community Since 1989 Linux FreeBSD Hel BSD OpenBSD Solans MS etc ITB Stereags installed Has ITE TU Dual cere S030 GPU by 1 Mas 7 CPUs 168 687M PROCIMMs Installed Bupperts 1608 FROIMM 42250068 hiswap SATA II Drives installed 4 port BATA I RAD ceantraliar 2410 100 710 00 LAN onboard 4E Storage installed Max 12TB JU Dual care 5050 CPU 10B 667MOAZ FEDO Ms Installed Supperts 16G8R FED iM 16 port SATA II RAID n ntralar 1682500 8 hiswap SATA II Orives installed 28 10 1 00 1000 LAN onboard 800w A ad PS ma ATE Storage installed Max 12TB 3U Dual core 5050 CPU z IQ 667MG2 FEDIMMase Installed Supperts 1608 FROMM 16 25068 htewap SATA II Drives installed 16 pert SATA RAID corir ollar 2X1 0 10071 000 LAN onboard s00w Red PS TA Storage insisailead Ma
3. prog Label icon command where label icon and command are replaced with the appropri ate entries for the application you want to launch For exam ple to add an entry that launches Konsole the KDE terminal emulator you would create an entry as follows prog Konsole konsole konsole Submenus are described with the following syntax menu Label Program entries or further submenus are defined between the curly braces The first thing we all thought on using the Eee when we first received it was the Windows XP theme doesn t look a E E M i ee ae eee ie ee a 14 47 Shutdown od Aepktabons Gal userigecepc To Figure 2 A broad selection of attractive themes are available for lceWM attractive on XP let alone on Linux How the heck do we change this abomination You ll be pleased to know that this is extremely simple now that the menu is enabled The biggest theme repository for IceWM is at themes freshmeat net browse 925 with hundreds of themes trom which to choose Once you ve downloaded a theme create the folder icewm themes and extract the theme to that folder It will now be selectable from the IceWM menu under Settings Themes You can find a wide range of other customisations by reading the comments in the icewm preferences file Some notable ones are showing the workspace switcher on the panel and adding a CPU meter Traditional window manager settings such as focus model
4. SILICON MECHANICS www siliconmechanics com HURRICANE ELECTRIC www he net SUN JAVA ONE CONF java sun com javaone INTEL www intel com TECHNOLOGIC SYSTEMS www embeddedx86 com 1 amp 1 INTERNET INC www oneandone com VERSALOGIC CORPORATION www versalogic com INTEROP www interop com ZT GROUP INTERNATIONAL www ztgroup com IT360 Www it360 ca www linuxjournal com april 2008 81 INDEPTH m Nexthaus SyncJe if you re using a BlackBerry E Funambol Windows Mobile clients if you re either using Windows CE on a PDA or a smartphone There also are clients for other applications such as Microsoft Outlook The latter allows you to synchronize contacts events and tasks fully with SOGo through the Funambol middleware Figure 4 shows a PalmOS based device insync with our SOGO server Migrating from Legacy Systems Whenever you re replacing an existing solution with a new one data migration is a must for your users Because SOGO stores its data directly using the iCalendar and vCard stan dards migration is relatively easy if the legacy system speaks the same language For example in Microsoft Exchange you can obtain data trom it through WebDAV If you are trying to use a simple WebDAV client such as cadaver however you will not be able to obtain the data as the client does not specify in its requests a required HTTP header You need to set the
5. What stands out for me is how participato ry it all is Even its disorganization has orga nized qualities to it What organizes it think is respect for actual contribution If it doesn t help the principle says it doesn t matter There is gravity there It keeps conversation grounded in the realities of actual contribution Linus has been saying this kind of thing for years You can hear it again in the interview excerpted in the UpFront section of this Linux Journal issue You also hear something new con cerning the social side of kernel development Here s what Linus says So the technical sides are often easier in the sense that don t get frustrat ed Okay we ve had a bug and we ve hit our head against a technical bug for a couple months and yes that can Getting Real about the Ideal Nothing s perfect That s why we ll never stop debugging everything DOC SEARLS be slightly frustrating but at the same time you always know it s something that you are going to solve and never worry about that The social side is maybe a bit more dif ficult in the sense that that can be really frustrating and sometimes you don t solve the social problems and people get upset and think that s very interesting too mean if every body was easy and everybody was all pulling in the same direction it would n t be as fun and interesting And it s different and also it changes from time to time Sometimes we con
6. could type 1 and then Bob lt Enter gt Then to see all the headers again could type 1 and then all lt Enter gt to show all messages You also can have mutt search with in the body of messages so created a mutt macro that bound to the F3 key so that when see the full list of headers and press F3 it limits the view only to new mes sages that contained error or fail in them could read those messages first and then change the limit back to all and tab through the rest Here is the extra line in my muttrc to create the macro macro index lt F3 gt 1 N b 4nN 00 error Ff Aa Ii L1 lt enter gt constantly am surprised with how far you can extend mutt It is definitely one of those programs that gives your time back in gained productivity as you learn more about its contiguration options If you use your e mail to remember things or dig through a large stack of server e mail every day or even if you don t mutt is an invaluable e mail companion that always has new tricks Kyle Rankin is a Senior Systems Administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of a number of books including Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks for O Reilly Media He is currently the president of the North Bay Linux Users Group Linux Server FreeBSD Server Microsoft Server Solaris Server Quad Core Woodcrest 2 Nodes amp Up to 16 Cores in 1U Genstor Systems Inc 780 Montague Express 604 Sa
7. dev hda2 50 9G 32 9G 17 9G 65 initrd mnt dev_save dev loop1 495 8M 733M 422 5M 15 initrd pup_rw tmpfs 77 90 77 0M 916 0k 99 initrd mnt tmpfs dev loop0 77 0 77 0M 100 initrd pup_ro2 unionfs 495 8M 73 3M 422 5M 15 tmpfs 55 0M 96 0k 54 9M 0 tmp shmfs 46 1M 0 46 1M 0 dev shm For convenience a symbolic link to initrd mnt dev_save has been created at mnt home This is the where all system changes and other PL specific data have been persisted as per your first reboot On my dedicated PL host the contents of mnt home appear as follows it s basically the entire contents of my hard drive Downloads RJE junk lost found pup 300 sfs pup save 2fs notes zdrv_300 sfs LJ PL depends on the following Tiles to persist user data across sessions and perform better E pup_save 2ts the standalone ext2 filesystem containing all session data that Is cumulative changes applied to the base system 94 april 2008 www linuxjournal com E zdrv_300 sfs and pup_300 sfs the embedded 300 refers to the release These two files were copied to the hard drive at the end of the first session They also reside on the PL bootable ISO image but having them here allows the system to start and operate more efficiently PL will never access or modify any file other than the PL specitic files on its own Tricks What s This Puppy Good For Given Its basic features and content several potential niches immediately come to mind e
8. m Additional media applications m C C compilers and libraries m And too many more applications to list here Not bad And you don t need to start with the standard core set of applications Through a process documented under Puppy Linux Unleashed www puppyos com puppy unleashed htm you can create a customized distribution from more than 500 packages designed to run under PL The PL community puts the total number of avail able applications at more than 1 000 Get Up and Barking Not just making a puppy quip here if PL was able to con figure your audio device during the boot process you ll hear the sound of a gentle dog bark woof woof If not a sound wizard can be launched from Menu gt Setup gt Wizard Wizard to attempt a manual sound card setup The two most impressive things discovered about PL was how quickly able to have a functioning PL desktop and how well it performed GUI applications launched instantaneously and seemingly without stepping on each other For now let s concentrate on getting PL running on the closest laptop or workstation Obtain a PL ISO image by downloading it from the Web or purchasing CD media As it s smaller than 100MB you can download it quickly over a broadband Internet connection Or you can purchase bootable media for a few dollars at www linuxonline biz index php cPath 137_ 149 Downloading the ISO Image The complete set of live ISOs and other PL artifacts
9. rithms on all server applications as well as to audit the kernel for pollers Car points out that We have been doing this work for the past year and it has accumulated to the point where we are seeing meaningful power savings m Suspend resume hibernate work on laptops including features such as automatic screen backlight intensity reduction as a laptop becomes idle Red Hat also will integrate the new tickless kernel in Fedora 9 and subse quently in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat has been a key developer of this technology says Car which allows the kernel to properly idle itself when appropriate Over in Ubuntu s camp Gerry Carr Canonical s Marketing Manager www linuxjournal com april 2008 49 FEATURE Go Green Save Green with Linux stressed that his company is not directly involved in green computing per se but indirectly we are massively involved adding that we built an enabling technology for green comput ing without it being directly built for this purpose Regarding virtualization Carr also stressed the optimization of the kernel for paravirt ops which is a long way of saying you can run more VMs on less iron using Ubuntu thus saving energy there Carr also highlighted the presence of Ubuntu on low cost computers which typically utilize less energy such as Intel s Classmate PC The Classmate is targeted at students in poor coun tries Similarly Ubuntu a
10. Advanced PL customization topics are well documented at puppylinux net puppy unleashed htm A base PL image can be assembled from scratch and can be as inclusive or limited as your requirements dictate Meanwhile for those assignments that call for digging deeper into PL kernel configuration build related topics are available at puppylinux net development compilekernel htm As mentioned previously my dedicated PL host was a proverbial paperweight What modern OS could practically operate on a Pentium Ill class machine with matching resources PL provides an excellent vehicle for getting these vintage platforms working again Thinking more globally this inexpensive platform PL plus older generation hardware can put a lot of computing power in the hands of people who might otherwise have none Considering that this rich but free OS can operate reasonably well on seven or eight year old hardware PL presents some interesting opportunities There are efforts abound to address the so called digital divide and PL can be a facilitator both locally and worldwide Nonprofit organizations less atfluent educational institutions and all Resources Puppy Linux www puppylinux com PL Distribution Home Page www puppylinux org PL FAQ puppylinux com faqg htm PL User Manuals puppylinux com manuals htm PL Discussion Forums www murga linux com puppy PL for Developers puppylinux com development developer htm PL News www
11. Based on OpenGroupware org a project with more than ten years of maturity Scalable OpenGroupware org provides a complete groupware solution oriented toward scalability instead of depth in functionality SOGo offers all standard groupware features including the following m Personal and shared calendars with events and tasks m Personal and shared address books with LDAP sources m Personal and shared e mail mailboxes It also stores calendar information using the iCalendar Standard and contact information using the vCard format This avoids information loss when exchanging over protocols sup ported by SOGo such as CalDAV CardDAV and GroupDAV In development since 2004 the project has greatly improved during the past few months Inverse developers on the project contributed many improvements such as CalDAV CardDAV and ACL support Furthermore it re created SOGo s Web interface so that it matches the look and feel of Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning or its standalone equivalent Sunbird The interface now also makes use of Ajax Although CalDAV and IMAP take care of the calendaring and e mail integration of the Mozilla suite with SOGo address books also needed to be synchronized Inverse created a plugin for Thunderbird named SOGo Connector that adds this functionality among others These contributions allow SOGo to provide Web and native interfaces sharing the same look and feel features and data a considerable advantage a
12. Without the tick Linux now chills out and conserves power until the next timer event is scheduled to occur Multisecond idle periods now are possible _ Session Edt View Bookmarks Settings Help Hartel PowerTOP version 1 7 C 2007 Tr The power savings from tickless idle can have positive benefits in any type of machine trom longer battery life on brawny notebooks to signifi cantly lower electricity bills for home users and data centers Although Intel through the Lesswatts org Project is more public about exploiting the tickless kernel and publicizing its power management tools representatives at AMD assured me that their less publicized initiatives and partnerships in the Linux community are just as or more significant than Intel s Margaret Lewis AMD Director of Commercial Solutions and Software Strategy asserted that the tickless kernel features are fully supported on both AMD s 32 bit and 64 bit proces sors Furthermore Brent Kerby Product Manager for AMD Opteron noted that AMD s PowerNOW Cool n Quiet and CoolCore technologies including the dynamic adjustment of individual pro cessor core frequencies and not just in pairs all function well and automatically under Linux and contribute greatly to power savings Lewis added These technologies give you a lot more power management control and are cumula tively perhaps more important than the tickless kernel AMD also emphasized its gree
13. are available as well With a built in Webcam it s a shame that the Eee PC didn t ship with the Linux beta of Skype that allows video calling It is however easy to install by hand Navigate to www skype com download skype linux and elect to download not the current stable version but the beta When it asks you to select your distribution download the package for Debian Etch Once you ve downloaded it to disk open a terminal and navigate to where the file was saved Type the following to install the package dpkg i skype debian 2 0 0 27 1 _1386 deb The version number of the package may have changed since the time of this writing As this upgrades the version of Skype already installed the Skype launcher will launch the new version During the course of adding applications to the menu the observant will notice that the Eee ships with most of KDE installed During its development phase the Eee exposed an option to enable a full desktop mode with a complete KDE 3 4 desktop The most elegant solution for enabling the full desk top is to install a package that does the configuration for you trom wiki eeeuser com howto getkde This package essen tially downloads the packages for kicker and ksmserver and modifies the ASUS startup scripts It adds an option to log in to full desktop mode trom the easy mode shutdown dialog To get back into easy mode there is an option in the K menu 0221 call with Jeg Figure 3 S
14. e 512 MB 4 GB RAM e 60 200 GB hard drive e DVD RW or Blu ray e 6 3 8 6 pounds e 802 11a b g 54Mbps WiFi e ExpressCard EVDO e Starts at 1350 Raven X61 Tablet ThinkPad X61 Tablet by Lenovo e 12 1 SXGA w aaieas e 1 6 GHz Core 2 Duo e 1 4 GB RAM e 80 200 GB hard drive e 3 8 pounds e Pen stylus input to screen e Dynamic screen rotation e Handwriting recognition e X61s laptops available e Starts at 2150 LJ 07 Ultimate Linux Laptop 1 888 651 6686 Model prices specifications and availability may vary All trademarks are the property of their respective owners Note The screenshot in Figure 1 is from an Ubuntu live DVD which is why you can see that install icon and Examples folder on the screen The Examples folder contains a number of sample docu ments spread sheets images and multimedia files to try with your Ubuntu Linux system gt IS an exciting evening Francois This issue of Linux Journal marks the 100th Cooking with Linux column by your humble patron mon ami You ve done an excellent job on the decora tions Francois am very impressed but do have one question Don t you think there s something just slightly wrong with the giant cake you ordered for this event You do not see it Mon ami it says Congratulations Cooking with Linux on being 100 years old the column is 100 issues old not 100 years Mon Dieu can see our guests approaching even now
15. those MAC addresses Then a boot option can be applied to all of that group m Finally if no specific files can be found pxelinux will look for a file named default and use it One nice feature of pxelinux is that it uses the same syntax as syslinux so porting over a configuration from a CD for instance can start with the syslinux options and follow with your custom network options Here is an example configuration for an old CentOS 3 6 kickstart default linux label linux kernel vmlinuz centos 3 6 append text nofb load_ramdisk 1 initrd initrd centos 3 6 img network ks http 10 0 0 1 kickstart centos3 cfg Why Use Menus The standard sort of pxelinux setup works fine and many administrators use it but one of the annoying aspects of it is that even if you know you want to install say CentOS 3 6 on a server you first have to get the MAC address So you either go to the machine and find a sticker that lists the MAC address boot the machine into the BIOS to read the MAC or let it get a lease on the network Then you need to create either a custom configuration file for that host s MAC or make sure its MAC Is part of a group you With pxelinux menus I can preconfigure any of the different network boot scenarios need and assign a number to them already have configured Depending on your infrastructure this step can add substantial time to each server Even If you buy servers in batches and group in IP ranges what h
16. Francois Please get the door Welcome Welcome everyone to Chez Marcel the meeting place of great Linux and open source software and excep tional wines Your tables are waiting mes amis so please sit and make yourselves comfortable Tonight mes amis we are privileged to count among our guests internationally renowned wine writer Decanter World Wine Awards chair and member of the Order of Canada Tony Aspler For those of you who may not know the Order of Canada represents Canada s highest civil honor He has graciously agreed to select a wine for us tonight Your suggestion Tony This is a wine to drink with duck breast for apr s ski romantic situations wakes or software writing Le Clos Jordanne Vineyard Pinot Noir 2005 medium ruby colour a nose of dried flowers minerals and raspberries richly extracted velvety mouthfeel firm but elegant with a long cranberry and pomegranate finish A lovely wine to drink now or hold for 2 3 years Five stars An excellent recommendation Thank you And as it turns out we happen to have several bottles in our cellar Francois please hurry down and fetch the wine for our guests While my faithful waiter goes tor the wine and before introduce the first item on tonight s menu my sincere thanks to Tony Aspler tor suggesting tonight s wine System administration sounds like something the computer person at your company does in the serv er room but anybody using a deskto
17. HTTP translate header to false if you want to obtain the data from the Microsoft Exchange server Using wget if you do wget user Ludovic password header Translate f http exchange Exchange Ludovic Calendar foo EML you will obtain the event with a summary foo in the too EML file The EML file is actually an RFC 2821 message with a text calendar part That part can be extracted and imported into SOGo easily WebDAV is de emphasized in Microsoft Exchange 2007 so hurry and migrate from it A similar approach can be used with Oracle Calendar A demo program bundled with Oracle s SDK provides an excellent starting point for becoming familiar with the shared library named capi With this library you can retrieve a user s events formatted with the iCalendar standard As with Microsoft Exchange the migration process is simply to push all events in SOGo through WebDAV The Oracle Calendar s only limitation is related to recurring events even though a series of events can be identified clearly there is no easy way to retrieve the original recurrence rule definition This frustra tion surely will be attenuated by the advantages of SOGo such as endless recurring events and a much more modern Web interface Conclusion Standards such as CalDAV and SyncML finally have emerged that improve interoperability between native groupware clients and various servers Open source developers have proven their commitment in support
18. In 2006 Novell retracted all full time employees trom the Hula Project In 2007 Messaging Architects announced the acquisition of NetMail from which Hula is derived Thereafter faithful contributors to Hula forked the source code in a new independent project named Bongo m The latest version of Apple Mac OS X Server code named Leopard is shipped with a CalDAV server called Calendar Server E OpenOffice org s groupware client named Glow is being replaced by a Mozilla based PIM suite m A new project named Zimbra obtained considerable attention especially trom Yahoo who bought the company in September 2007 The open source collaboration servers mentioned in the 2005 article have all survived the competition m Both OpenGroupware org OGo and Open Xchange OX remain good servers for companies that want to continue using Microsoft Outlook even though these products have not integrated any new appealing features during the past three years E Citadel has improved its GroupDAV support but the authors still refuse to implement CalDAV m Bedework has forked the UW Calendar Project and quickly brought the project to maturity This article focuses on Scalable OpenGroupware org SOGo a complete open source groupware that integrates all requirements one would expect from a collaboration suite accessibility consistent interfaces scalability and stability 76 april 2008 www linuxjournal com Scalable OpenGroupware org
19. Se VARBusiness 500 Ace is an Intel Che in www acecomputers com 1425 East Algonquin Road Arlington Heights IL 60005 877 ACE COMP 877 223 2667 Performance measured using SPECjbb2005 SPECjbb2005 SysWatt comparing a Quad Core Intel Xeon processor E5345 based platform to a Dual Core Intel Xeon processor 5160 based platform 2008 Intel Corporation All rights reserved Intel the Intel logo Intel Leap ahead the Intel Leap ahead logo Intel Core Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U S and other countries Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others l E a i dbj f I a j a a i iux to work to save energy money and the environment i n i A wl N k 2 i l 1 a 4 t 7 K 1 i q my i i i j 2 N a J j 3 i A new age of environmental awareness appears to be upon the green glory many people in IT including in our own us The meteoric economic rise of India China and other Linux and Open Source communities deserve attention for large countries has not only unleashed a spike in petroleum their green initiatives With a global problem to solve that prices and the spectre of dry gas pumps in our lifetime but requires creativity transparency and massive collaboration also has raised fears of our fragile planet s ability to support who else would you call but the Linux folks This articl
20. The Web interface looks extremely professional and appears as though it has been designed specifically tor Server as it bears little resemblance to that found in VMware s flagship virtualization platform ESX Server The interface feels a little clunky to use and is slow to respond Occasionally buttons simply However when the plugin is working it works exceptionally well with surprising performance an impressive feat would refuse to react until the Web browser had been refreshed The console to access virtual machines directly has been implemented as a browser plugin that the sever prompts you to install when you first attempt to navigate to the Console tab The plugin seems to work only for Firefox running on Windows or Linux Internet Explorer or Mac OS X users seem to be clear out of luck The plugin seems extremely buggy often requiring a refresh of the browser window before it will work again The console also often crashes the browser quite a major irritation However when the plugin is working it works exception ally well with surprising performance an impressive feat If the stability issues can be straightened out it s an exceptionally powerful tool On the server side the version of Tomcat bundled with VMware Server occasionally would malfunction until the process was restarted sending TCP RST to the browser When it s up the interface to define or add virtual machines is cumbersome First a da
21. Ubuntu Desktop but nonetheless it s a different distribution in its own right This month survey some of the major security features in Ubuntu Server 7 10 Unlike Ubuntu Desktop Ubuntu Server is probably the wrong choice for complete Linux newcomers It s extremely command line centric and its documentation is not exactly encyclopedic Accordingly this month s column assumes you ve got a basic understanding of how Linux works and some comfort with the command prompt Ubuntu Server vs Desktop There are several key differences between Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop First and most obvious is the lack of any graphical tools Ubuntu Server doesn t install the X Window System auto matically This has become an increasingly rare approach even with server oriented Linux distribu tions But as explain shortly omitting the X Window System improves system security and performance and decreases system complexity Second Ubuntu Server installs a much smaller set of packages overall than Ubuntu Desktop In tact there s ample room on the Ubuntu Server CD image to add things of your own watch this col umn for a future series on customizing and building your own bootable CD images You might think this means that Ubuntu Server offers fewer choices in server applications but as show here these aren t fewer choices than on other popular server oriented distributions And besides you can install additional Ubuntu packages
22. a kickstart or FAI Debian s Fully Automated Installer environment to automate all that manual configuration at install time Now you boot the install CD type in a few boot arguments to point the machine to the kickstart server and go get a cup of coffee as the machine installs When the day comes that you have to install three or four machines at once you either can burn extra CDs or investi gate PXE boot The Preboot eXecution Environment is an open Standard developed by Intel to allow machines to boot over a network instead of from local media such as a floppy CD or hard drive Modern servers and newer laptops and desktops with integrated NICs should support PXE booting in the 58 april 2008 www linuxjournal com BIOS in some cases it s enabled by default and in other cases you need to go into your BIOS settings to enable it Because many modern servers these days offer built in remote power and remote terminals or otherwise are remotely accessible via serial console servers or networked KVM if you have a PXE boot environment set up you can power on remotely then boot and install a machine from miles away If you have never set up a PXE boot server before the first part of this article covers the steps to get your first PXE server up and running If PXE booting is old hat to you skip ahead to the section called PXE Menu Magic There cover how to con figure boot menus when you PXE boot so instead of hunting down
23. a volume in the pool for the next job Otherwise it will prompt you to create a new volume as no existing volumes can be recycled due to reten tion settings You can run these jobs manually as often as you want but they also will run according to the schedule defined in the bacula dir conf file Restoring a File Restoring a Tile in Bacula also is remarkably simple You can use either the Restore button on the console toolbar Applications Places Sysbep iil 8 ete asst Change desktop appearance jand behavior get help or log out E wot We jan g 7 28AM Ge File Edit View Settengs a a B E z l Connect Ruri Dir Status Pastore Label Moon Coweta to irector leta noe 1000 OK baeula dir vartin Restore Files Dialog Reattore File Client bacula fd k FileSet Ur erhkomefolderi Pool Weekly Storage File Before ET help off Select Files GE cancel Command Status Pressiin command O Bacula Comoe O Restore Files Dialog oO j Figure 9 Bacula s Restore Options Dialog Window ff Applications Plas File Edit Wiew Help Up Ade et urrent dir 7 Mark File Mode ier omen Sia iain Files Se bec bed Command Status Precesalig command O Bacula Comoe O Restore File Selection Figure 10 Marking the Files to Restore or the restore command Both are easy to use but the restore command provides more options To keep it simple let s use the Restore button When the dialog ope
24. are also rabid Facebook fanatics a shortcom ing that s true of any of these services of course Simultaneously flashmob instigators found that Web based tools could help them organize and ser vices like Dodgeball were created A flashmob is a spontaneous gathering of people organized by cell phone or text messaging Dodgeball was bought by Google and then strung out to die but the meme of status messages as a form of shared communica tion continued to evolve and the latest evolution is a weird sometimes overly voyeuristic on line service called Twitter visit twitter com During the past few months have found Twitter oddly compelling in a manner perhaps analogous to Jimmy Stewart being unable to tear himself away from his binoculars in Rear Window even while the breathtakingly gorgeous Grace Kelly was administer ing to him but that s another column entirely Twitter is immediately useful if a group of people are at a conference allowing you to meet up easily for meals evening activities shared cab rides and so on but it s also rather fun to keep a running commen tary of your goings on and know what your friends and associates are doing too Twitter works directly from a Web page and also is completely short message service SMS compliant too so it s extraordinarily cell phone friendly adding significantly to its utility Okay nice history lesson What about some sort 28 april 2008 www linuxjournal
25. are avail able at ibiblio org pub linux distributions puppylinux Higher level information about PL offerings is available at puppylinux net download downpage htm strongly Suggest using the latest release 3 0 1 at the time of this writing It s a stable much improved release compared to 2 x ibiblio org pub linux distributions puppylinux puppy 3 01 seamonkey iso Creating Bootable Media Now write the ISO to a CD DVD disk using an application that can deal with ISO images such as K3b on Linux or Roxio on Windows The primary files on the ISO needed to boot and host PL are the following E vmlinuz the kernel E initrd gz a compressed RAM disk image used during the boot process E pup_300 sfs contains other system files packaged outside the RAM disk image the largest file by far E zdrv_300 sts contains a complete set of drivers and firmware The First Boot attempted to boot the PL media from every PC could access five laptops and three workstations didn t need to do anything special in any of these instances Assuming the ISO image is burned correctly and your system is set up to boot from CD you re ready to start your PL experience If not check the contents of the ISO through an explorer and make sure the system s BIOS boot sequence includes the CD DVD drive before other bootable drives A desired BIOS boot sequence will be something like this m USB if available An older system with
26. as now we won t get in trouble if we break It Have fun hacking your Eee but remember installing Windows is cruel to Eee PCs and not endorsed by Linux Journal m Jes Hall is a Linux Technical Specialist and KDE developer from New Zealand She s passionate about helping open source software bring life changing information and tools to those who would otherwise not have them a Insecure about your email PostConf Email Consulting Spam Filtering Postfix Unix amp Linux It s what we do Since 1995 info postconf com 800 418 4801 www linuxjournal com april 2008 87 INDEPTH Puppy Linux Exploring everyones pet Linux LOUIS J IACONA It would be fair to say that the Linux landscape is somewhat cluttered with distributions each offering a slight value delta to consider So didn t expect to be evaluating yet another distro any time soon Recently however went hunting for an embedded Linux solution for small devices and along the way stumbled on something that offers much more general value than what was looking tor a Linux distribution called Puppy Linux hereafter referred to as PL PL is getting a lot of attention and steadily gaining popu larity and it seemed worthy of further examination At first glance PL is a distribution praised for being small fast and stunningly complete for its size just as complete and secure as most desktop distributions It also has the relativ
27. boxes Resources Webmin and Usermin www webmin com Webmin Download Site www webmin com download html Linux Standard Base www linux foundation org en LSB Smart labix org smart LJ pays 100 for tech tips we publish Send your tip and contact information to techtips linuxjournal com www linuxjournal com april 2008 69 INDEPTH Backups to the Future Eliminate Tape Backups with FreeNAS and Bacula The future of backups is here but unfortunately there arent any Delorians JERAMIAH BOWLING Backups in today s environment are in a state of flux Tapes have been the mainstay of most organizations tor years and in some cases decades However as the cost of hard drives decreases and their capacity increases conventional wisdom about backups and tapes is changing Although tapes still prove useful for archiving and offsite storage inexpensive disk based technology slowly is creeping into areas that tape has traditionally dominated Many enterprises find it s just as easy and reliable to back up data over their network to near line storage such as a Storage Area Network SAN or Network Attached Storage NAS instead of tape Also sometimes referred to as disk to disk D2D backups the benefits of near line storage are many especially soeed and capacity When deciding to go near line you really have only two choices SAN or NAS Of the two NAS is more cost practical for most shops In thi
28. causes the iPod firmware to load Rockbox instead of the original iPod software Download the Linux version of ipodpatcher link provided in the installation manual and execute it as root chmod x ipodpatcher sudo ipodpatcher Assuming all goes well you should see a message telling you the bootloader has been installed Feel free to do a happy dance and then hold down Menu Select to reboot your iPod into Rockboxy goodness Figure 1 If you have problems along the way and corrupt the partitions on your iPod as did once just plug it back in to your iTunes machine allow it to repair itself and start over Rockbox Features at Your Fingertips Now that you have Rockbox installed let s talk a bit about what you can do with it Yes with a name like Rockbox your iPod now sounds threatening and weapon like And sure if you throw it hard enough you probably could hurt someone with it but really there are more productive things to do with your new media player Let s look at a few Games Apple ships iPods with a few games and the newer models allow you to purchase additional ones but the sheer number of Rockbox s available titles leaves the commercial alternatives in the dust Although many of the games are the type you d expect to see on a device the size of an iPod one game surprised me Doom Seriously as hard as It is to believe id Software s Doom runs natively on the iPod Figure 2 I ll ad
29. center operations and reduce power usage further One example is Cassatt Corporation s Active Power Management Technology which has released a platform agnostic prod uct to turn off servers safely when they are not needed or idle Rather than leaving machines automatically running round the clock or relying on manual decision making administrators can set priorities and policies to mandate how where and when to power down idle servers as well as power them back up The net result is better management of both virtual and physical infrastructure Interesting for us Linux lovers Active Spokesperson emphasized that his firm s green efforts extend consider ably beyond consolidation including the provision of highly optimized paravirt device drivers for fully virtualized guests This means more and more systems will be able to be virtualized broadening the utilization and impact of the technology Car also touted Red Hat s collabora tion with chip vendors and Open Source A typical Linux server gulps about 225 Watts or more of power meaning that the millions of Linux servers out there now at around a 27 market share are responsible for nearly 5 million tons of carbon emissions annually Power Management Is easy to install and nondisruptive as it relies on inter nal power controllers found inside most servers rather than on installation of software on managed servers Scalent V OE offers another approach
30. client m GIMP photo editor and other image manipulation and viewing tools m Additional development tools including additional TCL TK tools libraries Python and full bash 3 1 interpreters 6th Annual 2008 Linux Open Source on Wall Street show and conference APRIL 1 2008 TUESDAY ROOSEVELT HOTEL NYC Madison Ave and 45th St next to Grand Central Station Linux and Open Source are hot Lowering costs Increasing speed and agility Deploying faster Staying within budgets Plan to attend he 6th Annual 2008 Linux Open Source on Wall Street brings together major Wall Street IT executives and Gold Sponsors and exhibitors at one time and one place in New York This exciting Linux and Open Source event is a live search engine to see examine compare systems live on the show floor Register in advance for the full conference program Save 100 295 in advance 395 on site Don t have time for the conference Plan to attend the free show but you must register in advance at http www linuxonwallstreet com 2007 Sponsors HERA y intel ORACLE amp redhat Show Management Conference Management l T xx Flagg Management Inc Pete Harris NISY BEA i 353 Lexington Ave NY10016 718 237 2796 UNISYS L N Bre QLOGIC 212 286 0333 pete a teamgroup com flaggmgmt msn com Show Hours Tues Apr 1 8 4 00 Register online www linuxonwallstreet com Conference Hours 9 4 50 th Annual 2008 HIGH PERFORMANCE ON WALL
31. com of shell script Dave What makes Twitter interesting to me is that like so many modern Web services it has a public application programming interface API that makes it both easy and fun to hack and fiddle with Although some of the so called Web 2 0 services are still closed more and more are making their back ends accessible to open queries creating many possibilities for darn interesting shell scripts and more sophisticated software and mashups For this column want to show you how incred ibly easy it is to update your Twitter status from the Linux command line and then noodle a bit on how this could be used for useful interesting or just mundane tasks To tantalize you imagine that you could launch a big software build and have it text your cell phone when it was done rather than you having to sit at your office First though you can find the API at twitter com help api Read through it and you ll find that just about all interactions are done with specially construct ed URLs That s good because it s easy to manipulate and tweak a string within a shell script The most basic use of the Twitter API is to send a status update message to your account Here s an example of how to do that curl basic user user pass data ascii status testing123 http twitter com statuses update json You can see one of the big challenges of writing this as a shell script already User validation is done through s
32. ctagent conf file and perhaps other Tiles as well if the current copy on the host machine is different This adds some protection for a scenario where a corrupt cfagent cont is sent out or in case there never was one Although you could use cfengine to distribute update conf it should be copied manually to each host Cfengine commands are not entered on the command line They make up the syntax of the cfengine configuration language Because cfengine is a framework the system administrator must write the necessary commands in cfengine configuration files in order to move and manipulate data As an example let s take a look at the files command as it would appear in the cfagent cont Tile files etc passwd mode 644 Owner root action fixall etc shadow mode 600 Owner root action fixall This would set all machines etc passwd and etc shadow files to the permissions listed in the file 644 and 600 It www linuxjournal com april 2008 53 FEATURE Cfengine for Enterprise Configuration Management also would change the owner of the file to root and fix all of these settings if they are found to be different each time cfengine runs It s important to keep in mind that there are no group limitations to this particular files com mand If cfengine does not have a group listed for the command it assumes you mean any host This also could be written as files any etc passwd mode 644 Owner root action fixall etc shado
33. determines who is authorized to run which commands under what circumstances you must use the visudo command to edit the file etc sudoers The Ubuntu RootSudo Page see Resources provides more information Installing Optional Software Its no coincidence that used the aptitude com mand in the above examples Chances are one of the first things you ll do after installing Ubuntu Server is install some additional software and aptitude is Ubuntu Server s best tool for this job Perhaps surprisingly given that the Ubuntu Server distribution doesn t even fill a 650MB CD ROM there are many useful packages from which to choose on the CD in its pool directory When you install Ubuntu Server the installer also auto matically configures the Advanced Package Tool apt system for which aptitude is a front end with the locations of some download repositories In last month s column described the Ubuntu repository structure in detail In case you missed that here s a quick review m Main contains Ubuntu s fully supported fully patched free software packages E Restricted contains Ubuntu s fully supported nonfree copyrighted software packages m Universe contains Ubuntu s free but not fully supported patched packages m Multiverse contains packages that are neither fully free nor fully supported patched You might think that on a server sys tem universe and multiverse packages should be avoided as they lac
34. easily over the Internet The last major difference worth noting is that Ubuntu Server s default kernel is tuned for server performance whereas Ubuntu Desktop s default kernel is tuned for maximum responsiveness An article by Carla Schroder on these differences details some specifics as to how this is achieved see Resources 30 april 2008 www linuxjournal com Did Mick Just Say No Graphical Tools Yes you read that right By default Ubuntu Server is a purely console driven distribution On Ubuntu Server you do things the old school way with shell sessions man page lookups and the vi editor Of course there s nothing to stop you from installing the X Window System complete with a Tully packed KDE desktop environment OpenOffice org and Tux Racer Ubuntu s download repositories don t distinguish between Server and Desktop so you can install whatever you like However very strongly suggest you resist the temptation to install the X Window System on your Ubuntu Server system When the first edition of my book Linux Server Security came out which try not to plug here but this is after all an article on Linux server security one reviewer complained bitterly about my advice to omit the X Window System from server installa tions But for years I ve stood firm on this advice The X Window System increases complexity It has a history of local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that can often be exp
35. folders Playlists are created easily in Rockbox and it s possible to create and save several playlists on the fly They are standard M3U Tiles so uploading a playlist you ve created on a computer is a fairly pain less endeavor Because the Rockbox iPod mounts as a standard USB drive manipulating songs and playlists from the computer is literally as easy as drag ging and dropping Most Linux based MP3 playing software like Amarok or Rhythmbox will recognize the Rockbox player as well There s really not a best way to handle music management It s a matter of personal taste The Verdict What Rockbox does it does very well and very completely found the instal lation procedure easy enough that everyone should be able to accomplish it and yet it was geeky enough that felt a level of satisfaction when it was complete The number of features Rockbox has compared with the stan dard iPod software is astronomical but that s only a good thing if you re looking for lots of features in your media player Let me explain installed Rockbox and played with games demos and applications for a long time Then played some music and realized one of the advantages the original iPod software has over april 2008 www linuxjournal com Rockbox simplicity If you just want to listen to music without the complexity of multiple dynamic playlists auto manual generated databases playlist queue posi tions and sound file
36. gt 0 20 FREE 25 MB Mailbox Size 9718 A y a Private Registration 2 000 MB E Mail Account Search Engine Tools 24 7 Support Domain Forwarding Starter Website DNS Management ll rights reserved All quoted prices are based on standard pricing as of 1 31 08 for a one year registration of a single 4m specifications availability and pricing are subject to change without notice Visit 1and1 com for details Go Daddy f Go Daddy Software Inc Yahoo is a registered trademark of Yahoo Inc le for private registration Visit us now 1and1 lt com 5 Million Need a Web Host too 1 amp 1 One stop for your Domain and Hosting Needs 1 amp 1 Hosting We currently host over 5 million websites Join A LWAYS our online community now and take advantage Tild M st of the following benefits F R F E FREE domains DOMAINS If you already have a 1 amp 1 domain and choose to upgrade to a web hosting package you will no longer be billed for your domain Sign up for one of our Web Hosting packages and receive up to 5 domain names FREE It s easy to get on the web A website is the easiest and most affordable way to communicate your ideas products and information When combined with your domain name your website becomes a business card for the virtual world or a full color brochure 1 amp 1 WebsiteBuilder Included with all web hosting plans 1 amp 1 WebsiteBuil
37. it You certainly don t need an iPod to use Rockbox but because Apple s products are so popular was happy to see a wide variety of IPod models are supported Check out the Rockbox Web site to see whether your media player will work Installation To get Rockbox on your iPod the devel opers offer two options automatic and manual The automatic option appealed to my lazy nature but unfortunately it didn t work for me think this was largely because my iPod was formatted with the HFS Apple filesystem instead of the FAT32 Windows filesystem On an iPod with the FAT32 filesystem the automatic installer is very slick and downloads the latest version of the programs directly trom the Internet wish the automatic installer had worked for me off the bat because then could have just suggested you use it which still do and forget about the manual stuff Thankfully the documentation is very helpful even if you are forced to use the manual method Here s a brief overview of the procedure but be sure to read the documentation before attempting it on your own It s not terri bly difficult but it requires extensive use of the command line My suggestion is to try the automatic installation pro gram first and resort to the following method only if the installer doesn t work for you Manual Installation Steps Go to www rockbox org and click on Manual at the left Find your specific device on the list and g
38. pages data files upload and download and more Conclusion Can you benefit from Webmin Who should use it Jamie Cameron Webmin s creator said this program may be better suited for less experienced users who are unfamiliar with configuration file formats than for enterprise sysad mins who already have a detailed understanding of UNIX fully agree with that opinion although I d add that even if you are quite familiar with configuration files and the like you might welcome an easier and sometimes quicker way of doing things Webmin packs a quite impressive always growing number of functions but it allows you to use only what you require through clear menus and forms and it detects possible errors before they can do any harm You should at least consider it for its learning value because you can examine configuration files before and after each change and thus learn how something was or should have been done You can t avoid learning about each function before diving in but Webmin provides at least an easier road to becoming a more proficient sysadmin m Federico Kereki is an Uruguayan Systems Engineer with more than 20 years experience teaching at universities doing development and consulting work and writing articles and course material He has been using Linux for many years having installed it at several different companies He is particularly interested in the better security and performance of Linux
39. practice Before saving and closing the file go through and change any instance of Password or like entries to a common password Rather than cover how each Bacula d mon authenticates with the other it s easier simply to change all of them to the same password for the time being and get the system Running a backup Is quite simple as you already have done most of the work by editing the bacula dir conf file up and running You can change these passwords later if desired Change any other password related fields in the follow ing files to the common password as well bacula sd conf bacula td conf bconsole conf gnome console cont and tray monitor conf After changing the passwords you also need to change any references to your host in all the cont files so each d mon can communicate with each other If all of the daemons run locally you can use localhost You also could use an FQDN or IP address The field you want to edit is listed under each section as Address So for example change the line Address server example com to Address localhost You also could search for the client example com and storage example com entries to find some of the other entries that need to be changed Once the passwords and Address fields have been set open the etc bacula bacula sd cont file in your editor and comment the following line in the Device section of the Filestorage device Archive Device tmp Then add the
40. puppylinux org wikka LatestNews PL Video Tutorials rhinoweb us PL Media Purchase www linuxonline biz index php cPath 137_149 individuals sensitive to technology costs would be excellent PL candidates haven t noticed anything that would necessarily make PL a bad choice tor general purpose desktop needs providing you feel comfortable with a few manual configuration steps which is often the case with most distributions anyway and installing a few desired packages that might be excluded in the default distribution see some potential here and would wager that PL continues to gain more attention and popularity PL s agility and surprising completeness make it far from a one trick puppy okay that ll be the last silly puppy quip Given what PL offers the ease of getting started and the almost stunning performance on vin tage hardware there is something here worth watching A common experience in a desktop upgrade path is obtaining more powertul hardware only to experi ence the same or slightly better perfor mance Imagine going the other way regressing several generations of hard ware and realizing better performance Who should test drive PL If you were interested enough to read through this material you re a good candidate It requires a small investment of your time and none of your money And its usefulness as a data system rescue utility is something every desktop user should keep in mind This
41. recieves Unexpected messages MPI COMM SELF collective 1 PGDBG Queues www pgroup com cdk Ihe Portland Group Inc is an STMicroelectronics company PGI and CDK are trademarks or registered re S Of STMicroelectronics Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners COLUMNS COOKING WITH LINUX trom setting up a printer to configuring your Internet access You can share folders so others on your home or office network can use them look at system logs change the look and feel of the login screen and add users Perhaps one of the most important functions here involves updating and maintaining the pack ages on your system Staying up to date is one of the best ways to keep your system humming along nicely and securely All right let s look at how KDE does things when it comes to system administration Currently there s a transition happening in the KDE world and it s a fairly major one The venerable and powerful KDE 3 5 is making way for the new improved and in many ways very different KDE 4 desktop To ease transition certain things started changing later in the KDE 3 5 releases One of those things had to do with system administration as the old KDE Control Center was slowly replaced by System Settings command name systemsettings System Settings is more intuitive easier to navigate and easier to work with From System Settings you can change
42. s interoperation open your etc bacula bacual dir conf file and add the fol lowing lines for brevity have added only those sections used in our scenario JobDefs Name UserHomes Type Backup Client bacula fd 72 april 2008 www linuxjournal com FileSet UserHomeFolders Storage File Messages Daemon Job Name WeeklyHomeBackups JobDefs UserHomes Level Full Schedule WeeklyFullandDiffs Pool Weekly Priority 10 Write Bootstrap var spool bacula WeeklyHomeBackups bsr Job Name MonthlyHomeBackups JobDefs UserHomes Level Full Schedule MonthlyFull Pool Monthly Priority 10 Write Bootstrap var spool bacula MonthlyHomeBackups bsr schedule Name WeeklyFullandDiffs Run Level Full Pool Weekly sun at 3 00 Run Level Differential Pool Diffs mon fri at 3 00 Schedule Name MonthlyFull Run Level Full Pool Monthly 1st sat at 3 00 FileSet Name UserHomeFolders Include Options compression GZIP Signature MD5 File home Pool Name Weekly Pool Type Backup Recycle yes AutoPrune yes Volume Retention 6 days Maximum Volumes 5 Label Format Bkup Full Pool Name Diffs Pool Type Backup Recycle yes AutoPrune yes Volume Retention 23 hours Maximum Volumes 1 Label Format Bkup Diff Pool Name Monthly Pool Type Backup Recycle yes AutoPrune yes Volume Retention 364 days Maxi
43. that the notch on the module matches the key on the slot When the module s base is securely slotted in it can be carefully lowered into position by pushing the top corners of the module back ward with your fingers so that it lies flat against the Eee s motherboard The metal clips should snap over the sides of the module with a satisfying click when it s properly in place Once the memory is secure replace the memory compartment cover M Figure 7 Installing the New Module and ensure that all sides have clicked down If you re anything like us at this point you ll hunt all over the desk searching for the screws only to find them 20 min utes later stuck to the magnetic closure on the MacBook Replace the two screws to secure the memory compartment cover and insert the battery again It s always a good idea to run memtest86 over any new memory you install which is an option from any recent Ubuntu live CD or the eeeXubuntu bootable USB stick if you made one earlier It s pretty easy to see how the Eee has taken the personal computer market by storm It s cheap friendly and oh so very hackable with something for everyone There are myriad other hacks not covered here from installing Linux distribu tions and adding the drivers yourself to soldering additional gadgets to the motherboard In fact that s what we re off to do right after we submit this article solder a mutilated Bluetooth dongle to the motherboard
44. the account name and password in the script Given some of the suggested applications we ll explore later it makes sense to create a new Twitter account just for the command line updates in which case a shared password isn t that big a problem anyway Here s a first stab at a simple stu sent twitter update script bin sh user Davelaylor pass mypw cur l usr bin curl curl basic user user pass data ascii status echo tr t Attp twitter com statuses update json exit 0 In use simply type in the script name and desired Status update stu Writing makes me sleepy user name Dave Taylor description Blogger entrepreneur public speaker dad screen_name DaveTaylor profile_image url http s3 amazonaws com twitter_production profile_images 35534842 dticon_normal gif location Boulder Colorado url http www AskDaveTaylor com id 9973392 protected false created at Sat Jan 12 21 31 37 0000 2008 truncated false text Writing makes me sleepy source web id 592217322 Eek That s a scary output isn t it So before wrapping up this column strongly suggest that immediately after the invocation of curl you append gt amp dev null so you can discard the output If you want to be fancy check to see whether it s nonzero but let s talk about that level of improvement in the next column m
45. the headphones jack is totally non functional no sound output and plug ging in to it doesn t silence the internal speakers For my intended use table PC at home that s not a huge deal But as mentioned the biggest issue have with this notebook is the X3100 and Intel GM965 graphics chipset or rather the X org X server written for it I ve been using Linux since about 1994 and incidentally I ve been an LJ sub scriber since about issue 2 and this is the first X server can remember running into that doesn t support panning around a virtual screen resolution greater than the actual screen resolution From talking to other Linux users gather this is one of those emacs vi issues Some people hate and never use Virtual Others always use It when there s enough video memory to support it On my old HP use Virtual 1600 1200 On my desktops at home and work use Virtual 2500 2048 These virtual resolutions allow me to have several terminal windows a browser IM client MP3 player and so on all visible on one screen with little or no overlapping windows just pan around with my trackball touchpad to the part of the virtual screen want to see Nobody seems to mention the death of this feature when talking about current notebooks It was only after considerable Googling that found this thread where one of the authors of the Intel X server clearly states no Virtual panning for you lists fr
46. you re ready to upgrade Zonbu takes back your old device and foots the bill for its recycling Senior Vice President and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell noted that his company is focused on improvements in policy driven power management and system monitors for servers along with better suspend functionality for laptops 50 april 2008 www linuxjournal com reducing energy consumption A more important choice is whether your hard ware solution is built with an environ mental ethos in mind and offers maxi mum power conservation avoidance of toxins and recycling options A few exceptional Linux focused companies are worth considering in this regard oy Figure 2 The new Zonbu laptop follows in the green footsteps of its older kin the Zonbu PC Zonbu even will offset your carbon emissions for you j Zonbu PC Py and Laptop M Zonbu is perhaps the hardware provider most obsessed with being green and sees its environmental laurels as core selling points The company offers two interesting and green machines the Zonbu PC and the Zonbu Notebook Both machines are pre installed with Gentoo Linux and offer environmental advantages like few other PCs do Zonbu also offers interest ing features such as on line storage plans and separate versions for newbies and experienced users See the February 2008 issue of Linux Journal for a detailed review of the Zonbu desktop Zonbu is atte
47. 104 connector a 2 USB 2 0 480 Mbps a 2 SD sockets a 110 GPIO a 2 SATA ports a Gigabit ethernet a 10 serial ports a 5 10 bit ADC a Sleep mode uses 200 microamps a Boots Linux in lt 2 seconds a Linux 2 6 and Debian by default lt Design your solution with one of our engineers a Over 20 years in business a Never discontinued a product a Engineers on Tech Support a Open Source Vision a Custom configurations and d excellent pricing and turn Most products stocked and for next day shipping See our website for options peripherals and x86 SBCs SYSTEMS ou aan Technologic We use our stuff visit our TS 7200 powered website at www embeddedARM com 480 837 5200 COLUMNS AT THE FORGE well known blogger Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook tor downloading his contact list into another program His account was reinstated within a few days The notion that data should stay locked within one of these systems rather than be freely downloadable and transferable by the people who entered and approved it is disappointing If create a forum application using OpenSocial and use the persistence API in order to store messages it might work just fine But what if want the forum to work across differ ent networks such that forum post ings are persistent not only across users but also across the different OpenSocial containers That appears to be completely unsupported b
48. 2211 Norfolk Ste 514 Houston TX 77098 USA Periodicals postage paid at Houston Texas and at additional mailing offices Cover price is 5 99 US Subscription rate is 29 50 year in the United States 39 50 in Canada and Mexico 69 50 elsewhere POSTMASTER Please send address changes to Linux Journal PO Box 980985 Houston TX 77098 Subscriptions start with the next issue Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement 41549519 Canada Returns to be sent to Bleuchip International RO Box 25542 London ON N6C 6B2 _ Next Month TELEPHONY Next month Dan Sawyer compares VoIP programs for use with podcasting and Federico Kereki shows you how to set up Skype to turn your computer into a phone complete with instant messaging file transfer and video conferencing Plus Doc Searls interviews tech pioneer Bob Frankson who sees the last mile of the Internet as the end of the road for telecom and the beginning of a networked world we make for ourselves As always there s much more LJ columnist Dave Taylor details installing and testing Ubuntu Linux within both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop on Mac OS X John Knight takes a look at some promising new Linux software and Salah M S Al Buraiky gives an MIPv6 primer www linuxjournal com april 2008 3 10 Million Looking for a domain We have already registered 10 million domains Look below to find out why you should choose 1 amp 1 to
49. CE IS LIKE P we OFFER We AN IN FLIGHT 16 april 2008 www linuxjournal com S6 PER MINUTE AND S VOIP IS FREE if 50 ILL BE USING THE AIRPHONE Creative geniuses stumble they trip they make horrible mistakes Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures Dean Keith Simonton blog washingtonpost com achenblog 2007 1 1 when_genius_bombs htm The chances are that in the course of his lifetime the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor W H Auden blog washingtonpost com achenblog 2007 1 1 when_genius_bombs html Linus on Linux In January 2008 Linus Torvalds was interviewed by Jim Zemlin for the inaugural podcast of the Linux Foundation for which both Linus and Jim now work Here are a few excerpts from a transcript of their dialogue organized under headings that highlight what s changed what hasn t and what never will as long as Linus is leading Linux Code rules have a policy that he who does the code gets to decide But at the end of the day the only thing that matters is actual code and the technology itself And the people who are not willing to step up and write that code they can comment on it and they can say it should be done this way or that way or they won t but in the end their voice doesn t matter The only thing that matters is code Corporations don t it doesn t matter at all who
50. Grid and The Green Grid design mark or logo are service marks of The Green Grid Association ne LIE E nn e HE the green grid E un member e rid o a ZT Systems is a contributing member of The Green Grid a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe With server solutions designed from the ground up for energy efficiency ZT Systems empowers data center management to optimize density and power consumption and lower cost of ownership and operation Xeon inside Powerful Efficient LETTERS FOO LETTERS letter ordvalue F00 The FOO line matches a pattern in the LETTERS string the pattern is the specified letter then anything else This pattern is removed from the end of the LETTERS string and the length of the resulting string is determined Since this length is simply the number of characters that precede the speci tied letter in the alphabet it gives the letter s ordinal value Note that as in the first solution the O at the start of LETTERS is an arbitrary character There is simply a need to have one extra character at the start of the string to get the string lengths right given the way that the pattern matching string truncation works Solution 3 FOO eval echo a letter ordvalue F00 1 2 This one is a little bit more arcane the FO
51. HCP server is installed edit the configuration file often in etc dhcpd conf and locate the subnet section or each host section if you configured static IP assignment via DHCP and want these hosts to PXE boot and add two lines next server ip _of pxe_ server filename pxelinux 60 The next server directive tells the host the IP address of the TFTP server and the filename directive tells it which file to download and execute from that server Change the next server argument to match the IP address of your TFTP server and keep filename set to pxelinux 0 as that is the name of the syslinux PXE enabled executable In the subnet section you also need to add dynamic bootp to the range directive Here is an example subnet section after the changes subnet 10 0 0 0 netmask 255 255 255 0 range dynamic bootp 10 0 0 200 10 0 0 220 next server 10 0 0 1 filename pxelinux 0 Install TFTP After the DHCP server is configured and running you are ready to install TFTP The pxelinux executable requires a TFTP server that supports the tsize option and two good choices are either tftpd hpa or atftp In many distributions these options already are packaged under these names so just install your distribution s package or otherwise follow the installation instructions from the project s official site Depending on your TFTP package you might need to add an entry to etc inetd conf if it wasn t already added for you tftp dgram
52. It s an excel lent solution as a tablet DOC SEARLS Get Your News at LinuxjJournal com LinuxJournal com s News Editor Justin Ryan brings you the best Linux related news every weekday He digs through mountains of information to bring us the most interesting thought provoking and sometimes funniest news happen ing in the world of technology He wades through it all and delivers it with the wit and charm you have undoubtedly come to expect from LinuxJournal com We invite you to visit us each day for your dose of Linux insight and to subscribe to our news only RSS feed at www linuxjournal com breaking_news feed Make sure you join in the discussions on LinuxJournal com Whether in the news section or any other the lively discourse is sure to inspire amuse frustrate or enlighten and either way you ll want in on the conversation KATHERINE DRUCKMAN They Said It Life is short enough without imposing corporate metrics onto your friends Hugh McLeod www gapingvoid com mt mt tb cgi __mode view amp entry_id 4389 And keep on fighting for the things want Though know that when you re dead you can t But I d rather be a free man in my grave Than living as a puppet or a slave Jimmy Cliff www bluestorpeace com lyrics narder they come htm USER FRIENDLY by J D Uliad Frazer Hi I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU HAVE FREE WIFI ON THIS PLANE WHY CANT I USE BUT THAT SERVI
53. L pa eA E4 YALI War t MOr gt F 1 Y Y YY Ett ine ar Driv e OKXXXX a B A r 59 m D DA hak rast amp Flexible ReAN D Ot plic alec aa CONFERENCE A ENPO ee AT Best St Solution E The Linux Storage People Dave Jones has tracked down every available kernel release diff u WHAT S NEW prerelease release IN KERNEL candidate and what DEVELOPMENT right down to Linux version 0 01 and creat ed a 2GB git repository of the whole thing at git git kernel org pub scm linux kernel git davej history git For almost half of the thousand or so commits Dave also has scoured the mailing lists and retrieved changelog entries This represents the most complete Linux repository ever compiled although unfortunately it does seem as though some kernel versions have been truly lost forever Also unlike current kernel development Dave s repository does not have a patch by patch accounting of every change because no record was ever kept of those individual changes Only the versions actually released by Linus Torvalds have come down to us each of which represents dozens or hundreds of individual patches mashed together as one Given the wacky nature of some of these kernel hackers it s possible that various folks will try to correct and expand Dave s repository during the coming years and there s no telling how detailed it might become over time Linus has volunteered to recom
54. Linux p 88 e Eliminate Tape Backups with Bacula and FreeNAS p 70 COVER IMAGES Data Center Photographer Julian Addington barker Agency Dreamstime com Green Field iStockphoto com Nadezda Firsova CONTENT APRIL 2008 Issue 168 COLUMNS REUVEN M LERNER S AT THE FORGE Social Google Gadgets MARCEL GAGNE S COOKING WITH LINUX Happy 100th DAVE TAYLOR S WORK THE SHELL Twittering from the Commahd Line MICK BAUER S PARANOID PENGUIN Security Features in Ubuntu Berver KYLE RANKIN S HACK AND Mutt Tweaks for System DOC SEARLS EOF Getting Real about the Ideal REVIEWS 40 VMWARE SERVER 2 BETA Jes Hall IPOD ROCKBOX ENTERTAINMENT EXTRAVAGANZA Shawn Powers IN EVERY ISSUE 10 LETTERS 14 UPFRONT NEW PRODUCTS 1 ADVERTISERS INDEX INDEPTH 70 BACKUPS TO THE FUTURE ELIMINATE TAPE BACKUPS WITH FREENAS AND BA ULA Lose the tapes Embrace the fisk Jeramiah Bowling SCALABLE OPENGROUPWARE ORG Looking for an advanced Wep interface native clients or acftess through mobiles devices to ypur groupware platform SOGo hds it all Francis Lachapelle and Ludovic Marcotte HACKING THE EEE PC Several ideas for tweaking your Eee PC Jes Hall PUPPY LINUX Check out this lightweight digtro Louis lacona USPS L NUX JOURNAL ISSN 1075 3583 USPS 12854 is published monthly by Belltown Media Inc
55. MAC addresses and doing a lot of setup before an install you simply can boot select your OS and you are off and run ning After that discuss how to integrate rescue tools such as Knoppix and memtest86 into your PXE environment so they are available to any machine that can boot from the network PXE Setup You need three main pieces of infrastructure for a PXE setup a DHCP server a TFTP server and the syslinux software Both DHCP and TFTP can reside on the same server When a system attempts to boot from the network the DHCP server gives it an IP address and then tells it the address for the TFTP server and the name of the bootstrap program to run The TFTP server then serves that Tile which in our case is a PXE enabled syslinux binary That program runs on the booted machine and then can load Linux kernels or other OS files that also are shared on the TFTP server over the network Once the kernel is loaded the OS starts as normal and if you have configured a kickstart install correctly the install begins Configure DHCP Any relatively new DHCP server will support PXE booting so if you don t already have a DHCP server set up just use your distribution s DHCP server package possibly named dhcpd dhcp3 server or something similar Configuring DHCP to suit your network is somewhat beyond the scope of this article but many distributions ship a default configuration file that should provide a good place to start Once the D
56. MAP tree Other driver submissions were more genuinely new than David s Andrzej s and Harald s work Thomas Bogendoerfer sub mitted a new serial driver for C2681 SC2691 UARTs used in some older SNI RM400 systems Alex Dubov submitted a patch to support Sony s Memory Stick card in spite of the card using a proprietary unpublished protocol Speaking of supporting proprietary hardware Adrian McMenamin wrote a CD ROM driver for the SEGA Dreamcast The driver supports the proprietary Giga Disk ROM format aka GD ROM Among the numerous new drivers sub mitted this time around several of them were for system monitoring systems Jochen Friedrich s submission supports the watch dog timer on Power QUICC hardware This driver reboots the system if it is not touched periodically by software that is if the system has crashed Darrick J Wong wrote a driver to support tracking volt temperature and fan sensor readings on the ADT 7473 monitor chip And Steve Hardy submitted code to support the Burr Brown Texas Instruments ADS7972 12 bit eight channel A D converter which monitors voltage on various off the shelf CPUs ZACK BROWN LJ Index April 2008 1 Thousands of Linux based ASUS Eee PCs the company hoped to sell by the end of 2007 300 2 Thousands of ASUS Eee PCs the company actually sold by the end of 2007 350 3 Thousands of Ubuntu based NComputing thin clients to be deployed to students at schools in Macedo
57. O line puts a string of the form a bcd ef into FOO assuming in this case that letter is f and the next line finds the length of that string adds 1 to it and then divides that result by 2 This effectively gives the length of the string abcdef which is the ordinal value of f Now my question for Dave is there some way of nesting operations such that the temporary variable FOO could be eliminated from Solutions 2 and or 3 can t seem to figure out what it is if such a way exists Mike Henders Correction February 2008 LJ Index Regarding number 12 on the February 2008 LJ Index l m thinking this is a typo or something 900 billion Nokia phones in use 150 for every human being on the planet That seems a little not right Keith Blackwell Doc Searls replies My error Keith It s 900 million Thanks for pointing it out Sometime you may want to find all files moditied during the installation of a given package This problem can be solved simply as follows echo temp gt tmp afile Install your package find etc newer tmp afile Find files modified in etc A useful variation is to identity all files accessed during the execution of a given program Often some files under etc are accessed and you need to know which ones This can be done as follows echo temp gt tmp afile Run your program find etc anewer tmp afile A sneaky variation is to find all files modified between time1 a
58. ON Hy asp a r atv WWW ISPCON COM J an E a gt ae n Sr gak Get event updates and special offers via email www ispcon com optin VETO nn hen you start administering a Linux system one of the biggest challenges is learning exactly what to do and how to do it There simply are too many tools settings parameters configu ration files daemons and what have you to consider Obviously if you ever want to become a full fledged sysadmin on your own you have to learn everything But until you get to that point you still need to get things done and you would do well by installing and using Webmin a Web based comprehensive administration tool for Linux systems Webmin runs on your server and presents a Web based interface allowing you to do all sorts of system administration tasks trom the very simple to the very complex ones with out ever touching a configuration file or restarting any process 64 april 2008 www linuxjournal com or d mon on your own As an aside it isn t just any run of the mill tool If you mention Webmin at a Linux Users Group reunion it s guaranteed to raise a lively argument much akin to the using closed graphics drivers or banning all non open source software from distributions discussions on forums and chat channels For some people the idea of using anything but the com mand line to manage a server is barely short of heretica
59. OPE trunk SOPE trunk configure with gnustep enable strip disable debug svn co http svn opengroupware org S0Go inverse trunk S0Go trunk make amp amp make install SOPE needs to be patched so that it works well with And finally compile and install SOGo its Web templates SOGo Once you have pulled SOPE from the trunk successfully and resources apply the SOPE patch included with SOGo cd S0Go trunk cd SOPE trunk configure with gnustep enable strip disable debug patch p0 lt S0Go trunk SOPE sope patchset diff make amp amp make install cp a UI WebServerResources UI Templates GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT Prior to compiling SOPE and SOGo make sure to source gt Library SOGo 0 9 the GNUstep sh script that comes with GNUstep make This will define some environment variables used by Configuration GNUstep make when building the packages When using The first step in SOGo s configuration is creating a sogo user Come and join us ELC is the main event where developers fram around the world who work on open source software for embedded systems can get together and meet with open source community people Through a variety of sessions BoFs tutorials i n u X open source software technologies to learn share and overcome the Conference ELC 200 problems we all face using Linux Come join us and be inspired by technical ideas on the evolution of Linux and related software and at the same time M
60. OT IMAGE knopp1x Notice here that labeled it 1 so if you already have a label with that name you need to decide which of the two to rename Also notice that this example references the renamed vmlinuz knx5 1 1 and miniroot knx5 1 1 gz files If you named your files something else be sure to change the names here as well Because am mostly dealing with servers added 2 after init etc init on the append line so it would boot into runlevel 2 console only mode If you want to boot to a full graphical environment remove 2 trom the append line The final step might be the largest for you if you don t have an NFS server set up For Knoppix to boot over the network you have to have its CD contents shared on an NFS server NFS server configuration is beyond the scope of this article but in my example set up an NFS share on 10 0 0 1 at mnt knoppix 5 1 1 then mounted my One of my favorite features of a PXE server ts the addition of a Knoppix rescue disk Knoppix CD and copied the full contents to that directory Alternatively you could mount a Knoppix CD or ISO directly to that directory When the Knoppix kernel boots it will then mount that NFS share and access the rest of the files it needs directly over the network 62 april 2008 www linuxjournal com Extra Features Memtest86 Another nice addition to a PXE environment is the memtest86 program This program does a thorough scan of a system s RAM and reports any er
61. SESSIONS Interop is your only opportunity to see all the latest technologies in one place and get the information you need to be an IT leader Register today to reserve your Free Expo Pass Enter priority code CMADNLO7Z Event is open to trade participants only A business card demonstrating industry involvement will be required for entry INDEPTH called Corporate Directory which will be accessible both from the Web and native interfaces Finally launch the SOGo d mon usr local sbin sogod 0 9 From Firefox you now can access http localhost SOGo You will need to provide the user name password that you normally use for IMAP Figure 1 shows SOGo s login window File Edit View History Bookmarks Jools Help Cl th http localhostsoGo Connect Figure 1 Login Window Mozilla Integration SOGo integrates well with the Mozilla suite Sunbird provides a complete client side calendaring application and Lightning pro vides a calendaring extension to Thunderbird Combining Lightning and Thunderbird results in a complete PIM solution for managing e mail calendars events and tasks and contacts efficiently To connect the Mozilla PIM suite to SOGo first install and configure Mozilla Thunderbird to use the IMAP protocol Then download the latest releases of Lightning and the SOGo Connector extension From Thunderbird s Tools menu choose the Add ons option and install the extensions you just down l
62. STREET September 22 Monday Roosevelt Hotel New York Madison Ave at East 45th St next to Grand Central Station Conference Producer A TEAMGROUP High Performance Computing Grid Blade Virtualization Low Latency Linux systems will all be there The 2008 High Performance on Wall Street will return to the Roosevelt Hotel New York by popular demand Attendees reported this is the best New York show to see HPC systems that are changing the way Wall Street does business Plan to see HPC Linux Grid Blade Utility Open Source solutions for IT management in the financial sector Wall Street IT chiefs are looking for reduced total cost of ownership reduced Space reduced heat and increased energy efficiency The big savings are in consolidations time saving deployment and money saving Grid applications 2007 Sponsors i i E Conference Producer S oe r o 0 S EEA intel Teto Microsoft Novell AMD 1 3 redhat A TEAMGROUP J SUPERMICR Celoxica yee U1 Technologies Gisaseaces aus pellicle r n a8 S ky le pP SD Times XX Figi VELA a Show Management Conference Management QLOGIC i Flagg Management Inc Pete Harris 353 Lexington Ave NY10016 718 237 2796 Visit www highperformanceonwallstreet com _faggnantemsncon eee release Cate february 2008 Pippen eye bin Linux r t www LinuxJournal com ArchiveCD The 1994 2007 Archive CD back issues and more
63. Social container of our choice and it ll work just fine Adding Social Functionality Hello world is boring enough as a standalone program using it as an example of a social networking API seems almost silly For a gadget to become a fully fledged OpenSocial application it needs to demonstrate an ability to interact with other people More precisely a socially aware application should be able to find out something about me and my friends as well as what and my friends do The OpenSocial API addresses this by offering three types of functionality m People and relationships get information about because they let you interact with your friends in a variety of activities These activities can range trom exchanging messages to answering ques tions in an on line poll to keeping up to date on the latest sports scores OpenSocial sees an activity as a collection of actions within a particular container The Activity class provides access to this data Persistence OpenSocial makes it possible for an application to store information between ses sions One of the most interesting aspects of this persistence API is the fact that storage is handled by the OpenSocial container not by the applica tion There is no Persistence class for handling such data Rather the data is read and written by invoking methods on the overall opensocial object Note that the persistence layer lets appli you your friends and the various pie
64. USB interfaces may still not offer USB as a boot option In that case If you re Interested in configuring a USB resident PL boot image you might be able to resolve this by updating the BIOS m CD DVD m Floppy E Internal disk m Network boot PL Boot Cycles During the first boot process PL automatically determines a lot about the underlying hardware but it prompts the user tor additional guidance Once the X server and window manager are functioning you ll see an initial desktop that looks something like what s shown in Figure 1 a SS ia AE ERE oy AE SEERE Bii a Emme eea BF wes ce Tir Phn ee gee pm ee nm Figure 1 The Initial Puppy Boot Desktop Complete with Coaching Text PL now is ready to be used Some devices need to be configured manually through GUI utilities and users likely will want to apply customizations create data files and perhaps install additional packages At the first graceful reboot or power cycle users are asked where such data should be persisted between sessions so subsequent reboots are typically non interactive ASA COMPUTERS Hardware Systems for the open source community Since 1989 Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD Solaris MS etc The AMD Opterof processors deliver high performance scalable server solutions for the most advanced applications Runs both 32 and 64 bit applications simultaneously Your Custom Applicance Solution Let u
65. a cron job or a SVN sandbox _ Sys Sys S Admin Tin r ys Admin Mdi Figure 1 How the Few Control the Many cfengine execution d mon and pull the cfengine configura tion files appropriate for each machine from the server If there is work to be done for that particular machine it will be car ried out and reported to the server If there are configuration files to copy the ones active on the client host will be replaced by the copies on the cfengine server Cfengine will not replace a file if the copy process is partial or incomplete A cfengine implementation has three major components m Version control this usually consists of a versioning system such as CVS or Subversion m Cfengine internal components cfservd cfagent cfexecd cfenvd cfagent conf and update conf m Cfengine commands processes files shellcommands groups editfiles copy and so forth The cfservd is the master d mon configured with etc cfservd conf and it listens on port 5803 for connections to the cfengine server This d mon controls security and directory access for all client machines connecting to it cfagent is the client program for running cfengine on hosts It will run either from cron manually or from the execution d mon for cfengine cfexecd A common method for running the cfagent is to exe cute it from cron using the cfexecd in non d mon mode The primary reason for using both is to engage cfengine s logging sy
66. a single tool Version 3 2 adds features such as cross platform diag nostic tools Nagios support and MySQL support with up to 1 5 million trans m actions per minute Hyperic also counts CNET as one of its customers Linux 3 support includes Red Hat and Fedora The standard edition and a three device _ os _ on trial enterprise edition of Hyperic HQ are available at Hyperic s Web site 2S ss ok www hyperic com SIMPOL s Developer Kit with Desktop The goal of the British firm SIMPOL is to simplify cross platform software develop ment which has been advanced recently with two new products the SIMPOL Developer Kit and SIMPOL Desktop First the SIMPOL Developer Kit using the SIMPOL programming language with redistributable libraries provides the compo nents necessary for creating applications of many types such as desktop Web server and standalone server Future releases will support application development tor Mac OS X Windows CE and SymbianOS Second the SIMPOL Desktop which works with the Developer Kit is a lightweight end user database product that enables users to build data rich applications without programming and to modify Sample applications One can create an application based on database tables forms and reports Applications can be deployed by writing them as extensions to SIMPOL Desktop rather than re inventing all the functionality over again Wwww simpol com a Pe pa ia ree m m m Pi eii ee m ie Hewle
67. ainly specitic vendors UPFRONT who end up having more problems than others In fact sometimes the Same vendor may be very good in one area and very bad in another area Broadcom is an example of this They are they have actually been fairly good when it comes to high end giga bit network devices wired network devices but when it comes to wireless networks and other more consumer devices they ve been completely unable or unwilling to help us at all Practical vs perfect I m fairly pragmatic so don t care per se about one particular license or another want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what want to do And at this point in time Version 2 matches what think we want to do much much better than Version 3 the GPL Version 3 reflects the FSF s goals and the GPL Version 2 pretty closely matches what think a license should do and so right now Version 2 is where the kernel is Could there be something that happens to change that Maybe cannot change the license on my own anymore mean because have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2 l m not just think ethically bound by those people s choices am also actually legally bound It s still fun It s just a lot of fun working with people even though mean sit in my basement all day long and actually don t m
68. ake but nothing else allows a small group of system administrators to manage such a large group of servers Centralizing configuration management has the dual benefit of information and control and cfengine provides these benefits in a free open source tool for your infrastructure and application environments m Scott Lackey is an independent technology consultant who has developed and deployed configuration management solutions across industry from NASA to Wall Street Contact him at slackey violetconsulting net www violetconsulting net Greg Kroah Hartman www linuxjournal com article 7795 To give it a go in a bash shell use the following technique to execute your Java application export LD PRELOAD path to libjsig so java YOUR JAVA CLASS For more information on libjsig so try E Signal Chaining java sun com javase 6 docs technotes guides vm signal chaining html m Revelations on Java signal handling and termination www ibm com developerworks java library i signalhandling E Signal Handling on Solaris OS and Linux java sun com javase 6 webnotes trouble TSG VM html gbzbl html PAUL WHITTINGTON Continuous Data Protection The Future of Data Centers Can your backup R1Soft Acronis EMC software do this CDP Server True Image Retrospect Hourly Backups Not Supported Not Supported niian Not Supported Bare Metal Restore Not Supported Continuous Data Protection o vooo Not Supported Not Supported Resto
69. apabilities Making the Gadget Social As we saw last month the simplest possible Hello world Google Gadget looks like the following lt xml version 1 0 encoding UTF 8 gt lt Module gt lt ModulePrefs title Hello world gt lt Content type html gt lt CDATA Hello world lt Content gt lt Module gt The gadget comes as an XML file with a Module section and a Content section The Module section allows us to specify gadget specific prefer ences using the ModulePrets tag The Content section as you might expect contains the HTML and JavaScript that will be displayed and executed for the user We can turn a simple gadget into an OpenSocial gadget by adding a new Require tag within our Module tag lt xml version 1 0 encoding UTF 8 gt lt Module gt lt ModulePrefs title Hello world gt lt Require feature opensocial 0 6 gt lt Content type htm1l gt lt CDATA Hello world hl lt Content gt lt Module gt The Require tag indicates that our gadget is implementing the OpenSocial standard version 0 6 A new version undoubtedly will be released by the time this column is printed The initial version 0 5 was superseded by 0 6 in late December 2007 Other than that single line this is the same Hello world widget we installed on our iGoogle page last month In theory we can go ahead and install this application on the social networking site Open
70. appens if you want to install a different OS on one of the servers You then have to go through the additional work of tracking down the MAC to set up an exclusion With pxelinux menus can precontigure any of the differ ent network boot scenarios need and assign a number to them Then when a machine boots get an ASCII menu can customize that lists all of these options and their number Then can select the option want press Enter and the install is off and running Beyond that now have the option of adding non kickstart images and can make them available to all of my servers not just certain groups With this feature you can make rescue tools like Knoppix and memtest86 available to any machine on the network that can PXE boot 60 april 2008 www linuxjournal com You even can set a timeout like with boot CDs that will select a default option use this to select my standard Knoppix rescue mode after 30 seconds Configure PXE Menus Because pxelinux shares the syntax of syslinux if you have any CDs that have fancy syslinux menus you can refer to them for examples Because you want to make this avail able to all hosts move any more specific configuration files out of pxelinux cfg and create a file named default When the pxelinux program fails to find any more specific files it then will load this configuration Here is a sample menu configuration with two options the first boots Knoppix over the network and th
71. article represents information that was able to glean after kicking the tires tor 40 odd hours taking PL in directions that interested me For completeness l Il offer a bit of subjective criticism PL is not a flawless desktop thought a few utili ties could use a face lift as they presented screens that looked a bit toyish long on text and short on intuitive functionality Because of that there were a couple instances when felt either experienced a minor bug or committed a pilot error couldn t really be sure That s forgivable because overwhelmingly things worked as expected and as documented on the first attempt I m sure noticeable kinks will be addressed over time For now PL may very well stand alone within its sweet spot Louis J lacona has been designing and developing software since 1982 mainly on UNIX Linux platforms Most recently his efforts have focused on Java J2EE implemented solu tions for enterprise scoped applications and leveraging virtualization techniques Louis is currently on assignment at HP Software in Paramus New Jersey and can be reached at louis iacona verizon net Did you know Linux Journal maintains a mailing list where list members discuss all things Linux Join LJ s linux list today Technologies Linux Laptops Starting at 799 Linux Desktops Starting at 375 Linux Servers Starting at 899 DONT BE SQUARE CET CUBED 3 309 34 CUBED shoprcu
72. as of the time of this writing is 1 380 and it s being developed actively The easiest way to install Webmin is with your favorite package manager Even though am an OpenSUSE user preter Smart to YaST so a simple smart install webmin command did the job for me If you don t get the latest version this way don t worry You can tix that just by using Webmin itself keep reading H cker Halted USA 20058 Attend Hacker Halted 2008 Security Event in USA May 28th June 4th 2008 Myrtle Beach Hacker Halted has been successfully held in Mexico City Dubai Singapore Kuala Lumpur China and now in the USA For more information please visit http www hackerhalted com Email info hackerhalted com http www hackerhalted com FEATURE Graphic Administration with Webmin The other method of installation is to go to the download site download the appropriate version for your system and follow the instructions on the left side of the page There are two options here You can get the full package with all available modules or you can get the minimal edition and add the modules you require afterward using Webmin s own update features After installing Webmin you need to start a service Working as root use su do chkconfig webmin on to ensure that Webmin starts every time you turn on your machine Then do etc init d webmin start to start it immediately You re all set Using Webmin is simple Open
73. at change he also updated Adam s e mail address wherever it appeared in the kernel tree As a result of this Andrew Morton initiated a new policy of keeping all contributor e mail addresses in a single location giving their names in the various files they touched so that if an address changed it would need to be updated only in one place Joe fixed all the cases involving Adam 14 april 2008 www linuxjournal com A variety of new drivers has been submitted into the kernel Some of these have been written recently and others have been marinating in various forked trees until now David Sterba s 3G UMTS PCMCIA card wireless driver has been in Andrew Morton s mm tree for a while and he recently submitted it to Linus Torvalds for inclusion in the main tree After various technical comments from a few different folks Andrew endorsed the patch and passed it up to Linus Some code submis sions this month came from longer ago than that Harald Welte unearthed some work by Thomas Kleffel to support the Samsung 3C24xx SD MMC controller Thomas work had never made it into the kernel proper and had grown a bit stale in the intervening years Harald had brought it up to date with the current tree and the rel evant APIs He and Thomas planned to share maintainership once the code was accepted formally And Andrzej Zaborowski submitted the OMAP1 PWL based LCD backlight driver to Linus after it had lived for some time in the O
74. ay be edited for space and clarity WRITING FOR US We always are looking for contributed articles tutorials and real world stories for the magazine An author s guide a list of topics and due dates can be found on line www linuxjournal com author ADVERTISING Linux Journal is a great resource for readers and advertisers alike Request a media kit view our current editorial calendar and advertising due dates or learn more about other advertising and marketing opportunities by visiting us on line www linuxjournal com advertising Contact us directly for further information ads linuxjournal com or 1 713 344 1956 ext 2 ON LINE WEB SITE Read exclusive on line only content on Linux Journal s Web site www linuxjournal com Also select articles from the print magazine are available on line Magazine subscribers digital or print receive full access to issue archives please contact Customer Service for further information subs linuxjournal com FREE e NEWSLETTERS Each week Linux Journal editors will tell you what s hot in the world of Linux Receive late breaking news technical tips and tricks and links to in depth stories featured on www linuxjournal com Subscribe for free today www linuxjournal com enewsletters Are you Shoc ked by the high cost of iSCSI amp Fibre Channel SAN storage AlA over Ethernet Fast Reliable Simple storage www coraid com d B Pas a E E A o
75. bed com EOF Solutions might be useful but problems are what make stories interesting That s why like reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List LKML and the Kernel Trap Web site I m no hacker and most of the work that s discussed there is too arcane for me But there still are problems to follow and most of them lead somewhere Take the thread New Kernel Bugs started by Natalie Protasevich on November 13 2007 Andrew Morton followed by noting no response from developers after most of the bugs concluding So count around seven reports that people are doing something with and 27 that have been just ignored Three of these reports have been iden tified as regressions All three of those remain unresponded to After many posts about particulars David Miller added I think you like just saying No response from developers over and over again to make some point about how developers are ignoring lots of bugs That s fine but at least be accurate about it Andrew replied Do you believe that our response to bug reports is adequate David came back with Do you feel that making us feel and look like shit helps When someone like me is bug fixing full time take massive offense to the impression you re trying to give especial ly when it s directed at the networking So turn it down a notch Andrew Andrew replied That doesn t answer my question See first we need to w
76. ble and then set the div s innerHTML property to be that of the variable For example html lt p gt Hello lt p gt div innerHTML html In order to display a list of the viewer s friends we need to retrieve a list of those friends We then can iterate over those friends putting their thumb nail image URL in our html variable In order to retrieve a list of friends we must do the following viewer_friends opensocial DataRequest Group VIEWER FRIENDS req add req newFetchPeopleRequest viewer_ friends opt_params gt viewer friends req send response The above request contains a single query which we call viewer_friends Don t be confused by the viewer_friends variable which was introduced simply to make the lines easier to understand When the method has finished executing asynchronously it invokes our response function We can define it like any other JavaScript function and Google s documentation even indicates that you can use JavaScript libraries such as Prototype or Dojo inside an OpenSocial application Google already has included a number of useful JavaScript functions as part of its implementation of gadgets meaning that a Ruby like each method is available to us That method which typically is invoked on an array takes a function as a parame ter The function is executed once for each element of the array with each array element being passed to the function in turn Thus we can writ
77. capability discussed in the November 2004 issue of Linux Journal in the article Modifying a Dynamic Library without Changing the Source Code by Java JNI and Linux 56 april 2008 www linuxjournal com import any groups cf copy cf The above is a full cfagent configuration that adds cfengine execution from cron to each client if it s Linux or Solaris So effectively once you run cfengine manually for the first time with this cfagent conf file cfengine will continue to run every five minutes from that host but you won t need to edit or restart cron The control section of the cfagent conf is where you can define some variables that will control how cfengine handles the configuration file actionsequence tells cfengine what order to execute each command and AddInstallable is a variable that holds soft groups that get defined later in the file in a define statement such as after the editfiles command where the line is DefineClasses cron_restart The reason for using Addinstallable is sometimes cfengine skips over groups that are defined after command execution and defining that group in the control section ensures that the command will be recognized throughout the configuration Being able to check configuration files out from a versioning system and distribute them to a set of servers is a powerful system administration tool A number of independent tools will do a Subset of cfengine s work such as rsync ssh and m
78. centrate on technical problems and then occasion ally happily fairly seldom there comes this perfect storm of social issues that start up and one flame war perhaps brings out some other issues that peo ple have had and have been kind of simmering under the surface Outside this small world it has become fashionable to talk about social networks and point to Facebook and MySpace with their millions of users and zillions of posts as exam ples of those Perhaps they are But there s a difference between those and the societies of constructive problem solvers who create the infrastructure on which civilization relies One welcomes and even values noise The other one doesn t Which would you rather build on The trick is knowing what goes into what you rely on With open source code and open development methods including discussion among developers themselves you can do that You can know Or at least try to know At their best humans are creatures that try to know what s going on But humans also aren t perfect No species is Life is experimen tal Behavior like the beings that commit it is all prototype So are developments amidst crys tals weather geology stars and galaxies All is aloha and beta and we never get to omega Nor should we Getting better is far more interesting than being perfect You can build toward the ideal But you use what s real m Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal H
79. ces of data associated with those friends The Person class provides access to this information cations store data globally as well as on a per user or per application instance basis as needed Interactions with these three objects as well E Activities social networking sites are interesting as with the OpenSocial API in general is done via Expert included Rob is one of the Silicon Mechanics experts who make the interactive online tools at www siliconmechanics com a workable reality If you use our interactive configuration tools to create the specifications for cost effective compute nodes the 1Us pictured here he s an important part of making sure your order is filled in a timely fashion If you rely on the dynamic power calculator to optimize the energy efficiency of your new head node the 2U pictured here he s part of the team we rely on to deliver it to your specification If you use the industry s first online cluster configuration tool for aggregating a rack of servers and individually configuring the components like the one Rob is on top of well Rob really is on top of it Rob is not an engineer or a quality control professional or a production manager He s in charge of purchasing here at Silicon Mechanics and he s the expert committed to stocking the high quality energy efficient state of the art components your IT infrastructure requires When you partner with Silicon Mechanics you get more t
80. ch world is to no tech attacks Wwww syngress com Please send information about releases of Linux related products to James Gray at newproducts linuxjournal com or New Products c o Linux Journal 1752 NW Market Street 200 Seattle WA 98107 Submissions are edited for length and content www linuxjournal com april 2008 39 REVIEWS SOFTWARE VMware Server 2 0 Beta An overview of the promising VMware Server 2 0 Beta JES HALL VMware Server 2 0 Beta is the next evolution in the free as in beer virtual ization line It s able to run on both Linux and Windows and virtualize a wide range of guest operating systems We tested out the beta on Ubuntu 7 10 running on an Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 at 2 4GHz with 2GB DDR2 memory The new features available in the beta include m Web based management interface m New supported operating systems including Vista Business and Ultimate host only Windows Server 2008 RHEL 5 and Ubuntu 7 10 m Up to 8GB of memory per VM up from 3 6GB m Up to two virtual SMP processors m Up to 64 VMs per host m VIX API 1 2 scripting API for automation E Support for VMI enabling transparent paravirtualization for supported guests The installation routine hasn t changed from that on almost every VMware product on Linux for the last five years The console based wizard is relatively easy to follow So far the beta doesn t have any real user authentica tion m
81. clicking on the newly created icon and changing its image to usr libexec webmin images webmin xpm this path might be different for distributions other than OpenSUSE Upgrade Once you have Webmin installed correctly upgrading It or adding more modules is a breeze On the left side menu select Webmin Webmin Configuration and you ll see a screen full of icons If you click Upgrade Webmin the up pointing blue arrow you can upgrade Webmin itself from the Internet Note that you can click on Scheduled Update to set up a cron task that will connect to the Web and download all needed updates on its own This is a safe option for you ll definitely get all updates and bug fixes as soon as possible but it s also an unsafe one should the Webmin Web site itself ever be hacked So leave it up to you to decide whether you want to do this Lf 20 at ye EL 3 Pie iy SY no soi A i veab l a ee ee a Si ae i Lal w 9 EE p pai rg Sa po ee i ae A E ia aea 7 7 E Dz ao ese Vee a Figure 3 Webmin Configuration Screen af BO E gee E ie Ser E i E se ae ee Upgrade E Up Webmin Ts fn lees po bo ue oe ee mbn ipii Se i pee ee cee BPS ee ee ope Ti Li Figure 4 You can upgrade Webmin or add new modules without any other tools On the same Webmin Configuration page if you click the Webmin Modules icon the one with small boxes you can browse all available modules on the Webmin site or even download thir
82. ctively supports thin client com puting through partner ship with NComputing and other providers One example is the deployment of terminal desktops for every child in the Republic of Macedonia 180 000 terminals on only 20 000 PCs Carr further explained that the Xubuntu version of its distribution is built specifically to run on older less powerful machines and thus extend their shelf life significantly and that it has evidence that a PC running Ubuntu is significantly more power efficient than one running Windows Finally Carr notes that As an organisation we are great believers in the multiplier effect in providing the means for others to take action We couldn t try to directly support the number of initiatives that happen purely by providing a product that is tree to use and redistribute and that we freely maintain Regarding SUSE Linux Roger Levy Green _ PCs and ee Other 4 Equipment l Just because a piece of hardware is cheap doesn t mean it is cheapest in the long run Whether that hardware is expensive in environmental terms is harder to calculate but is fortunately becoming easier as hardware providers seek competitive advantage via green credentials and tools to evaluate product impact The difference between running Linux with its tickless kernel on AMD or Intel processors is probably a wash Both companies have strong commit ments to environmental protection and Finally when
83. cture Processors e Power Efficiency Optimum performance per watt and power savings e AMD Virtualization Reduce complexity and increase ak existing soluti AMD the AMD Arrow logo AMD Opteron and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced M icro Devi COLUMNS HACK AND KYLE RANKIN Mutt Tweaks for System Administrators If digging through your server e mail bogs you down use these tips to organize and tweak your mutt configuration and cut through that mailbox like a letter opener through an envelope I am one of those people who stores everything in e mail Travel reservations phone numbers f it is in an e mail message know one way or another can find the information That might be one of the reasons have been using mutt as my main mail program both at home and work for years It is difficult to beat when you need to read search and navigate large mailboxes full of mail That and it has vi style key bindings love vi style key bindings If you are a sysadmin there are even more rea sons to love mutt For one you probably spend a good deal of your day in front of a terminal so why not read your mail from there as well A lot of administrators like to run stripped down servers that don t include binaries for X or graphical tools but mutt is small and what s more you can ssh to a server or your work desktop from another machine and check your mail At work like to segregate my e
84. d Core Storage Server 8U 40TB Dual Quad Core Storage Server Xeon e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors inside e Up to 32GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 32GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 32 x 1TB 321B Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to 40 x 1TB 401B Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to two Rear Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives for OS e Up to two Rear Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives for OS Qu a d co re e Dual Areca PCI Express 800MB sec RAID Controllers e Dual Areca PCI Express 800MB sec RAID Controllers a e 1350W 3 1 Triple Redundant Power Supply e 1350W 3 1 Triple Redundant Power Supply e 5 Year Warranty e 5 Year Warranty U n matched Starting at Starting at Intel Intel Logo Intel Inside Intel Inside Logo Pentium Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries For terms and conditions please see www aberdeeninc com abpoly abterms htm 1j024 888 297 1409 www aberdeeninc com lj024 letters OPENVPN EWM CODECS Miimi i Zonbu PC D PP Powered By Linux No Virtual Panning for You Having recently read the Laptop Buying Guide in the December 2007 issue of L thought I d let you know about some thing not mentioned in the article Anyone who enjoys using a virtual screen resolution should steer clear of any note book based on th
85. d PowerTOP a tool that finds culprits in the kernel and user space that are bothering the processor need lessly and reports the energy wasted by those activities PowerTOP also reports on the time spent in each power state Virtualization Making more efficient use of existing computing resources through virtualiza tion such as consolidating multiple virtual servers onto fewer physical machines has been a major trend in the Linux space Little do we realize we are saving a great deal of juice in the process Thus not only does one reduce server sprawl and the expense of purchasing and maintaining more machines but also electrical power uti lization is improved by approximately 10 20 Watts per idle virtual machine according to AMD Additionally as Jon maddog Hall says Utilizing fewer sys tems and sharing the load is goodness The power savings from virtualiza tion on Linux has been enhanced further by the arrival of tickless idle The existence of ticks in each virtual machine would otherwise put multiple extra loads on the virtualization plat form and greatly reduce efficiency and the number of VMs per machine For instance If you have 30 VMs on one machine with each one creating hundreds of ticks per second a sig nificant load is created before any real work Is done Beyond virtualization itself a num ber of vendors are exploring ways to manage their virtualization strategies to streamline their data
86. d device and foots the bill for its recycling Zonbu says it is determined that no Zonbu device contributes to the problem of e waste Save a Ton ne with Koolu Not much different philosophically from Zonbu is Koolu a Canadian firm that aims to save a tonne Canadian for ton of carbon emissions with its thin clients and Net appliances With Jon maddog Hall as Koolu s CTO and Ambassador you are sure that the concept is robust and open source The products run Ubuntu Koolu s and many other firms thin clients says Hall require only 10 Watts or less and allow better sharing of CPU power memory disk and even people power Meanwhile Koolu claims that the fanless Net appliances will save you up to 90 on electricity costs and 50 on PC capital costs Furthermore like the Zonbu twins Koolu s products are ROHS compliant Unfortunately Koolu does not currently offer a recycling program nor does it purchase carbon offsets Other Ways to Make a Difference Besides the above information there are many other ways to compute that are gentler on the environment Here are a few suggestions m Avoid e waste by avoiding Windows Vista a 2007 study by Softchoice Corporation and amplified by Greenpeace stated that 50 of all PCs are below Windows Vista s basic system requirements and 94 are not ready for Windows Vista Premium edition A similar study by the British government found that Linux us
87. d party modules from other sites Choosing the Standard Module option provides a pop up window with i aim hi E amp n io iru 4 B a ih Pir x 5 Create Webmin User O Weine ur mamaa riia 1 haridini homer eki Eien ipara Unis subtenticmticn Boal iine Fetes nanahi O Lier ner hae mA O Dec are n oe O Amaia Ate bere coach ae a Wiel aew TEF Batag af ae Langone ama F by m vem di i Abat TH iii bi F r hein benaf i zen j Gt noe Pasa 5 wre Pa r Hn Biia Tup re Progr Frari bot z Pup esaa Figure 5 Webmin has its own database of users dozens of modules I haven t been able to figure out whether there s a method to the list s organization If you click a mod ule name and then click Install Module Webmin downloads it and sets it up for you Users and Groups Before moving on let s talk about security and users Webmin has its own users which are not the same as the operating system users The very first time you log in it Password Restrictions Tiii i ie Geel bii i a D ibA Beg de cere peewee el mei eee Deas iie aii peered es eT ER Dimer peee he collar eee maa PE Diaa hte bey a jiri a fi Seer H i pos in riari ian level S meee LE E E amp amp iJ Som Figure 6 Using password restrictions provides higher security levels automatically creates a root user You shouldn t let every user work with this account It s safer if you create specific accounts and r
88. day Teas Best price With 1 amp 1 s all inclusive pricing you always know exactly what you are going to pay and you will always find the best price We don t waste money on high overhead costs or on tasteless commercials No catch We treat you fairly The price we advertise is the price you pay for a domain registration No set up fee and no additional costs Ever Maximum freedom Your 1 amp 1 domain belongs to you as long as you re with us You can use it to set up an e mail account or for your website You can even use a different web host without any restrictions Reserve your name now and get started on the web when you re ready Peace of mind Protect your contact information from spammers Your privacy is important That s why unlike other domain companies we offer Private Domain Registration free of charge Switch and save You already have a domain 1 amp 1 does not charge transfer costs and you can save immediately with the industry s best prices If you want to save more upgrade your domain to a hosting package and take advantage of our great prices See next page MEMBER OF Call 1 877 goland1 Yahoo Go Daddy 6 99 9 95 From 9 99 FREE 9 00 6 99 net org us info name Private Domain Registration ICANN Fee Included Induded FREE No E mail Account 2 000 MB Mailbox Mailbox included Total Annual Cost 1 89 AVAAN
89. der lets you design a professional looking website with no HTML knowledge Using simple point and click prompts and a built in text editor your site can be online in minutes Creating your website has never been easier All Inclusive for All Levels amp sooemmodations Resorts Tours Vacations Rentals amp i sun LEPAA H oiii acaton Explore exciting 1 amp 1 gives you a choice between Linux or Microsoft web hosting at unbeatable cesars ye cool acai trae vacations Once in a betime trips and find great i rescets Top Vacation Destinations Explore an eotie destination ge find something new in your backyard From beach ski amp golf vacations bo adams ers bo cultural tours prices Our hosting packages are easy enough for any beginner yet powerful enough for the most demanding developer MEMBER OF lt a 1 877 go1and1 Websites Web com Hostway DIY Included Domains Web Space Monthly Transfer Volume 120 GB 1 200 GB 1 200 IMAP or POP3 2 000 MB J 12 Pages J 5 GB 20 GB 30 POP3 300 MB Extra charge applies 12 GB 250 GB 250 POP3 79 MB E mail Accounts Mailbox Size Search Engine Submission Website Builder Photo Gallery RSS Feed Creator Ad free Blog Dynamic Web Content Web Statistics Starter Software Suite J 24 7 Toll free Phone E mail 90 Day Money Back Guarantee 24 7 Toll free Pho
90. determine the right mix of technologies and platforms for your environment We set up customized stable platform programs to extend product lifecycles improve consistency and drive down total cost of ownership Customized Service and Support ZT Systems extends a flexible range of service and support offerings designed for data centers From full service support to customized options for clients with internal Support resources ZT develops specialized programs tailored to meet your specific requirements Custom Logistics Custom logistics options from ZT Systems are designed to increase data center procurement efficiency From custom packaging and palletization to enhanced RA procedures and extranets ZT solutions speed server implementation and reduce internal costs Maximum Cost Effectiveness ZT is committed to providing value added price leadership within the high volume server segment Our operational efficiencies mean cost advantages for you with recent comparisons yielding substantial savings over equivalent configurations from other major manufacturers Contact Us Today to Learn About ZT Server Solutions and Data Center Programs Customized to Fit Your Needs 866 888 6669 DataCenterSales ZTSystems com www ztsystems com datacenter ovale Wl All rights reserved lintel the Intel logo Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the L S and other countries The word mark The Green
91. e an SUV lifestyle for billions Furthermore the scientific com explains how Mother Nature s Mayday calls have inspired our munity feeds us daily evidence of our climate changing right community to innovate and do more with fewer resources before our eyes The problems seem so daunting What can Whether your motivation is to green the earth or save green we do to fight back and do well by the planet backs though improved efficiency read on to find out more Although hybrid vehicles wind turbines and ethanol get about how you can go green and save green with Linux JAMES GRAY 46 april 2008 www linuxjournal com IMAGE ISTOCKPHOTO COM NADEZDA FIRSOVA A typical Linux server gulps about 225 Watts or more of power meaning that the millions of Linux servers out there now at around a 27 market share are responsible for nearly 5 million tons of carbon emissions annually Furthermore Springboard Research recently reported that an average size server has the Same carbon footprint as a mid size tour wheel drive vehicle In response to this and other daunting evidence the color of Linux is purposefully going green The number of green Linux based initiatives and projects is proliter ating and I d like to share some of them with you In this article discuss initiatives to save energy related to the Linux kernel distributions and applications virtualization and excep tionally green Linux based products such as hardwa
92. e box to turn NFS on and type your network address range in B pE m p pa a ee o E O an mr UE gee ened te ee Figure 4 Mounting the DATA Share CIDR notation Click the Save button and your NAS build is complete Bacula With the FreeNAS system in place let s start building the Bacula system The test system used here was built on Fedora 8 Werewolf with GNOME because it includes Bacula and its dependencies in its core RPM library To add the necessary packages and related dependencies all you need to do is use the Add Remove Software utility under the Applications menu When ready install the following packages E bacula client E bacula common E bacula console m bacula gnome E bacula console gnome E bacula console wxwidgets E bacula director common E bacula director mysq E bacula docs E bacula storage common E bacula storage mysal www linuxjournal com april 2008 71 INDEPTH FreeNAS is one of the simplest programs have ever deployed Its small enough to run a system from a CD or USB key E bacula traymonitor E mysql When the installs are complete start mysqld and set it to start runlevel 5 from the Services utility in GNOME or use chkconfig If you re using a different distribution you need to use the Bacula source files and make configure the install to get to the next step This can be more challenging than using an RPM because of the numerous command line install opti
93. e Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 found in the Dell Inspiron 1420N mentioned in the Laptop Buying Guide This chipset is unfortu nately quite common and used in many of the lower end modern notebooks just bought a Lenovo Y410 to replace my six plus year old HP N5450 which use as a table top PC at home Going from a PIll 850 with 384MB RAM S3 Savage video and 60GB drive upgraded the 20GB original drive died a year or so ago you d think I d be thrilled with a Core 2 Duo 1 5GHz 2GB RAM 160GB SATA drive built in dual layer DVD burner 802 11g and so on and for just 650 after rebate if get that rebate But the truth is I m still using that old HP a month and a half after buying the Lenovo The Lenovo came with Vista but of course the first thing did when got it home was boot up an Ubuntu 7 10 CD Running live from the CD was amazed that the 1280x800 native screen resolu tion worked automatically and that was able to get the Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG working on the home wireless 10 april 2008 www linuxjournal com without any hacking Getting the built in 1 3M Webcam working did require actu ally downloading and compiling linux uvc but that was relatively painless Sound Support is a little sketchy Under Ubuntu 7 10 it doesn t work automatically You have to edit etc modprobe d alsa base and set the snd hda intel model to fujitsu That gets the internal speakers working but
94. e can be overridden by clicking on the Settings button next to the listed effect For instance you may not like the key sequence provided for the Looking Glass effect the Meta key on my notebook is the so called Windows key and might not want that Once the Settings button Is clicked a small window appears with the default keyboard short cuts selected Figure 6 You can click on the key sequence and make your change If you muck things up you always can press the Defaults button to return things to normal Figure 6 Default key and mouse combinations for various effects can be edited by clicking the Settings button Of course useful is open to interpretation One of the effects lets you use your mouse pointer to draw on your desktop You can make windows and decorations translucent or have objects fade away on the screen You can dim active windows or fade parent windows when configuration dialogs appear Figure 6 You may find it useful to have windows explode when you close them Or it may be better for your productivity to have them fall into a thou sand pieces Figure 7 Be warned if you choose the exploding or falling apart window effect even tooltips explode when they close There are several different effects to play with all of which should impact your productivity nicely at least for a little while And remember if your patron ever comes by your desk and asks what you are doing with all these fancy exploding wi
95. e is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University NEW LOOK More IT HOSTING All the FANATICAL SUPPORT You ll Ever Need rackspac experience fanatical _ support Hear YourselfafhinksAgain j WhisperStation Cool Fast Silent For 64 bit HPC Gaming and Graphic Design Applications Originally designed for a group of power hungry demanding engineers in the automotive industry WhisperStation incorporates two dual core AMD Opteron or Intele EM64T processors ultra quiet fans and power supplies plus internal sound proofing that produce a powerful but silent computational platform The WhisperStation comes standard with 2 GB high speed memory an NVIDIA e GeForce or Quadro PCI Express graphics adapter and 20 LCD display It can be configured to your exact hardware specification with any Linux distribution RAID is also available WhisperStation will also make a system administrator very happy when used as a master node for a Microway cluster Visit www microway com for more technical information WWVicroway Technology you can count on
96. e org KDE 4 Visual Guide www kde org announcements 4 0 applications php Marcel s Web Site www marcelgagne com The Order of Canada www gg ca honours nat ord oc index_e asp Tony Aspler The Wine Guy www tonyaspler com Webmin www webmin com The WFTL LUG Marcel s Online Linux User Group www marcelgagne com wftllugform html www linuxjournal com april 2008 27 COLUMNS WORK THE SHELL Dog ae DAVE TAYLOR Twittering from the Command Line Incessant status updates to your cell phone from the command line Sure with a little help from curl and Twitter If you ve been around the Linux and UNIX world as long as have is it really going on 30 years How could that be you ll be familiar with the various attempts at multiperson chat that have come down the pipeline from simple command line tools to the curses based talk program to Internet Relay Chat IRC chaos Occasionally fun but often a complete waste of time there s still something appealing about having an open line with a circle of friends and colleagues A few years ago that mantle was assumed by the status line in Facebook where hard core users update their status throughout the day to reflect the meetings they re attending conferences they re involved with dates with their spouses or significant others concerts fights with parents and so on The problem is that s useful only if the people in your circle
97. e our response method as follows function response data var viewer_friends data get viewer_friends getData viewer _friends each function person var thumb person getField opensocial Person Field THUMBNAIL URL html lt img src thumb gt J document getElementById main innerHTML html Our response method is invoked only after the request has been sent Its data parameter is popu lated with the response to our query which we can retrieve with its name viewer_friends We then use the getData method on the resulting object to give us the data that interests us namely an array of person objects Each person in OpenSocial has a few required properties among them the URL of their person al thumbnail picture You can see from the above example that we retrieve it by invoking the getField method on a person indicating which field we want by using a value provided by the OpenSocial framework We can use several such values including ID for their unique ID NAME for their name and even PROFILE_URL for the person s home page URL on the system Beyond those basic fields a well behaved OpenSocial application must query its container to make sure that it s available Does OpenSocial Work One of the biggest problems with OpenSocial is its inherent diversity and cross platform functionality Programmers who create desktop applications have discovered often the hard way tha
98. e second boots a CentOS 4 5 kickstart default 1 timeout 300 prompt 1 display fl msg F1 fl msg F2 f2 msg label 1 kernel vmlinuz knx5 1 1 append secure nfsdir 10 0 0 1 mnt knoppix 5 1 1 nodhcp lang us ramdisk_size 100000 init etc init 2 apm power off nomce vga normal initrd miniroot knx5 1 1 gz quiet BOOT_IMAGE knoppix label 2 kernel vmlinuz centos 4 5 64 append text nofb ksdevice eth 0 load_ramdisk 1 gt initrd initrd centos 4 5 64 img network wks http 10 0 0 1 kickstart centos4 64 cfg Each of these options is documented in the syslinux man page but highlight a few here The default option sets which label to boot when the timeout expires The timeout is in tenths of a second so in this example the timeout is 30 seconds after which it will boot using the options set under label 1 The display option lists a message if there are any to display by default so if you want to display a fancy menu for these two options you could create a file called f1 msg in var lib tftpboot that contains something like BOOT Options Knoppix 5 1 1 1 2 CentOS 4 5 64 bit lt F1 gt Main lt F2 gt Help Default image will boot in 30 seconds Notice that listed F1 and F2 in the menu You can create multiple files that will be output to the screen when the user presses the function keys This can be useful if you have more menu options than can fit on a single screen or if you want JavaOne Su
99. e very tight and recommend more memory and a faster processor 88 april 2008 www linuxjournal com What Breed Is This So what does the PL distribution contain Given the size of the bootable image the latest 3 0 1 release is smaller than 100MB you might be surprised to see the completeness of PL PL includes utilities and applications for anything a desktop user typically expects and needs to do browse and communi cate on the Web view and manipulate digital photos and other media files create documents play games and so on Specifically the default core distribution includes the following m Desktop control filesystem browser and command line console m Choice of two X servers and the JWM Joe s Window Manager m Language interpreters Perl TCL TK and the bash compatible shell m An assortment of media players and burners m Office applications word processor spreadsheet and PDF writer E Internet client tools base Mozilla browser Seamonkey chat FTP e mail secure shell Telnet a wiki and a Web authoring tool m Network services including an FTP server and firewall m System administration utilities to manage and monitor disks filesystems job scheduling printers processes and memory usage m Drawing graphics applications m A handful of games and dozens of utilities for managing PL s activities life cycle and appearance Additionally available packages include m Web server E Gaim chat
100. ect all we have to do is invoke req add multiple times As you can see trom the above line of code invoking reg newFetchPersonRequest required that we both indicate what we want to request and that we give it a symbolic name viewer This naming allows us to pull apart different types of response data within a single object You might be wondering what stops the viewer trom being able to retrieve arbitrary data from the OpenSocial container The answer is that OpenSocial defines two basic types of people the viewer and the owner The former as we have seen refers to the person who Is running and viewing the operation and might even refer to no one at all if our system permits anonymous brows ing The owner by contrast must be a defined person on the system and may very well refer to the same person as the viewer But at least in theory OpenSocial will provide only limited infor mation to viewers about owners with whom they have no relationship Who Are Your Friends Perhaps the simplest type of application we can write with OpenSocial is one that shows the current user s friends Better yet because friends on a social networking site typically upload their pictures we even can display a list of the view er s friends 20 april 2008 www linuxjournal com Last month we saw how we can modify the HTML in which a Google Gadget or an OpenSocial application is running Create an empty div build up the HTML in a varia
101. eedesktop org archives xorg 2007 April 023841 html This is a big enough issue for me that as soon as Xi Graphics supports the I965GM l m going to gladly pay them 129 for a full featured X server In the meantime I ll have to get by with multiple workspaces and have installed brightside so that can pan to adjacent workspaces just by moving the pointer off the edge of the current workspace It s not the same but it s apparently the best can do for now Jon Lewis We Don t Need No Stinking Perl in Our Shell Scripts Well Dave Taylor threw down an irresistible challenge in his January 2008 column when he remarked that he couldn t imagine a shell only method of calculating the ordinal value of a letter without extraordinary levels of effort actually found three different ways of doing this and while it did take a certain amount of effort to refresh my memory on some details think the resulting methods are all reasonably simple I ve presented them below the following examples are intended to be drop in replacements for this line on page 31 of the January 2008 issue ordvalue echo letter perl e a getc print ord a 96 Solution 1 Do this array initialization prior to using LETTERS LETTERS a z ordvalue 1 while LETTERS ordvalue letter do ordvalue ordvalue 1 done The LETTERS array is initialized with the letters of the alphabe
102. eet anybody at all but what do is essentially communicate and It is very social what drives motivates me is the fun part mean part of being fun is that it should be difficult enough to not be trivial So fun doesn t mean that it s frivolous it just means it s interesting and exciting For more visit linux foundation org DOC SEARLS www linuxjournal com april 2008 17 COLUMNS AT THE FORGE REUVEN M LERNER Social Google Gadgets How do we turn a Google Gadget into an OpenSocial application An initial look at the OpenSocial API what it includes as well as what it doesnt The past year has seen an explosion in the growth of social networking sites like Facebook People have jumped at the opportunity to find existing friends make new ones and spend time communicating and participating in group activities on line Facebook might be the best known site but LinkedIn Ning Hi5 Orkut and others also have become popular As we might expect in a competitive market place each of these sites has tried to offer unique features to encourage new people to sign up During the summer of 2007 Facebook unveiled one of the most interesting and powerful of these features in its developer platform basically a way to integrate third party Web applications into Facebook This API has led to a torrent of applications being developed for Facebook It s not clear whether anyone is making money o
103. ely unique distinction of being usable from live bootable removable media CD DVD or even a USB Flash device PL was developed and organized by Barry Kauler in 2003 as a fresh start Linux Distribution Project that Is it did not grow out of an existing distribution Its goal and identifying characteristics have been consistent ofter a small efficient distribution that doesn t sacrifice on user features or ease of use PLs lightweight footprint makes it practical to use directly trom a portable bootable image rather than needing to install it onto a fixed internal disk In fact PL can be booted and used effectively from any medium ranging from a floppy disk to a network server Prerequisites To try PL you need access to a CD DVD R W drive and disk writer software capable of burning ISO images and a host PC laptop with the following m Pentium ll class processor m Removable media CD DVD or USB device m BIOS that will allow the computer to boot from CD or USB this device needs to appear before internal drives or other active boot options m RAM 128MB 256MB at minimum E Internet connection The machine primarily used for testing is now a dedicated PL host On the surface this machine was ready for the scrap heap a vintage Pentium Ill 600MHz processor with 384MB of RAM The PL community has suggested that a 100MHz class machine with a minimum of 64MB of RAM will support PL That may be but would expect it to b
104. ending an account name and password pair and that means you re probably going to have the password embedded in your script Never a good idea But prompting for it each and every time you want to send an update isn t good either Before we address that though notice how I m utilizing the wonderful curl utility a must have for your Linux distro If you don t have it grab a copy trom curl haxx se curl makes it very easy to work with Web pages via the command line and consider it essential for any modern shell script programmer Looking back at the command invoked you ll notice that the URL to which we are going to send the update is status update json Read the API and you ll notice that it supports four different output formats all of which are a pain to parse within a script unfortunately One of those is json and it re occurs here as the update receiving URL address If you ve already worked with Web sites from the com mand line you know there are lots of illegal characters that cannot be included in URLs and by extension on command lines of utilities that interact with the Web such as curl As a result one of the tasks of our send twitter update script will be to make all of the necessary substitutions before sending the new status message to the Twitter server On a lightweight service like Twitter think it s probably crazy to go through too many hoops to ensure security so actually will be including
105. eral configuration including language and theme selection you can use Webmin in more than 40 languages upgrades module installation logging options log browsing and more If you want to make your installation more secure check the Authentication option allowing among other things protection against brute force password cracking attacks and also check IP Access Control and Blocked Hosts and Users If you have the Servers module installed you can use it to scan for other Webmin servers and administrate them remotely although it won t be as speedy System covers many different functions You can con trol backups with the third party option for the Bacula backup system or with a far simpler filesystem backup that uses either tar or the dump and restore family of commands to save directories to tape or to a Tile on another filesystem Bootup and Shutdown lets you spec ity which services will be run at which levels and also obviously to reboot or shut down the system For user management check Users and Groups which allows you to create edit or delete both users and groups and Change Passwords whose function is obvious The Disk and Network Filesystems module lets you mount or unmount devices and filesystems and Disk Quotas will be of interest if you have assigned file space quotas to users You can schedule commands to run once think atd or have periodical jobs think cron You can get a top like display of processes bu
106. erous power saving documents whitepapers and tips such as utilizing the Aggressive Link Power Management feature on SATA controllers or utilizing Gigabit Ethernet only when a system needs it Lesswatts org is directed by Intel s Open Source Technology Center the firm s nexus of Linux and open source initiatives Over on the dot org side of things is the Linux Foundation s LF Green Linux Initiative The Linux Foundation is a product of the 2007 fusion of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group whose mission is to support Linus Torvalds and other efforts that move Linux forward technologically and out in the field According to Amanda McPherson LF s Director of Marketing LF was inspired to set up a Green Linux Workgroup in June 2007 at its Collaboration Summit where concern for the planet and power management emerged as a top project to work on LF says McPherson is pleased with how the tickless kernel PowerTOP and other projects have pro gressed adding that developments by the community have been very impres sive over the last few years and that enterprises are gradually adopting them as the technologies are supported in the conservative enterprise distributions Enterprises are understandably cau tious about upgrading kernel distribu tion versions and taking advantage of new features As time goes on these features will be used more and more The Green Group is ramped up
107. ers need to upgrade their hardware only half as often as Windows users m Investigate the environmental foot print of your next equipment purchase with Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool EPEAT m Look for the Energy Star logo with its tough new requirements for energy efficiency and power management capabilities m Recycle your old CRT monitor according to ViewSonic a 19 LCD monitor sips only 40 Watts compared to 100 Watts for a comparable CRT monitor The company estimates you ll save around 20 annually in electricity costs Do It with Linux Although most news about the environ ment and energy consumption is alarm ing the plethora of new Linux focused technologies and initiatives related to green computing is a cause for hope and optimism Many barriers such as data center complexity lack of information and societal apathy must yet be overcome but the Linux community and many IT firms have laid a laudable foundation from which to build The initiatives outlined in this article IBM s Big Green Linux Intel s Lesswatts org Linus tickless kernel virtu alization Zonbu and Koolu PCs Energy Star EPEAT and more are excellent tools that can help you to do well while you do good Linux Journal encourages you to keep Mother Nature in mind as you green up your data center or PC but if you do your homework going green likely will not be a burden to bear but a substantial long term compet
108. ersity Ransom Love Director of Strategic Relationships Family and Church History Department Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints Sam Ockman Bruce Perens Bdale Garbee Linux CTO HP Danese Cooper Open Source Diva Intel Corporation Advertising E MAIL ads linuxjournal com URL www linuxjournal com advertising PHONE 1 713 344 1956 ext 2 Subscriptions E MAIL subs linuxjournal com URL www linuxjournal com subscribe PHONE 1 713 589 3503 FAX 1 713 589 2677 TOLL FREE 1 888 66 LINUX MAIL PO Box 980985 Houston TX 77098 USA Please allow 4 6 weeks for processing address changes and orders PRINTED IN USA LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds The Straight Talk People wenn ABERDEEN QUAD CORE SAY NO MORE ABERDEEN n Fe ABERDEEN hlen 128 ABERDEEN y JA 2a i kT Tot TETT 1U 3TB Quad Quad Core HPC Server 1U 4TB Dual Quad Core Server 2U 8TB Dual Quad Core Server e Up to four Quad Core Intel Xeon MP processors e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Intel 7300 chipset with 64 Bit Support e Intel 5000P Chipset with 64 Bit Support e Intel 5000P Chipset with 64 Bit Support e Up to 192GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory Up to 64GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 64GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 3 x 1TB 3TB Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to 4 x 1TB 4TB Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to 8
109. ery seriously He knows that IT administrators are concerned about more than just prices Compute density reliability and high efficiency are all part of the equation when evaluating whether a server is Xeon ae truly cost effective That s why Travis is confident when he takes orders for the Silicon Mechanics Rackform iServ R254 inside Powerful Efficient The R254 features two Quad Core or Dual Core Intel Xeon 5000 Sequence processors with 45nm Hi k silicon technology a 1333 MHz System Bus and Intel Virtualization Technology It supports 6 DDR2 DIMMs 2 integrated Gigabit Ethernet adapters and 2 hot swap SATA drives Travis knows that his customers can evaluate the R254 s energy efficiency in various configurations using the Silicon Mechanics web based power calculator and that they can count on Intel s record of reliability He is confident that they are getting truly cost effective compute power for high performance deployments When you partner with Silicon Mechanics you get more than a powerful and energy efficient Intel solution you get an expert like Travis Mechanics Try out the Silicon Mechanics Power Calculator under Configured Power at www siliconmechanics com power ad LU el MECHANICS Silicon Mechanics and the Silicon Mechanics logo are registered trademarks of Silicon Mechanics Inc Intel the Intel logo Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Cor
110. estrict each one to needed functions To do this click Webmin on the left side menu and then Webmin Users When adding users you can opt to give them a specific Webmin password or use Unix authentication The former option is usually safer but only if users choose a password different from their standard passwords and the latter option METRO TORONTO CC VENTION CENTRE CANADA CONFERENCE 729 APRIL 2008 EXPO 8 9 AP MEDIA AREER Cit t World Canada IDG CANADA Thus Patiala Copier Cha SPRING CONFERENCE 2008 Ww ITH PEE EE ASTERISK amp PRESENTING W OPEN TELEPHONY CONFERENCE PREMIER MEDIA SPONSORS SILVER SPONSOR BRONZE SPONSORS go we F 2al COMPUTERWORLD NetwokWolhe SESER Cons infra Canon D Link CONFERENCE SPONSORS PLATINUM ASSOCIATION SPONSOR CERTIFICATION SPONSORS IT GREEN SPONSOR ASTERISK amp OPEN TELEPHONY SPONSOR sacend CORPORATE LEARNING SIDC CANiance hiTorono CANADA Analyze the Future digium Asterisk gt Database Management gt Web 2 0 gt Open Source gt Information Architecture gt SaaS gt Unified Communications gt Security gt Virtualization www it36o0 ca gt Microsoft Technology gt SOA gt Service Management gt Storage is the friendliest one The Password Restrictions screen lets you set specific controls so users can t use too short simple or easy to guess pass
111. et of default configurations and an impressive array of fully supported security related software packages Fewer than Debian but many more than CentOS or RHEL If you re an intermediate to advanced Linux system administrator depending on what you need to do Ubuntu Server may be worth checking out If you re a Linux newbie looking for a gentle introduction to the Linux experience Ubuntu Desktop is a much better choice even if you want practice setting up server applications That s it for now Until next time be safe m Mick Bauer darth elmo wiremonkeys org is Network Security Architect for one of the US s largest banks He is the author of the O Reilly book Linux Server Security 2nd edition formerly called Building Secure Servers With Linux an occasional presenter at information security conferences and composer of the Network Engineering Polka Resources The Official Ubuntu Home Page www ubuntu com Ubuntu Server Guide https help ubuntu com 7 10 server C index html Christer Edwards blog which consists almost entirely of handy Ubuntu HOWTOs ubuntu tutorials com Ubuntu Server Considering Kernel Configuration by Carla Schroder www enterprisenetworkingplanet com netos article php 3710641 Home Page for Webmin a Free Web based GUI for Remote Server Management www webmin com The Ubuntu RootSudo Page Describing Ubuntu s sudo Implementation in Detail https help ubuntu com community Ro
112. ethods it expects the root user name and password to log in to its Web interface Ubuntu users need to enable the root account by setting a root password to use VMware Server The traditional looking VMware con sole has been done away with entirely and the FAQ and release notes seem to imply that a standalone VMware con sole cannot be used to access the virtual machines although we were unable to confirm this Instead the Web interface is intended to be the entire interaction point between the user and the 40 april 2008 www linuxjournal com New Virtual Machine Ready to Complete Centenks 1 Derli Operating Syolern Please werty thet your mew virtual machine is configured appropriately The follawing virtual machine will be created Wan Pi z 2 Maret ond Lacaben Virtual Machine H Virtual Machine Location Guest Operating Setem Preceseare Himei Network connection Hard beck Tee Hard egk Capac Hard Disk Loe ation Wlocabe apace Aen Splat disk ints 2 GA files 5 Procespors and Memery d Hebvork Fanmection b Dee Bee E Dik Capac and Lacabicn F Virtual Miathene Compatibility i Ready to Complete Hard Disk Adapter Fe CROWD Orn Peppy Drie SUSE Linu standard Swbe Lincs 02 bit i 250 HO Bridged H n virtual igh g ott etandard Yeu Yeu See Using device fdeeyedrom Using device fdewiio Figure 1 Defining a Virtual Machine Using the Web Interface VMware processes
113. etimes pressing the menu button exits Sometimes you must press the select and menu buttons Other programs require you to press play and select in order to get back to the main Rockbox program I m sure this is because the different programs or plugins as they are called in the Rockbox interface are developed by separate programmers but wish there was a standard in place regarding how to exit Other Stuff Along with games and applications there s also a group of programs called demos If you were a computer user back in the early 1990s you may remember hacking groups releasing what they called demos in which they would show off their programming skills and push the graphics processors of the time to their limits These Rockbox programs follow a similar road and the demos mainly show off the iPod s www linuxjournal com april 2008 43 REVIEWS graphics and processor They aren t use ful for much more than oohs and aahs but they do make for interesting con versation starters The demos vary from Rockbox Replacement Firmware Pros and Cons PROS m Numerous games applications and demos available mM Customizable themes for varied look and feel m Supports more music formats m Rockbox is open for develop ment changes additions and third party plugins m Music quality is better or so they claim I can t tell the difference m Music management is simple and flexible m Mu
114. ff these applica tions or whether there are any that people find truly useful rather than frivolous But there are plenty of indications that Facebook s API is an important milestone for social networking applications and for Web applications in general For the first time we have a Web site that is providing an open platform tor application development In response to the popularity of Facebook s developer API a number of competitors announced they would be supporting a similar API known as OpenSocial Applications written for OpenSocial should work equally well on all compliant social networks Thus instead of writing one application tor MySpace and another for Ning you can write the application once and deploy it on many differ ent networks The exception at least for now Is Facebook whether Facebook decides to join the OpenSocial consortium or provide a compatibility layer remains to be seen The OpenSocial specification was spearheaded by Google and is based on the specification known as Google Gadgets part of the personal ized iGoogle page for some time Last month we looked at how to build a simple Google Gadget which packages HTML and JavaScript into an XML wrapper This month we look at how to take our simple Google Gadget and turn it into an OpenSocial compliant application We begin to see the pros 18 april 2008 www linuxjournal com and cons of the OpenSocial standard and consider ways to make use of Its c
115. formation on the server side to see what s working and what isn t Now let s take a look at distributing a configuration file Although cfengine has a full featured file editor in the editfiles command using this method for distributing configurations is not advised The copy command will move a file from the server to the client machine with cfnew appended to the filename Then once the Tile has been copied completely it renames the Tile and saves the old copy as cfsaved in the specified directory Here s the copy command syntax copy class lt lt master file gt gt dest target file server server mode mode owner owner group group backup true false repository backup dir recurse number inf 0 define classlist Only the dest is required along with the filename to save at the destination These can be different Here s another example copy Linux copydir linux resolv conf dest etc resolv conf server cfengine examplel com mode 644 owner root group root backup true repository var cfengine cfbackup recurse 0 define copiedresolvdotconf The last line in this copy statement assigns this host to a group called copiedresolvdotconf Although we don t have to do anything after copying this particular file we may want to do some action on all hosts that just had this file successtully sent to them such as sending an e mail or restarting a process As another example if you update a configuration fi
116. g is heavier weight but more capable and may not work well with older more obscure video devices This is usually the better choice Xvesa is lighter weight has a fixed refresh rate and supports a narrower set of input devices If X org proves problematic try Xversa m Step 2 select screen resolution Driven by the perceived capabilities of the discovered graphics card monitor a set of resolution choices will be presented usually between 860 and 1 400 What s on the desktop By default the desktop launch icons tor the commonly accessed applications are organized as follows m Row 1 system setup and administration utilities m Row 2 office related applications such as a word processor E Row 3 network client applications such as a browser and chat tool m Row 4 and below personal tools such as a calendar contact organizers and multimedia tools Access to the complete set of applications is provided through the lower left menu button Here s an overview of its organization m Desktop basic desktop settings window manager control set time date m System printer management system monitoring boot manager configuration m Setup application installation network tools remaster live PL media m Utility shell prompt backup m FileSystem file browsing searching disk mounter E Graphic paint graphics editing screen capture m Document dictionary word processor Web authoring E Calculate calc
117. gap lengths you might want to consider sticking with the original software Thankfully the devel opers even have admitted that to them selves and offer a painless way to run the original software right alongside the new If you reboot your iPod hold down menu and select for 3 5 seconds and immediately toggle the hold switch the iPod boots the original firmware So if you like everything about the Rockbox music player except the way it plays music don t worry you can have the best of both worlds Well done Rockbox Final Thoughts I m sure on an iPod with a color display the features would have been even more visually appealing Running it on the iPod Mini was a good way to com pare it to the simplicity of the Apple firmware though Rockbox does exactly what it says it will do It met all my expectations and exceeded them in many areas namely the quality and quantity of games Oddly enough however more often than not found myself booting the iPod into the original Apple firmware That s not to say don t reboot into Rockbox when have time to play around but for listening to music have to give the advantage to Apple The one thing I m thankful for is that with Rockbox at least have a choice My choice is to keep both oper ating systems on board because quite honestly they re both great m Shawn Powers is the Gadget Guy at www linuxjournal com He s also the Technology Director for a K 12 school i
118. gure 4 dpi g f ps j TE a raj at or oaa haa a riae n ert hji m Ee Berge Laihia io l Biagi a ia iE af Apr at anne _e l ry i o ae eel et ps Presser Mimiru Merai wf wear neka be nidu ee He i al iT eee B aa acl a ee ee OF ee ce _ tall agen it g Figure 4 For serious eye candy KDE 4 users can turn a little of their administration time over to some glitzier pursuits Under this All Effects section you ll find lots of great desktop toys Some of them are strange little special effects and others are actually quite useful enhancements to your desktop experi ence For instance there s a magnifier tool that magnifies the section of the desktop that is under the mouse pointer For some trying to find the cursor on that busy desktop is some times difficult a task that can be made even more taxing by your choice of color and desktop theme Have no fear as yet another cool desktop effect comes to your rescue Activate the Track Mouse effect When you next lose your cursor activate the mouse tracker by pressing the Crtl Configure derkiop fects O AmaE Mind to fired aut cr configure bw to acirate an affect beck af affects eethinga Figure 5 Lost your mouse pointer We can find it for you surrounded by stars and Meta key Five bright yellow stars appear orbiting the mouse pointer Figure 5 Although there are preset key defaults many of thes
119. h E Handheld UMPC ultra mobile PC Nokia N810 It s a great device he says His main everyday use of it is reading books on the subway between his home in the Bronx and Bug Labs offices in Manhattan basically use a pdt reader plus an e mail client m Phone Motorola E6 ROKR This is a Linux phone that use as a GPRS modem for my Nokia N810 over Bluetooth m Laptop Lenovo X61 tablet running Ubuntu Linux looked at the new Fujitsu 810 It was small with a resis tance touchscreen and the driver didn t work so well But Linux has support from Wacom So decided to get a Wacom tablet previously had another ThinkPad that had Ubuntu working perfectly So decid ed to stick with Lenovo got the X61 and installed the Wacom drivers On an airplane the screen re orients Somebody figured that there s an Angel Roman of Bug Labs and His Gear accelerometer in the machine and wouldn t it be nice if you could guide Tux Racer that way Then Angel picks up the machine and moves it around as if steering a penguin down a ski slope So knew that if stuck with Lenovo l d have good support for drivers And so far that s worked out He makes heavy use of the X61 as a tablet I can make use of the whole screen area And found something called Cell Writer which can train to know my handwriting It works really well and it s fast You can even suspend and resume
120. han cutting edge AMD Quad Core Opteron processors you get an expert like Rob 7 mechanics For more information about the pO trow loge AMD Opel ale RackScale Clusters Configuration tool combinations thereof are trademarks of ae a P Advanced Micro Devices Inc Visit www siliconmechanics com clusters MECHANICS Or Silicon Mechanics and the Silicon Mechanics logo are registered trademarks of Silicon Mechanics Inc AMD the e a A l COLUMNS AT THE FORGE method calls on the opensocial object Typically methods execute asynchronously with a callback method specified as one of the invocation parame ters For example we can get information about the person currently running viewing our application by creating a new OpenSocial data request and indicating what request we want to make var req opensocial newDataRequest req add req newFetchPersonRequest opensocial DataRequest w gt PersoniId VIEWER viewer We then send the request to our container req send response The response parameter is a function as soon as the request returns a response that function will be invoked Moreover when the response function is invoked it will be passed a single parameter that contains the results from our method call Applications written for OpenSocial should work equally well on all compliant social networks We can send multiple queries within a single data request obj
121. hat allow one to change the adapter s functionality via open source software easily Users can install different firmware versions from an ever growing on line pool over USB The adapter can be used for programming and debugging AVR and ARM processors as a USB to RS232 converter as a JTAG interface or as a simple I O interface www embedded projects net usbprog Navicron s Fusionplatform and Fusionsoftware Pushing the envelope on mobile wireless devices Navicron recently introduced two new products tusionplatform a reference high performance mobile entertainment engine and fusionsoftware a Linux based platform with a GTK based front end for application develop ment Navicron stresses the integration value of the two products that are designed trom the ground up and optimized for wireless consumer electronics and handheld products based on Linux or other OSes Fusionplatform contains a powerful multimedia application processor and support for the latest wireless standards and multimedia features Components can be added left out and upgraded downgraded simply Navicron also cites advantages from using open source which offers unparalleled mobile multimedia experiences to consumers Wwww navicron com Azingo s Azingo Mobile In yet another instance of Linux s agility on diverse devices Azingo has released Azingo Mobile a suite of open mobile software and services that helo companies deliver rich multimedia exper
122. hat take advantage of these supports We also saw how OpenSocial applications communicate with the enclosing containers Finally we saw how we can even create a simple application in only a few lines of carefully chosen code It remains to be seen whether OpenSocial will succeed either on its own or as a competitor to the Facebook development platform do believe that it needs to become more mature before it will be truly useful But the intentions are definitely positive and there is a great deal of potential for good to come out of this standard m Reuven M Lerner a longtime Web database developer and consultant is a PhD candidate in learning sciences at Northwestern University studying on line learning communities He recently returned with his wife and three children to their home in Modi in Israel after four years in the Chicago area Resources Examples code google com apis opensocial articles firstgadget firstgadget 0 6 html Description of OpenSocial blog pmarca com 2007 10 open social a n html OpenSocial Screencast blog pmarca com 2007 10 open social scr html OpenSocial Specification code google com apis opensocial docs spec 0 6 html Tim O Reilly s Arguments in Favor of Data Mobility within OpenSocial radar oreilly com archives 2007 11 opensocial_social_mashups html EmperorLinux where Linux amp laptops converge Since 1999 EmperorLinux has provided pre installed Linux laptops
123. he first step is creating a directory for local modifications Open a terminal using the aforementioned keyboard shortcut and type mkdir icewm cp etc X11 icewm home user icewm This creates a local customisation directory and copies the ASUS IceWM configuration into it ready for you to modify As not all of the software that ships with the Eee is accessible through the easy mode launcher the first useful thing to With hardware support already taken care of the Eee offers an opportunity for beginning to intermediate Linux users to customise themselves a flexible Linux based tool using the Eees easy or full desktop mode 84 april 2008 www linuxjournal com con la E memi T E F B pA pie paimi jeh pnp jj ja Gan 0 j 4 1 1 rm fhai freq fed ith fariti Enpa PEI Pein Peas ET 3 Figure 1 The lceWM Menu with the Menu File in the Background tweak on the Eee is to add the IceWM panel menu and edit it to add those applications that aren t exposed through the easy mode interface To enable the menu edit icewm config and scroll down to the option named TaskBarShowStartMenu Change the 0 in the uncommented value to 1 and save the file You need to restart your Eee for the menu to show up Show Start menu on task bar TaskBarShowStartMenu 1 0 1 TaskBarShowStartMenu 1 To edit the menu open icewm menu in your favourite editor The menu format is pretty simple following the syntax
124. her trademarks are the property of their respective owners 80127 INDEPTH Hacking the Eee PC How to tweak your Eee PC JES HALL ASUS diminutive sub notebook the Eee PC has so far exceeded expectations and is sold out virtually everywhere Its simple interface and wallet friendly pricing have contributed to making the Eee the most popular gadget this season It s in the hands of the power user that the Eee really shines With hardware support already taken care of the Eee offers an opportunity for beginning to intermediate Linux users to customise themselves a flexible Linux based tool using the Eee s easy or full desktop mode In this article we take you through tweaking your Eee although in the interest of preserving your warranty most of the hacks here are focused on software The first and most important hack is to read the manual that came with your Eee to make sure you re completely up to date on everything When you read the manual because you are going to read it right you ll notice that ASUS mentions the keyboard short cut Ctrl Alt T to launch a terminal Gaining root on the default Eee install is as simple as issuing the commana sudo s There is no password any person who can open a terminal is able to gain root ASUS easy mode uses a customised IceWM Www icewm org a standard X11 window manager that s been around for a very long time It s relatively easy to customise to your liking T
125. i E gt a moe a Ep m a a PL par Figure 8 You can configure Apache fully with Webmin Here you can edit the default server attributes 4 f a0 a Sipe mig Bi 2 j MySQL Database Server a beei k Fm be oe h g Ba Br ddaa oe om e oma niem Tim ere oei o cee pep ee Eom monarg a mie mibr Shee umi main Empa iak n En mm hme ag Ma ag ai ee deanas ee os de a raha Figure 9 Webmin provides an alternative to PHPMyAdmin for configur ing MySQL databases m Hardware lets you control disks and volumes including LVM RAID and disk partitions you also can use Smart to check the status of your disk units printers CD burning and the system clock If you are using GRUB you can edit its options from here too m Clusters includes several options you will use only if you are running two or more machines forming a cluster with the Heartbeat monitor a rather more specialized setup which proves once again that you need to know what you re doing before starting to mess with Webmin m Others a catchall for several options including a command shell implemented via a Java applet for full console access or Custom Commands which allows you to set up and exe cute commonly used commands with optional parameter substitution a fine tool if you need to make some com mands available to inexperienced users There also is a File Manager another Java applet SSH Telnet remote login an HTTP tunnel for accessing Web
126. iala Pra gt cari jet www linuxjournal com april 2008 93 INDEPTH m Screen 4 apply encryption choices are none weak or strong If you re saving data you care about on removable media it might make sense to select an encryption level allowing you to assign a password which you ll need to provide at subsequent boots m Screen 5 specify an initial size for the standalone ext2 filesystem file that will contain PL customization data 512MB is the default and recommended size but larger is better m Screen 6 if you re saving the session data on faster media than the boot CD DVD such as an internal IDE drive you will be given the option of saving some PL runtime files to speed up the boot process going forward m Screen 7 review confirmation opportunity to change details or cancel Housebroken Puppy On subsequent PL boots you ll notice a few differences You need to attach removable media if that s where your cus tomizations have been saved You ll find that PL has main tained its network configuration assuming it was saved the initial desktop Welcome woof woot has been replaced with a plain color backdrop the applications you ve installed are now accessible through the Menu structure and an additional filesystem has been mounted under initrd mnt dev_save As before all mounted devices appear under mnt See the updated output of df h below Filesystem Size Used Available Use Mounted on
127. ic Marcotte Paul Barry e Paul McKenney Dave Taylor Dirk Elmendorf Proofreader Geri Gale Publisher General Manager Director of Sales Regional Sales Manager Regional Sales Manager Circulation Director System Administrator Webmaster Accountant Carlie Fairchild publisher linuxjournal com Rebecca Cassity rebecca linuxjournal com Laura Whiteman laura linuxjournal com Joseph Krack joseph linuxjournal com Bruce Stevens bruce linuxjournal com Mark Irgang mark linuxjournal com Mitch Frazier sysadm linuxjournal com Katherine Druckman webmaster linuxjournal com Candy Beauchamp acct linuxjournal com Linux Journal is published by and is a registered trade name of Belltown Media Inc PO Box 980985 Houston TX 77098 USA Reader Advisory Panel Brad Abram Baillio e Nick Baronian Hari Boukis e Caleb S Cullen Steve Case Kalyana Krishna Chadalavada Keir Davis e Adam M Dutko Michael Eager Nick Faltys Ken Firestone Dennis Franklin Frey Victor Gregorio Kristian Erik e Hermansen e Philip Jacob Jay Kruizenga David A Lane Steve Marquez Dave McAllister e Craig Oda Rob Orsini Jeffrey D Parent Wayne D Powel e Shawn Powers e Mike Roberts Draciron Smith Chris D Stark Patrick Swartz Editorial Advisory Board Daniel Frye Director IBM Linux Technology Center Jon maddog Hall President Linux International Lawrence Lessig Professor of Law Stanford Univ
128. iences to a wider range of mobile phones Based on LiMo Foundation specifications the suite allows handset makers and operators to plug in a comprehensive and pre integrated mobile middleware framework that provides a variety of out of the box applications and an Eclipse based SDK Azingo says that the product accelerates time to market and allows for lower cost phones to offer the latest multimedia and UI innovations The Linux based software platform also includes a feature rich browser a highly configurable UI media players for music video and photos a mobile optimized Linux kernel and more Finally Azingo says that its platform can be integrated into new handset and chipset designs Www azingo com No Tech Hacking by Johnny Long and Kevin Mitnick Syngress If security is on your shoulders you may want to get insights from the new book No Tech Hacking A Guide to Social Engineering Dumpster Diving and Shoulder Surfing by Johnny Long and Kevin Mitnick and published by Syngress No Tech is an irreverent behind the scenes memoir of two professional hackers wreaking havoc Long and Mitnick take the readers along as they break in to buildings slip past industrial grade firewalls and scores of other high tech protection systems put up to thwart intruders After hundreds of jobs the authors reveal their secrets behind bypassing every conceivable security system Included are photos videos and stories that show how vulnerable the high te
129. inaries and utilities on every machine so be careful not to run the server d mon cfservd on a client machine unless you specifically intend to do that After the install you should have a var ctengine directory and the binaries mentioned previously Before any host can actually communicate with the cfengine server keys must be exchanged between the two Cfengine keys are similar to SSH keys except they are one way That is to say both the server and the client must have 54 april 2008 www linuxjournal com each other s public key in order to communicate Years of sysadmin paranoia cause me to recommend manually copy ing all keys and trusting nothing Copy var cfengine ppkeys localhost pub from the server to all the clients and from the clients to the server in the same directory renaming them var ctengine ppkeys root 10 11 0 1 pub where the IP is 10 11 0 1 On the server side cfservd conf must be configured to allow clients to access particular directories To do this create an AllowConnectionsFrom and an admit section cfservd conf control AllowConnectionsFrom 192 168 0 0 24 admit configs datacenter1 example1 com configs datacenter2 example2 com To test your example client to see whether it is connecting to the cfengine server make sure port 5803 is clear between them and run the server with cfservd v d2 And on the client run cfagent v no splay This will give you a lot of debugging in
130. ing those standards and created competitive alternatives to commercial solutions The Scalable OpenGroupware org Project always has fol lowed the same motivation to offer an open source scalable groupware solution that integrates nicely with the Mozilla PIM suite while not neglecting mobile users This article should help you get started with SOGo so you can test its functionali ties for yourself Join the mailing list to discuss your experience with the developers m Francis Lachapelle flachapelle inverse ca holds a Bachelor s degree in Computer Engineering from McGill University He is currently a senior systems architect for Inverse Inc an IT consult ing company located in downtown Montr al that specializes in the deployment of infrastructures based on free and open source components like PacketFence and S0Go Ludovic Marcotte ludovic inverse ca holds a Bachelor s degree in Computer Science from the University of Montr al He currently is the practice leader for Inverse Inc an IT consulting com pany located in downtown Montr al that specializes in the deployment of infrastructures based on free and open source components like PacketFence and SOGo Resources Scalable OpenGroupware org SOGo www scalableogo org SOGo Connector for Thunderbird www inverse ca english contributions sogo_connector html Funambol www funambol org Funambol SOGo Connector www inverse ca contributions funambol html Nexthaus S
131. itive cost advantage as well m James Gray is Linux Journal Products Editor and a graduate student in environmental science and management at Michigan State University A Linux enthusiast since the mid 1990s he currently resides in Lansing Michigan with his wife and cats Resources IBM s Big Green Linux Initiative www 03 ibm com press us en pressrelease 22006 wss Intel s Lesswatts org www lesswatts org The Linux Foundation s Green Linux Initiative www linux foundation org en Green_Linux Cassatt Corporation www cassatt com Pacific Gas amp Electric Rebates for Virtualization Projects www pge com biz rebates hightech htee_incentives html Red Hat www redhat com Ubuntu www ubuntu com Intel s Classmate PC www classmatepc com Macedonia Computer Project www ubuntu com news macedonia school computers Xubuntu www xubuntu org Zonbu www zonbu com US EPA Energy Star Program www energystar gov Climate Trust www climatetrust org Koolu www koolu com Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool EPEAT www epeat net www linuxjournal com april 2008 51 FOR ENTERPRISE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT Cfengine makes it easier to manage configuration files across large numbers of machines Scott Lackey Cfengine Is known by many system administrators to be an excellent tool to automate manual tasks on UNIX and Linux based machines It also is the most comprehensive framework to execute administrat
132. itor utility trom the System Tools menu as well The Tray Monitor Figure 7 is nice because it gives you a quick glance at the status of the daemons and any running jobs This is helpful when you are multitasking or have jobs that run nightly and you want to check their status the next morning Return to the console and click the Run button to bring up the backup job dialog window Under job select WeeklyHomeBackups Figure 8 This pre tills the field selections with the items specified in your conf file You could change any of these options at this point but they must first exist in the conf file or they will not appear in the fields In other words you can t create a job from the drop downs without populating the Job section of the conf file Up to this point there are no volumes which as previously mentioned need to exist before you can run a backup Typically you would have to use the label command trom the console s command line to create a volume in a pool manually but because of our settings the system will create them automati cally auto name them and recycle them when the volume retention period triggers like this better than manually creating the volumes as you are less likely to encounter naming errors Click OK to run the job and view the results in the console If you were to change the Volume Retention setting on the same pool restart the daemons and run the job again you would see the system auto recycle
133. ive shell scripts across many servers running disparate operating systems Although cfengine is certainly good for these purposes it also is widely considered the best open source tool available for configuration manage ment Using cfengine sysadmins with a large installation of say 800 machines can have information about their environ ment quickly that otherwise would take months to gather as well as the ability to change the environment in an instant For an initial example if you have a set of Linux machines that need to have a different etc nsswitch conf and then have some processes restarted there s no need to connect to 52 april 2008 www linuxjournal com each machine and perform these steps or even to write a script and run it on the machines once they are identified You simply can tell cfengine that all the Linux machines running Fedora Debian CentOS with XGB of RAM or more need to use a particular etc nsswitch conf until a newer one is designated Cfengine can do all that in a one line statement Cfengine s configuration management capabilities can work In several different ways In this article focus on a make it so and keep it so approach Let s consider a small hosting company configuration with three administrators and two data centers Figure 1 Each administrator can use a Subversion CVS sandbox to hold repositories for each data center The cfengine client will run on each client machine either through
134. ize Knoppix disks so that they do very specific things at boot such as perform load tests or even set up a Webcam server all from the network m Kyle Rankin is a Senior Systems Administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of a number of books including Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks for O Reilly Media He is currently the president of the North Bay Linux Users Group Resources tftp hoa www kernel org pub software network tftp atftp ftp mamalinux com pub atftp Syslinux PXE Page syslinux zytor com pxe php Red Hat s Kickstart Guide www redhat com docs manuals enterprise RHEL 4 Manual sysadmin guide ch kickstart2 html Knoppix www knoppix org Memtest86 www memtest org ISPCON is where the service provider industry goes to GET REAL about the future of their businesses Isn t it time you e increase your ARPU e optimize your operations e pump up profits e discover what s next Whatever your plans ISPCON will help you GET REAL about them This is the industry s only forum where peers learn from peers in real one on one discussions about what works what doesn t and what s next A g o l P U T l gt i FS y N d eae MAY 13 15 2008 Donald E Stephens Rosemont Convention Center Chicago Il mo F gt 4N on Bp ay ta AER a De R i 3 a aTi A Aes koeko sam a kegi Se w ee v ei art x re 77 qe a BR
135. k any guarantee of timely security patches or bug fixes And as a general rule think you d be right But there are some notable packages in universe and multiverse that may be worth installing and sustaining whatever risk is entailed One such package is Bastille in universe a comprehensive system hardening tool you can uninstall after it does its thing Another might be Tripwire in multiverse which is the clas sic file integrity checker though the main repository s aide packages provide the same functionality and are fully support ed by the Ubuntu security team All of these packages are part of the main repository Unlike with Ubuntu Desktop however these can be installed from the Ubuntu Server CD Notable Ubuntu Server Packages Space does not permit me to include lengthy charts of security related pack ages like those provided in the Ubuntu Desktop column last month If did they would be very similar except for two things First would omit security auditing tools such as Nessus and tcodump though both are on the Ubuntu Server CD You shouldn t install anything on any Internet server or other multiuser system that can be used by an attacker against the system Itself or other systems on your network Instead you should run such tools from an administrative system where they re less likely to be abused Second you would see that many packages on Ubuntu Desktop must be downloaded from a main reposi
136. l and they believe you should not even consider using Linux if you plan on employing such a tool A Linux user know once said dismissively If you want to use graphic tools use Windows However for other people any tool that helps them avoid mistakes or the need to memorize a lot of parameters is a welcome addition to their toolset Webmin won t let you avoid actually learning about Linux though You can t merely start using it and change configura tion settings without knowing perfectly well what you are doing If you know what needs be done and how to do it Webmin can save you from having to memorize lists of param eters or configuration files and it will help you get things done quickly and safely On the other hand don t ever use Webmin as an experimentation tool It s quite likely you could really mess things up Webmin runs not only on Linux but on UNIX and FreeBSD as well Here s a partial list of supported systems and distributions Asianux Caldera Debian FreeBSD Gentoo and Sabayon HP UX IBM AIX LinuxPPC Lycoris Mac OS X Mandriva and Mandrake and Conectiva MEPIS NetBSD OpenBSD PCLinuxOS PlayStation Linux Red Hat and CentOS and Fedora Scientific Linux SCO OpenServer and UnixWare Slackware Sun Java Desktop System Sun Solaris SUSE and OpenSUSE Linux Turbolinux Ubuntu and derivatives like Kubuntu or Xubuntu Xandros Yellow Dog Linux and Yoper Linux If your favorite distribution isn
137. l manual index html Data Acquisition amp Control Computer iPac 9302 _ e Cirrus Logic EP930 200 Mhz Processor Floating Point Math Engine 2 USB 2 0 Host Ports Laa SD MMC Flash Disk Slot a Miko 48 Digital GPIO Lines 1 10 100 Base T Ethernet port a 5 channels of 12 bit A D amp 3 PWMs i 1 R5232 amp 1 RS232 422 485 Serial Port rii Battery Backed Real Time clock calendar Eclipse Development Environment The iPac has enough 1 0 for demanding applications amp with a size of 3 5 x 3 8 it can fit almost anywhere Prices start at 150 00 Please contact us for more information a _ Elia INC SINGLE WOAR EQUIPMENT MONITOR AND CONTROL Phone 678 529 4525 Fax 618 457 0110 Web www emacinc com www linuxjournal com april 2008 75 INDEPTH Scalable OpenGroupware org Finally a scalable groupware solution that matches the offerings from big vendors FRANCIS LACHAPELLE AND LUDOVIC MARCOTTE This article is a follow up to Linux Groupware Roundup published in Linux Journal in July 2005 As you might know a few things have changed since 2005 m CalDAV has been adopted by the IETF as a proposed Standard and open source projects such as Bedework OSAF Chandler Server Cosmo Zimbra and SOGo implement the protocol m The Sync4j Project a PIM data synchronization server is now called Funambol It also has received major enhance ments in the past few releases m
138. ld that you ve just installed Apache but haven t gotten around to contiguring it yet Ow But there s no obvious way for an attacker to exploit this You can t recurse out of the nearly empty default http root directory default CGI scripts aren t present and so on If you re worried about this you simply can shut down these newly installed services until you ve con 32 april 2008 www linuxjournal com figured them Or better still stage your new server on a protected LAN before connecting it to the Internet How Not to Be Root in Ubuntu As explained in last month s column Ubuntu is set up so that you never can actually log on as root Instead you create one or more nonprivileged login accounts that are authorized to execute root privi leged commands via sudo the superuser do com mand This makes it harder to damage your system accidentally and it has the security benefit of removing the root account as a viable attack vector because root has no password and can t log in So for example whereas on a standard Debian system you might install the package too with this command aptitude install foo On Ubuntu you d use sudo aptitude install foo After issuing any command with sudo you ll be prompted for your own password not root s which will be cached for a brief period of time during which subsequent sudo commands won t require re authorization If you need to change sudo s configuration which
139. le more wine relax and it will all seem friendli er shortly From time to time you will want to do things on your system that affect everyone who logs in equally Changes made under Preferences don t affect anyone but the current user and if your niece Stephanie chooses some garish desktop colors it won t affect you when you log in Making Applications Places System 4 Preferences ay Adrmumestratian Ue Deaice Manager asks Bo Gnome Partition Editar ag AD Help About GNOME ta Install About Whur L Er Language Supp rt E Lock Screen i E Login window abl Log Out ubuntu 8 Networking be EJ m Network Taals Series Shared Folders a Software Properties re Synapiic Package Manager ey Syste Lae ES system Monitor TI Time and Date C Update Manager A gt Users and Groups sure everybody gets treated equally isn t all there is to it The Administration functions cover the gamut Figure 2 GNOME s Administration sub menu is the starting point to configure your network check logs install software and more E PGDBG The Portland Group Eile Gemings PGI CDK MPI Debugger MP Profiler pgdbg all 0 gt 0 Breakpoint at 0x619A81 function init module wrt quilt file module _io quilt Tine 1179 1179 IF mytask EQ O THEN pgdbg all 0 gt 0 Stopped at 0x619A8B function init_module wrf_quilt file module io quilt f line 1180 1180 OPEN uni
140. le that is attached to a d mon you may want to send a SIGHUP to the process to cause it to reread the configuration file This is common with Apache s httpd conf or inetd conf If the copy is not successful this server won t be added to the copiedresolvdotconf class You can query all servers in the network to see whether they are members and if not find out what went wrong A great way to version control your config Tiles is to use a cfengine variable for the filename being copied to control which version gets distributed Such a line may look something like this copy linuxi copydir linux resolv_conf Or better yet you can use cfengine s class specific vari ables whose scope is limited to the class with which they are associated This makes copy statements much more elegant and can simplify changes as your cfengine files scale control resolve_conf value depends on context is this a linux machine or hpux Linux resolve_conf copydir linux resolv conf hpux resolve_conf copydir hpux resolv conf copy linux resolve_conf Here is a full cfagent conf file that makes use of everything I ve covered thus far It also adds some practical examples of FEATURE Cfengine for Enterprise Configuration Management how to do sysadmin work with cfengine cfagent conf control actionsequence files editfiles processes AddInstallable cron_restart solaris cr
141. less network interface For example you ll probably configure the ethO interface to obtain an address automatically through a DHCP server You need to do this only once network settings can persist across sessions Figure 2 If you select a wireless interface such as athO use the O BEET he mos Bhi ii SP ame ce Pima pim pi atl Pd ee ee Cj a SS ee SO Be ee ee me Ce ee ar e g aa ni okan 1 Ss ee es ee tee ee The E ee e iea iig ee ee Lan FF gag bap a gpp ar ee n jha cee lha ee ee eee iie he mE ee ee mh SS a FEN Se ee ee wee ei ee See gpi Gee lerre Gee ee SE Lm O eree eee Feiner Eyer Figure 2 Network configuration made easy a e Sate weet 1o amen og Bee ascent te ai Figure 3 Managing Applications with PETget Scan button in the next dialog box to locate your network Again you ll probably want to select Auto DHCP Once a network interface has been configured you can test basic net work access by launching the browser chat client or other network application Then you can choose to install any additional packages to suit your needs The launched PETget Package Manager is shown in Figure 3 a i pa p ee pa pe ee Hea aa rit are QIN ses GF ae ThA OOO os Bs x one jarupisoc j ip h ip ieee pee Ea E a e i Figure 4 Puppy Linux at Work m Screen 3 by default your working session data is saved to a standalone ext2 filesystem file called pup_save 2fs You ll be gi
142. line below in its place to associate the locally mounted FreeNAS partition with the storage d mon so you E root Te jan 6 7 24AM ah Background Services Gn Dem d Services im These services are started once and run in the background You can specify in which runkeyels they are started Currently Running in Runlevel 5 Bacula dir i th Backup server which i the Start Stop Restart program that schedules backups and controle the a autos bacula client and the batula storage daemons y avahrdatmon Editing Runlevel 5 Fj bacula dir rj g bacula Fel Status z bacula sd bacula dir pid 7964 is running bluetooth btsted bttrack Figure 5 Start all three Bacula daemons and set them to runlevel 5 www linuxjournal com april 2008 73 INDEPTH Ep Applicata Paces pamiazeihiiime EER 7 uments ng mE ano mETWOTE i Fl Edit View Settings Help Ee Connect Fun Dir Status Restore inecting to Director lecalhetti ayi TOG mK uldir vartion 2 6 3 06 March 2007 jbacula dir OR EE e ie Leas ate Current job Wo cunning job pinion ta a Last job job status Terminated 0 error bacula ad 50 job No current job i ph status Terminated 0 error b cula dir Version 2 0 3 06 harch 2007 i36 redhat linus gr recht Denon started Jan O8 64 32 6 Jobe run since started BeSp by tied 627 m k by teel ts 074 b fS 263 Ak bufee 2s Ho Scheduled Jobe Running Jobsi Cons
143. lization with a supported guest OS Unfortunately the compatibility of the new Server 2 VM format seems rather buggy Using the Server 2 option seems to guarantee a VM that does not work on Workstation 6 VMware Player 2 or VMware Fusion 1 1 all of which should be able to open them REVIEWS The performance was exceptional in every area feeling almost as though we were sitting in front of a reasonably spec d machine running the OS natively We decided to install an OpenSUSE 10 3 virtual machine to test the perfor mance of the console interface with a heavy graphical desktop environment The performance was exceptional in every area teeling almost as though we were sitting in front of a reasonably spec d machine running the OS natively The in browser console rendered the desktop beautifully without a single glitch The mouse performance was slightly subpar but this is an issue we have found on almost every virtualiza tion platform we ve tried It looks very much like VMware Server has caught up with Player Workstation and Fusion in leveraging the extra hardware features of the newer Intel and AMD architec tures that accelerate virtualization One aspect of the new beta that is above reproach is the documentation The user manual is exceptional for a product in this stage of development covering all conceivable aspects of using VMware Server All other available documentation is polished and looks very complete al
144. loited remotely and it always imposes a significant performance penalty Keep it simple is one of the most important tenets of good system security If you don t need something you should live without it And in most server scenarios when a system s primary function is to provide various network services and wherein what little interactive access necessary for admin istration can be done remotely it s hard to justify the increased attack surface and overall complexity that come from running X Besides even in Ubuntu Desktop many if not most serious configuration and security tasks at some point require you to open a terminal and issue commands with sudo If you want to be an Ubuntu system administrator or more than a novice at Linux in general there s no getting around needing to be able to cope with the command line So applaud the Ubuntu team s common sense and courage in keeping the X Window System out of the default installation of Ubuntu Server If you really need a GUI experience in adminis tering your Ubuntu Server system there are remote administration tools you can use Webmin for example see Resources and also see Federico Kereki s article Graphic Administration with Webmin on page 64 that provide this without Figure 1 Ubuntu Server installer fei foe p pm die offers encrypted requiring X on the server itself The installer can guide vou through partitioning a disk tusing
145. ltiple dynamic playlists can be created on the Tly m Playlists are standard M3U Tiles m Allows for dual booting with the option to start original iPod firmware CONS m Very complicated due to a number of features Playing music isn t as simple as with the original firmware E Battery life isn t as long as with the original firmware a solution is in development E Programs plugins don t have consistent controls especially for exiting E Can t read iTunes database E Can t play DRM d Tiles 44 a simple starfield simulation to a 3 D cube to a complex digital fire scene Oh It Also Plays Music and Video Rockbox has a plugin again that s what these add on programs are called that allows playback of MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 video The main focus of the program however is to play music Rockbox sup ports pretty much any non DRM music tile and Rockbox claims the audio play back is better quality than with the orig inal iPod software Honestly can t tell the difference but perhaps audiophiles will notice the improvement Locating and playing Tiles is done mainly by traversing the folder structure on the drive Rockbox also can create a database of information Artist Album and so forth but unfortunately it can t read the database created by iTunes To add insult to injury if you try to find songs placed on the drive by iTunes you ll find cryptically named files in equally cryptically named
146. mail into fold ers based on whether a message Is from a person Essentially it allows mutt to cache the headers from mailboxes so that the next time you load the mailbox it has to pull down only the new messages or a server and of course segregate them further trom there If you manage a lot of servers those mailboxes can start to get rather large Almost nothing compares to mutt when you need to open a mailbox with a few thousand new messages This brings me to my first almost essential mutt tweak header caching Header caching is a feature that has shown up in mutt only in the past few years Essentially it allows mutt to cache the headers from mailboxes so that the next time you load the mailbox it has to pull down only the new messages This is particularly handy with IMAP servers or even large local mailboxes To enable header caching create a directory called muttheaders in your home directory then 36 april 2008 www linuxjournal com add the following line to your muttrc and restart mutt or reload your mutt config set header _cache muttheaders Separate Mutt Configs This tweak is in some ways more organizational and it s handy not only for sysadmins but also for anyone who runs mutt on multiple machines Many mutt guides will tell you to split muttrc into multi ple files for different types of configuration so you can have one file that has all of your color options another with you
147. me displayName IDFieldName cn UIDFieldName cn baseDN ou example dc com bindDN cn superuser ou Users dc example dc com bindPassword xdeadkOw canAuthenticate YES displayName Corporate Directory hostname 127 0 0 1 id public isAddressBook YES port 389 ye SOGoMailSpoolPath var spool sogo SOGoMailingMechanism smtp SOGoOtherUsersFolderName Other Users SCGOSMIPServer 127 070 1 SOGoSentFolderName INBOX Sent SOGoServerTimeZone Canada Eastern SOGoSharedFolderName Shared Folders SOGoSpecialFoldersInRoot YES SOGoTrashFolderName INBOX Trash SOGoUseLocationBasedSentFolder YES WOMessageUseUTF8 YES WOParsersUSeUTF8 YES WOPort 25000 WOUseRelativeURLs NO For now the most important parameters in the configuration file from Listing 2 are AgenorProfileURL and OCSFolderlnfoURL which must point to your PostgreSQL database server SOGoLDAPSources must point to your LDAP server In this example the LDAP source will be used not only tor authentication but also to provide a shared address book e VIRTUALIZATION e NETWORKING AND SERVICES e DATA CENTER e APPLICATION DELIVERY e IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT e STORAGE e GREEN IT e UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS e IT SECURITY e VOIP e PHYSICAL SECURITY e WIRELESS AND MOBILITY e SAAS e ENTERPRISE 2 0 Co located at Interop CSISX SECURITYEXCHANGE software2008 e 20 000 ATTENDEES e 500 EXHIBITORS e 200
148. mit con trolling it was a bit awkward but there it was in all its glory Although high on the cool factor Doom wasn t the best game available found Bubbles much like Frozen Bubble and Jewels much like Bejeweled to be the most fun Just like the com puter version of these games their iPod counterparts easily will suck hours of productivity from your life You ve been warned Applications Along with the games Rockbox also includes a handful of applications The metronome was particularly useful and the text editor was particularly difficult I m impressed there is a text editor at all but the interface is severely limited by the lack of buttons I d rather use a cell phone to text message an entire novel than try to write an article of this size with the Rockbox text editor Still Figure 2 Here s Doom running on the iPod Mini No really it is Apple iPod Original Firmware Pros and Cons PROS m Simple intuitive interface m Automatic syncing with iTunes playlists m Ability to play DRM music from iTunes store CONS m Limited to MP3 and AAC playback E Proprietary database is frustrating to interface with non iTunes programs E Very limited number of games and applications m Not expandable except for com mercial games on some models it s nice to have the option One oddity worth mentioning is that there s not really a standard way to exit games and applications once they start Som
149. mpting to cover all the environmental bases which is Summed up in its Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool EPEAT Gold rating for strong overall environ mental performance Only 12 desktop machines have reached this mark to date The Zonbu sisters deliver significant gains in energy efficiency achieving the US EPA Energy Star 4 rating This translates to a power requirement of only 10 15 Watts depending on the load Most PCs of similar caliber without monitor will gulp 60 100 Watts or more depending on numerous factors Zonbu s marketing people tell me that you ll save over 1 200 kilowatt hours during the course of a year which seems generous given their assumption that a typical PC averages 175 Watts However even with a more conservative savings estimate of 600 kilowatt hours per year you ll probably save more than 60 on electricity during the course of a year based on a cost of 0 10 per kilowatt hour A unique Zonbu bonus involves auto matic purchases of carbon offsets from the firm Climate Trust which invests in projects that reduce net carbon emis sions society wide such as wind energy or tree planting In addition Zonbu builds its hardware with recycling in mind and follows the European RoHS Directive such that no more than 25 of the hazardous substances such as lead mercury and cadmium that go into typical desktops are used Finally when you re ready to upgrade Zonbu takes back your ol
150. mum Volumes 12 Label Format Bkup Monthly Although it may seem odd to start at the bottom and dis cuss the Pool section it is vital that it is configured correctly A pool is simply a collection of volumes Volumes are tapes or disks to which the backup files are written A pool can contain any number of volumes but it must have at least one volume Here we have set up three pools a weekly full a differential and a monthly This allows us to maintain backups for the current week up until the previous day and a 12 month rotation for our monthly backups Then going from the top section down there is a Job Definitions JobDefs section and two Jobs modeled around our backup strategy The JobDefs section defines common properties that several jobs share like a template In it we have listed settings common to both jobs The Schedule section defines when a given job runs and how often The schedules listed here run weekly backups every Sunday daily differ entials Monday through Friday and a monthly back up the first Saturday of every month The Fileset sec tion lists what folders and files to back up and with what options For this example we have set Bacula to back up the local users home folders a common scenario tor backups Recursion is enabled by default on FileSets so we need to specify only the parent folder The backup Tiles also are set to compress using gzip and to hash encrypt themselves using MD5 Doing both is good
151. n s 2008 Worldwide Java Developer Conference EVERYTHING ABOUT JAVA TECHNOLOGY AND SO MUCH MORE MORE You won t want to miss the JavaOne conference the premier OF WHAT YOU NEED technology conference for the developer community This year s 200 F technical sesion Conference presents the latest and most important topics and 100 innovations today to help developers access even more l More than AA i i Birds of a Feather sessions richness and functionality for creating powerful new applications and services 15 Hands on Labs LEARN MORE ABOUT e Web 2 0 e Java Platform Standard e Rich Internet applications Edition Java SE e Compatibility and e java Platform Enterprise interoperability Edition Java EE Save 200 e Open source e Java Platform Micro Edition on Conference registration e E commerce collaboration Java ME Register by April 7 at java sun com javaone Please use priority code J8DA1SC e Scripting languages JavaOne Conference May 6 9 2008 JavaOne Pavilion May 6 8 2008 The Moscone Center San Francisco CA Platinum Cosponsors Cosponsors BLU aGe PEE AMD intl ORACLE S m ME Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems Inc All rights reserved Sun Sun Microsystems the Sun logo Java the Java Coffee Cup logo JavaOne JavaOne Conference the JavaOne logo Java Developer Conference Java EE Java ME Java SE and all Java based marks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks
152. n northern Michigan He loves to read science fiction and is quite a Star Trek fan He s married to a beautiful woman and has three lovely daughters Feel free to contact Shawn via e mail at shawn brainofshawn com Resources Rockbox www rockbox org Apple s iPod Page www apple com ipod Creators of the Original Doom Game www idsoftware com intet Por Leap A hea MULTIPLY ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND MAXIMIZE COOLING THE WORLD S FIRST QUAD CORE PROCESSOR FOR MAINSTREAM SERVERS JE NEW QUAD CORE INTEL XEON PROCESSOR 5300 SERIES DELIVERS UP TO 20 T MORE PERFORMANCE THAN PREVIOUS INTEL XEON PROCESSORS IN THE SAME SOWER ENVELOPE BASED ON THE ULTRA EFFICIENT INTEL CORE MICROARCHITECTUR IT S THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION FOR MANAGING RUNAWAY COOLING EXPENSES LEARN WHY GREAT BUSINESS COMPUTING STARTS WITH INTEL INSIDE VISIT INTEL COM XEON ACE POWERWORKS 3985 ACE POWERWORKS BLADE 6970 e Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon e Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon Processors Processors e High Availability Rack Server uian N i e Modular Blade Server Design with High Storage Capacity e Integrated SAN and First Class e High Performance Database sissi Management Capabilities Platform E i e Excellent for Server e Excellent for Storage os Consolidation and Virtualization Virtualization and Consolidation th 25 Anniversary Ace Computers is ranked as a Top n j LP AG is also rated as a Top 5 Custom
153. n Jose CA 95131 www genstor com Email sales genstor com keom Phone 1 877 25 SERVER inside 1 408 383 0120 NEW PRODUCTS The Amanda Company s Vdex 40 The solutions growing up around the Asterisk telephony engine and toolkit asii are plentiful One of the latest is The Amanda Company s Vdex 40 reputed to be the first embedded Asterisk based system to enhance voice quality The secret according to the company is the inclusion of multiple micropro cessors as well as DSPs The Vdex 40 ships with 16 G 711 G 723 1 G 726 Vdex and G 729a b voice codecs a mix of 16 concurrent codecs hardware based G 168 echo cancellation and four built in telecom line ports Amanda also touts the Vdex 40 s elimination of moving parts such as fans and hard drives which further improves the product s reliability Despite its technological advancements the Vdex 40 Is intended to be an affordable Internet enabled telephone system for the needs of the small office nome office market www taa com Hyperic s Hyperic HQ If you are managing high volume Web infrastructures check out the new version 3 2 of Hyperic HQ from Hyperic Inc HQ s value proposition is an open source mea solution offering hands free monitoring and management for Web scale uama systems HQ supplies performance and event data product coverage and the functionality operations teams need to discover diagnose and deliver a solution in
154. n efforts in other areas such as the Green Grid a consortium of compa nies working together to address envi ronmental issues holistically throughout the data center addressing hardware Detailed C etate information is only available on Mobile CPUs laptops gt Top causes for wakeups 1 7 190 3 11 0 gerell 3 6 thunderbird bin r FA a kernel module gt ie a kernel core pA Ee interrupt 41 265 17 5 Ze Fa i i 0 mwidia korg do_setitimer it_real_fn i libata achedule_timeout fute wait Artimer_wakeup usb hed_poll_rh_etatue rh_timer_func sk_reset_timer top_delack_timer Sata v1a gt extra timer interrupt etho _ timeout Suggestion Enable the CONFIG NO_HZ kernel configuration option This option is required to get any kind of longer sleep times in the CPU a if Shon Figure 1 Intel s PowerTOP tool helps sleuth out applications that are consuming extra power needlessly software building design storage cooling and more Attendant Applications PowerTOP Linus Torvalds has stated that work on the tickless kernel is mostly done and thus can take advantage of low power States in processors however much remains to be done to maximize its effect Although Linux gladly would remain dormant other superfluous busybody processes trom various appli cations keep waking it needlessly To solve this problem Intel s Arjan van de Ven create
155. nal com system from CD and when you come to the options menu Figure 1 select option 7 to install the server image to a local hard disk Next select option 2 to create two UFS partitions UFS is the native filesystem in FreeNAS and as we plan to access our data on the disk via a networked protocol NFS any system should connect to it Select these options to create a small partition for the server software and use the rest of the space for a second data partition When prompted enter the name of the CD drive acdO in my install and then enter the destination drive da0 When the install routine is com plete enter 3 at the prompt to return to the main menu and then enter 1 to assign an interface Accept the default inter face and give it an IP address unless you are using DHCP Once assigned return to the main menu and reboot the machine Remove the CD and the system now should boot trom the system partition on the disk Figure 1 FreeNAS Install Options Once the system is back up open a Web browser from another system and enter the IP of the FreeNAS machine as the URL to access the management site At the prompt enter admin as the user name and freenas as the password From this management site you can change a multitude of settings but for now we need to change only our hostname Figure 2 mount the auto created DATA partition and enable NFS Click the Management link under the Disks section of the Web page Yo
156. namely dynamic server repurposing V OE allows administrators to shift their data centers between different configurations or go from dead bare metal to live running connected servers in just a few minutes and without physical intervention Scalent s Director of Marketing Alana Achterkirchen pointed out that Pacific Gas amp Electric PG amp E California s largest electric utility offers rebates to companies that deploy IT virtual ization projects that result in the removal of computing equipment The incentive says PG amp E is based on the amount of energy saved pre dicted through a calculation model and ranges from 150 300 per server Way to go California What Are the Distributions Doing The main distribution providers are core contributors to many a green project and are integrating them into their releases as rapidly as possible For instance Red Hat Ubuntu and SUSE Linux all committed publicly to contribute to and make available the innovations trom Lesswatts org Nick Car Red Hat Chief Technical communities to optimize power consumption in areas such as m CPUtreg clock scaling in collaboration with Intel Clock scaling allows for changing the clock speed of the run ning CPU on the fly thus reducing the power the CPU consumes m AMD s PowerNow speed throttling and power saving technology includes CPUfreg work E Intel s PowerTOP Project and using it to identify power inefficient algo
157. ncML standard if you re using PalmOS based devices A Ah J 3 Ss ay a A BD G b Figure 4 SOGo from a PDA For advertising information please contact our sales Advertiser Index department at 1 713 344 1956 ext 2 or ads linuxjournal com www linuxjournal com advertising Advertiser Advertiser ABERDEEN LLC www aberdeeninc com L JUPITERMEDIA EVENTS www Spson com APPRO HPC SOLUTIONS appro com W nN LINUX FEST NORTHWEST www linuxfestnorthwest org ASA COMPUTERS www asacomputers com N SO LINUX ON WALL ST www linuxonwallstreet com AVOCENT CORPORATION www avocent com LOGIC SUPPLY INC www logicsupply com CARI NET www cari net Ej W Microway INC www microway com D s CE Linux FORUM www celinuxforum org N N O REILLY WHERE 2 0 conferences oreilly com where 00 W CorRAID INC www coraid com THE PORTLAND GROUP Www pgroup com N nn EMAC INC www emacinc com PostCONF www postconf com CO N EMPERORLINUX www emperorlinux com RACKSPACE MANAGED HOSTING www rackspace com DM Ww GENSTOR SYSTEMS INC www genstor com R CUBED TECHNOLOGIES www rcubedtech com O Opl HACKER HALTED USA www eccouncil org R1SoFT INC www r1soft com 2 HPC SYSTEMS INC www hpcsystems com
158. nd time2 Let s use the times 2007 12 02 13 45 and 2007 12 04 01 30 as an example touch u 200712021345 00 tmp titel touch t 200712040130 00 tmp file2 Find ete newer tnp tilel a 7 newer tmpy ii le This works by using touch t to set the modification date of the Tiles to set a date range for use with find KIM HENDRIKSE 12 april 2008 www linuxjournal com JOURNAL At Your Service MAGAZINE PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS Renewing your subscription changing your address paying your invoice viewing your account details or other subscription inquiries can instantly be done on line www linuxjournal com subs Alternatively within the U S and Canada you may call us toll free 1 888 66 LINUX 54689 or internationally 1 713 589 3503 E mail us at subs linuxjournal com or reach us via postal mail Linux Journal PO Box 980985 Houston TX 77098 0985 USA Please remember to include your complete name and address when contacting us DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS Digital subscriptions of Linux Journal are now available and delivered as PDFs anywhere in the world for one low cost Visit www linuxjournal com digital for more information or use the contact information above for any digital magazine customer service inquiries LETTERS TO THE EDITOR We welcome your letters and encourage you to submit them to ljeditor linuxjournal com or mail them to Linux Journal 1752 NW Market Street 200 Seattle WA 98107 USA Letters m
159. nd uncommon characteristic com pared with other FOSS groupware solutions Installation SOGo depends on a few core components such as Apache PostgreSQL an LDAP server and an IMAP server preferably Cyrus IMAP Server Dovecot or Courier that uses the LDAP server as the authentication back end You need to install those or reuse existing installations and get them running properly before continuing with the SOGo installation instructions SOGo supports other database back ends but for this article we assume the use of PostgreSQL and that all components including the LDAP server are installed on the same server Furthermore SOGo depends on the following components m GNUstep make and base for compiling and installing the project and subprojects m SOPE for server side Web application development SOGo integrates well with the Mozilla suite Sunbird provides a complete ae client side calendaring application Start with obtaining GNUstep make and base If you re i using Debian you can install both components with apt get and Lightning provides a calendaring apt get install gnustep make libgnustep base1 13 extension to Thunderbird libgnustep base dev the Debian packages this script is located in usr GNUstep Then retrieve the SOPE and SOGo s sources from the System Library Makefiles GNUstep sh Once sourced compile official Subversion server and install SOPE as follows svn co http svn opengroupware org S
160. ndows animations and what not say you are doing your job system administration We may well be able to change just about anything on our systems but sadly mes amis there is little we can do to change the time on the wall There is still plenty of wine however and Francois will be offering some of that amazing Figure 7 Windows look better when they fall apart as they close 100th birthday cake along with some fantastic caf au lait after you finish your wine In closing this 100th Cooking with Linux want to thank you all for coming each and every month My thanks also to Tony Aspler for his wine sugges tion and to my ever faithful waiter Francois When you ve finished taking your bows Francois please make sure everyone s glass is refilled Raise your glasses mes amis and let us all drink to one another s health A votre sant Bon app tit Marcel Gagn is an award winning writer living in Waterloo Ontario He is the author of the Moving to Linux series of books from Addison Wesley He also makes regular television appearances as Call for Help s Linux guy and every month on radio s Computer America show Marcel is also a pilot a past Top 40 disc jockey writes science fiction and fantasy and folds a mean Origami T Rex He can be reached via e mail at mggagne salmar com You can discover lots of other things including great Wine links from his Web site at www marcelgagne com Resources GNOME www gnom
161. ne E mail 24 7 Toll free Phone support E mail Monthly Cost So A pat ee tO Ww cA AN A satak m nas an 2008 1 amp 1 Internet Inc A chal ae Visit 1and1 com for details Prices based on comparable Linux web hosting erie Y Click package prices effective 1 28 2008 Offer valid for Home Package only 12 month minimum contract term required Product and program specifications availability and pricing subject to change without notice All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners Visit us now 1and1 com GO SOLID INCREASE RELIABILITY solid state systems fully x86 compatible fanless quiet operation Direct Plug IDE Flash Modules Intel VIA amp AMD CPUs 95 Efficiency Rated PicoPSU Power Supplies DISCOVER MINI ITX elja E SUPPLY www logicsupply com Executive Editor Senior Editor Art Director Products Editor Editor Emeritus Technical Editor Senior Columnist Chef Fran ais Security Editor JOURNAL Jill Franklin jill linuxjournal com Doc Searls doc linuxjournal com Garrick Antikajian garrick linuxjournal com James Gray newproducts linuxjournal com Don Marti dmarti linuxjournal com Michael Baxter mab cruzio com Reuven Lerner reuven lerner co i Marcel Gagn mggagne salmar com Mick Bauer mick visi com Contributing Editors David A Bandel e Ibrahim Haddad Robert Love Zack Brown e Dave Phillips e Marco Fioretti Ludov
162. nia 180 4 Estimated hundreds of dollars in cost per student for the above clients 1 5 Percentage of schools in Macedonia covered by the NComputing deal 100 6 Number of rural North Carolina schools deploying NComputing s Linux based desktop virtualization 25 8 Thousands of NComputing systems deployed worldwide 500 7 Thousands of NComputing systems deployed in the above schools 13 9 Thousands of organizations using NComputing systems 13 10 Minimum power consumption percentage savings estimated by NComputing for its systems 70 11 Maximum power consumption percentage savings estimated by NComputing for its systems 90 12 Percentage of Americans who learn about political campaigns from the Internet 24 13 Percentage of Americans who sourced the Net for politics four years earlier 13 14 Percentage of 18 29 year old Americans who learn about political campaigns from the Net 42 15 Percentage of 18 29 year old Americans who learned about political campaigns from the Net in 2004 20 16 Position of the Net among all news sources on political campaigns for 18 29 year old Americans 1 17 Number of Linux based hosting companies among Netcraft s top five most reliable for November 2007 3 18 Number of Linux based hosting companies among Netcraft s top two most reliable for November 2007 2 19 Number of open source based Linux BSD hosting companies among Netcraft s top ten most reliable fo
163. ns select a job client pool and so on from which to restore Figure 9 then click Select Files to mark the files folders you want to restore Figure 10 Before the restore job runs you will be prompted to confirm your options at which point you could type yes mod or no Typing mod provides more options over the job including the option to restore to a different path trom the original one The Beginning of the Future Although we have simplified the near line backup process here it s only the beginning Our simple setup has accom plished what we set out to do back up our data to a networked disk To replace tapes completely in most backup strategies you need some sort of offsite storage synchronization scheme which I ve not addressed here However once you see much faster backups and how much more data you can store on a disk you ll be itching to make the move and get rid of those tapes m Jeramiah Bowling has been a systems administrator and network engineer for more than ten years He works for a regional accounting and auditing firm in Hunt Valley Maryland and holds numerous industry certifications including the CISSP Your comments are welcome at jb50c yahoo com Resources FreeNAS Main Site www freenas org FreeBSD Hardware Compatibility Checklist www freebsd org releases 5 1R hardware i386 html Bacula www bacula org Bacula Download Site sourcefort net projects bacula Bacula Documentation www bacula org re
164. o to the instruc tion manual provided The installation sec tion is helpful and following it will ensure success Here s a rundown of the steps 1 If you have an iPod that was format ted for use with OS X you need to convert the filesystem to FAT32 You either can plug the iPod in to a Windows machine and have iTunes reformat it or follow the directions provided in the Rockbox manual to reformat it with Linux command line tools 2 Download the appropriate version of Rockbox from the Web site and extract it directly to the iPod If done properly there should be a folder on the iPod called rockbox with the program inside It should be at the root level of the iPod not the root level of your computer and because It starts with a dot it won t be visible by default 3 Next download the font package available from the Extras section on the Web site The font package is the same regardless of what media play er you have so you can t go wrong when downloading it Just like with the Rockbox software the fonts need to be extracted at the root level of the iPod The fonts actually reside inside the rockbox folder but the zip tile is designed to be extracted at the root level of the iPod and it will put Figure 1 The Rockbox bootup screen if you see this you ve succeeded 42 april 2008 www linuxjournal com them in the correct place 4 Finally install the Rockbox bootloader This is the part that
165. oaded Restart Thunderbird to activate the extensions The next step is to configure Lightning s CalDAV connector From Thunderbird s File menu choose New gt Calendar and create a network calendar of type CalDAV Specify the appropriate URL to connect to your SOGo server Usually it should be http ocalhost SOGO dav lt username gt Calendar personal Next configure the SOGo Connector Thunderbird From the Address Book s File 80 april 2008 www linuxjournal com menu choose New gt Remote Address Book Give your address book a name and as the URL specify something like http localhost SOGo dav lt username gt Contacts personal You also can use the shared address book provided by SOGo which uses your LDAP server named Corporate Directory trom Thunderbird To do so repeat the procedure to create a remote address book but as the URL specify http localhost SOGo dav lt username gt Contacts public and check Read Only Once completed your personal calendar and address book are now fully synchronized with SOGo Events tasks contacts or e mail are now accessible from either SOGo s Web interface or from Mozilla Thunderbird Lightning Figure 2 shows SOGo s Web interface with one personal and one shared calendar Figure 3 shows the same information q se o ml Meida Remaerber Bi FONT A GUEST Pride Maceme fo STON OORT ste ee Fridley Beaia Bo yin Midday Neweaber Ie peat sent Peep Meee bi paR i 2ST dep hoe
166. of Sun Microsystems Inc in the United States and other countries FEATURE PXE Magic Flexible Network Booting with Menus to provide extra documentation at boot time this is handy if you are like me and create custom boot arguments for your kickstart servers In this example could create a Nvar lib tftpboot f2 msg file and add a short help file Although this menu is rather basic check out the syslinux configuration file and project page for examples of how to jazz it up with color and even custom graphics Extra Features PXE Rescue Disk One of my favorite features of a PXE server is the addition of a Knoppix rescue disk Now whenever need to recover a machine don t need to hunt around for a disk can just boot the server off the network First get a Knoppix disk use a Knoppix 5 1 1 CD for this example but I ve been successful with much older Knoppix CDs Mount the CD ROM and then go to the boot isolinux directory on the CD Copy the miniroot gz and vmlinuz Tiles to your var lib tftpboot directory except rename them something distinct such as miniroot knx5 1 1 gz and vmlinuz knx5 1 1 respectively Now edit your pxelinux cfg default file and add lines like the one used above in my example label 1 kernel vmlinuz knx5 1 1 append secure nfsdir 10 0 0 1 mnt knoppix 5 1 1 nodhcp gt lLang us ramdisk_size 100000 init etc init 2 gt apm power off nomce vga normal gt initrd miniroot knx5 1 1 gz quiet BO
167. of the screen desktop beyond the borders of the screen itself Speaking of which the 7 back lit 1040x768 display also is a touch screen and it can pivot and flip around both sides of the base to become a writing pad a display or you decide E Lead suggests many possible Noahpad uses a car GPS with a larger screen than just about every standard built in or aftermarket GPS a hangable multimedia player a digital photo frame and even a Jogging companion Classmate room mate travelmate the slogan goes Tech details 1GHz VIA Eden CPU 512MB of RAM 30GB HD 300k pixel cam Bluetooth Ethernet 10m 100M USB to RJ45 dongle 802 11b g external 3 5g compatibility Wi Fi and Ubuntu 7 10 For more information visit www noahpad com DOC SEARLS runs on Linux www linuxjournal com april 2008 15 UPFRONT What Are They Using Angel Roman is a 24 year old star soft ware architect with the Bug Labs team in New York Bug Labs subject of an UpFront piece in the December 2007 issue of LJ is becoming familiar in Linux circles as a hack ready DIY hardware development and assembly system At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2008 got some hang time with the Bug Labs people and was especially impressed not just with Angel but also with how he had hacked together his own personal assortment of Linux gear Here s the rundown he provided at the constantly crowded Bug Labs boot
168. ol conmected at 08 Jan 03 07 25 Console conmmected at 08 Jan 09 07 25 He Joke running Terainated Joke Jebid Level Files Bytes Status Finished DERE RRR eee Baas Eq O Bacula Console Bacula tray monitor ff Figure 7 The Bacula Tray Monitor F3 Applications Places S Connect arte Eh riag en eir OGG OR Aun a jab Run a job WeeklyHomeBackups Type Backup bacula Ad liz UserHome Folders Priority iW x S008 01 08 07 20 27 command Status Precegadirg commerce O Bacula console O funa job ERAN amp Figure 8 Running a Backup Job from the GNOME Console 74 april 2008 www linuxjournal com can back up to it Archive Device mnt freenas The final step is to open the Services utility under System gt Administration and check the box to set bacula dir bacula sd and bacula fd to start on runlevel 5 Figure 5 You now can use the syntax service bacula dir sd fd start stop restart to control the daemons On other distributions you can Start the daemons directly from usr sbin and use chkconfig to set the runlevel Running a Backup Job Running a backup is quite simple as you already have done most of the work by editing the bacula dir conf file Start the Bacula console from the Applications System Tools Menu Figure 6 in GNOME You may need to edit the launcher as did to point it to the correct etc bacula gnome console cont file Start the Tray Mon
169. ome Linux mascots take time out from their busy schedule to test video calling for us FA LA Lat br By Coreecticn Mirana E erie Wet oein A T Piai Aree terari Sore E a Pangan Gee Bee bee aaj Fiet E J tiucetan e W Fai z Conn Danka b Eo Gara E G See Pas anepi i Epin Eoo kanpi 1 0 ee Ma Hri Py Tunseres hai Cer Abre O ip Beuman D hn mha Err Mode if Pages d O 2303 Figure 4 A Full KDE Desktop This page also details the manual methods for enabling full desktop mode Adding more software from a Xandros or Debian repository is the next logical step in customising the operating system that ships with the Eee For us the Eee requires only the addition of Emacs and Subversion to be a great portable hacking tool You can use any Debian Sarge repository or a Xandros 4 0 one as shown below There are a few caveats though As the Xandros running on the Eee Is heavily customised by ASUS it s very easy to end up with the Eee in an unbootable state if you allow apt to upgrade too much Although it s not a complete solution apt pinning can be used to ensure that the ASUS repository always takes priority for a package Add your repository to etc apt source list with your favourite text editor as root either your local Debian Sarge www linuxjournal com april 2008 85 INDEPTH As not all of the software that ships with the Eee is accessible through the easy mode launcher the first useful thing to
170. ons available Next open a terminal to create the MySQL tables needed for Bacula to operate Run the following scripts created by the Bacula RPM etc alternatives create_bacula_databases etc alternatives make_bacula_tables etc alternatives grant_bacula_privileges After setting up the database create a local mountpoint like mnt freenas and mount the FreeNAS share created previously An easy way to do this on every startup is to add the following line to your etc fstab file FreeNASServerHostName mnt DATA mnt freenas nfs defaults 0 To mount the partition immediately type mount a Before moving on to editing Bacula s configuration files here s how Bacula works The Bacula program is composed of three separate daemons the director the storage d mon and the file d mon The director is the boss It s the main server d mon that defines jobs pools schedules and most of the important settings related to backups As such the majority of setup deals with its configuration file etc bacula bacula dir conf The storage daemon SD controls the media written to by Bacula usually either tapes or disks These items are configured in the bacula sd conf file The tile daemon FD also referred to as the client runs locally on any system you want to back up Two other related utilities used here are the GNOME console gnome console conf and the tray monitor tray monitor conf utility With this basic knowledge of Bacula
171. ontab var spool cron crontabs root linux crontab var spool cron root files solaris crontab action touch kinux crontab action touch editfiles solaris crontab AppendIfNoSuchLine 0 10 20 30 40 50 w var cfengine sbin cfexecd F DefineClasses cron_restart linux crontab AppendIfNoSuchLine 0 10 20 30 40 50 w var cfengine sbin cfexecd F linux doesn t need a cron restart shellcommands solaris cron_restart etc init d cron stop etc init d cron start TECH TIP Do you have code for Linux written in Assembler C C FreePascal or any other native compiled language that surfaces a Java JNI interface Have you had problems with crashes from time to time It could be that your native code is improperly from Java s point of view anyway using signals Even if your code is not explicitly using signals the Run Time Library RTL linked into your Java JNI Shared Object may be using signals for you The answer to your problems may lie in a Shared Object named libjsig so that comes with later versions of Java Basically libjsig so makes it easy to implement something called signal chaining that allows the Java JVM and your Java JNI native code that uses signals to interact with one another properly There are a couple ways to use libjsig so but one quick way to find out whether libjsig so will benefit you Is to use the wonderful Linux LD_PRELOAD
172. op You have a very limited keyboard you have touchscreen issues you have a very small screen and think the bigger issues tend to be in things like the UI interfaces Continue forgetting ABIs The lack of an ABI is twofold one is we really really really don t want one Every single time people ask for a stable ABI the main reason for wanting a sta ble ABI is they want to have their binary drivers and they don t want to give out source and they certainly don t want to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel And that in turn means that all the people who actually do all the kernel work and maintain the kernel are basically unable to work with that piece of hardware and that vendor because if there s any bugs whatsoever we can t fix them So all the commercial vendors even the ones who used to accept bina ry drivers have moved or are moving away from wanting to have anything at all to do with binary drivers because they re completely unmaintainable other projects have binary inter faces for one reason or another quite often because of commercial reasons and that just means that they cannot fix their fundamental design The verities still are You need to have the code out there not because of any social issues but simply because you don t know who s going to be the one who has to fix it Vendor suckage may vary There are cert
173. or down according to project needs and will ramp up again this coming June to address potential new issues such as Energy Star compliance and better optimization of device drivers for power management McPherson also cited the importance of Intel and IBM 48 april 2008 www linuxjournal com rallying behind this topic to move it forward Tickless Idle in Linux The two most significant recent innova tions in Linux regarding power manage ment are tickless idle and virtualization The various Linux distribution makers deserve credit for supporting these innovations integrating them into their distributions and pushing forward initia tives like Lesswatts org The idea behind tickless idle is that Linux starting with kernel 2 6 21 for 32 bit and 2 6 23 for 64 bit machines keeps track of time in a completely new way in order to take advantage of low power states in modern processors The Strategy Involves keeping the processor in its lowest power state for as long as possible interrupting that state only when necessary For instance on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor the power states or C states vary between 1 2 and 35 Watts a significant difference Before kernel 2 6 21 Linux pulled the processor out of the lower C state with a timer tick to inform the processor of the need to perform housekeeping tasks This tick occurring every few milliseconds functionally reduced the usefulness of the lower power States
174. ork out whether we have a problem If we do this then we can then think about what to do about It tried to convince the 2006 KS atten dees that we have a problem and resoundingly failed People seemed to think that we re doing OK 96 april 2008 www linuxjournal com But it appears that data such as this contradicts that belief This is not a minor matter If the kernel is Slowly deteriorating then this won t become readily apparent until it has been happening for a number of years By that stage there will be so much work to do to get us back to an accept able level that it will take a huge effort And it will take a long time after that for the kernel to get its reputation back So it is important that we catch deterio ration early if it is happening Ingo Molnar followed with a long post that ended with Paradoxically the end product is still considerably good quality in absolute terms because other pieces of our infrastructure are so good and power ful but QA is still a weak link of our path to the user that reduces the quality of the end result We could really be so much better without any compromises that hurt Much discussion among many participants followed about the new development model and about policies and practices around bug fixing patching and in general debugging the debugging process The thread ran to more than 100 posts near as can bother to count over two days
175. otSudo Security Pages on the Ubuntu User Community s Wiki https help ubuntu com community Security AppArmor Page on the Ubuntu User Community s Wiki https help ubuntu com community AppArmor The Securing Debian Manual Indirectly Applicable to Ubuntu www debian org doc manuals securing debian howto index en html Bauer Michael D Linux Server Security 2nd ed Sebastopol CA O Reilly Media 2005 Provides detailed procedures for securing popular server applications Appro Xtreme X2 Supercomputer HPC Unified Scalable Clusters ar a a A HPC Cluster Solutions Designed for Reduces TCO Simplifies IT Outstanding HPC and Built with Green Management and Support and to Scale Architecture Administration Services Appro Xtreme X2 powered by Quad Core AMD Opteron Processors is a modular and unified scalable cluster designed to address the most demanding High Performance Computing requirements The Xtreme X2 combines high capacity with superior capability in a scalable well balanced computing platform delivering 6TF to 1000TF of computing power It is supported by the Appro Cluster Engine Management Software a complete lights out remote management system providing high availability scalability and manageability For more information please visit www appro com or call Appro Sales at 800 927 5464 AMD Opteron Investment Protection Increase capability without altering datacenter infrastru
176. other Borislav Petkov has taken over main tainership of the IDE CD driver in the wake of a major code reworking by Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz Bartlomiej had done this as a one off just to bring the driver back into a maintainable state Because it hadn t had a maintainer for quite a while all the fixes and other changes going into it had tended to make the code uglier and more difficult to understand Bartlomiej s work cleaned up the code and also made it easier for the libata ATAPI developers and others to identity all the hardware special cases they ll need to code around in their own projects With the driver now in a workable state Borislav should have a fairly straightforward time carrying it along There have been some other maintain ership changes recently Hans Jurgen Koch has teamed up with Greg Kroah Hartman as co maintainers of UIO Userspace Input Output Swen Schillig also recently stepped down as the zFCP maintainer saying the project was about to undergo a major rewrite and he didn t have time to shepherd it through that Instead he s patched the MAINTAINERS file to list Christof Schmitt and Miartin Peschke as the new co maintainers during the rewrite although they probably will continue to be the maintainers after the new code settles Additionally Joe Perches has removed the TMS380 Token Ring Network Driver entry from the MAINTAINERS file formerly maintained by Adam Fritzler While Joe was making th
177. ountai At the Computer History Museum from April 15th to 17th connect with your counterparts in this industry http Iwww embeddedlinuxconference com CE Linux Forum 3855 SW 153rd Drive Beaverton OR 97006 USA Currently in its fifth year ELC is the longest running international conference dedicated specifically to using Linux in embedded devices and products INDEPTH Listing 1 Apache Configuration Alias SOGo woa WebServerResources lt GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT gt Library SOGo 0 9 WebServerResources AliasMatch SO0Go so ControlPanel Products Resources lt GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT gt Library S0Go 0 9 1 S0Go Resources 2 lt LocationMatch S0Go gt AddDefaultCharset UTF 8 SetHandler ngobjweb adaptor SetAppPort lt sogod 0 9 port gt lt LocationMatch gt lt LocationMatch SOGo so ControlPanel Products UI Resources png gt SetHandler default handler lt LocationMatch gt lt LocationMatch SOGo so ControlPanel Products UI Resources gif gt SetHandler default handler lt LocationMatch gt lt LocationMatch SOGo so ControlPanel Products UI Resources css gt SetHandler default handler lt LocationMatch gt lt LocationMatch SOGo so ControlPanel Products UI Resources js gt SetHandler default handler lt LocationMatch gt uu The SOGo d mon runs under this user adduser sogo Once you ve created the user you need to config
178. owing this advice The Eee PC takes a single SODIMM of DDR2667 in either 512 1 024 or 2 048MB That s right the Eee PC can be upgraded to an impressive 2GB of memory To upgrade the memory on your Eee you need a set of small electronics screwdrivers and a clean surface that s safe for handling static sensitive equipment If you haven t installed memory before Linux Journal recommends you enlist the help of a professional or a hardware minded friend Ensure that the Eee is shut down not suspended and unplug it from the power Turn the Eee upside down and remove the battery Using a very small Phillips screwdriver remove the two Figure 6 Removing the Module screws in the memory panel One is covered by a sticker that will tear easily if you simply remove the screw as though the sticker was not there Use a small flatblade screwdriver very carefully or a finger nail to lever up the memory compartment Put the memory compartment cover and the screws to one side To remove the memory that shipped with your Eee carefully use a pair of small screwdrivers or your fingers to lever the clips outward The memory module will pop upward when it is tree of the clips Remove the module from the slot taking care to touch only the very outside edges of the module Place the module aside in a static safe place and remove the new module from its packaging Place it in the slot at a 45 degree angle as shown in Figure 7 taking care
179. p In Ubuntu Server however AppArmor is present but not configured you ll need to activate any policies you want to enforce manually AppArmor profiles reside in etc apparmor d If you re unfamiliar with AppArmor it s a power ful means of running applications in contained environments such that applications access to local resources is kept to a minimum It s similar to SELinux but less comprehensive and therefore easier to understand and administer However on Ubuntu no graphical tools are provided for this purpose even in Ubuntu Desktop What s more the only Ubuntu documentation besides man pages is the AppArmor page on the Ubuntu User Community Wiki see Resources which is little more than a listing of commands and their command line syntax no HOWTOs or other introductory material are provided For the time being it appears AppArmor on Ubuntu Server is for expert users only Conclusion I ve discussed Ubuntu s sensible omission of the X Window System in its default installations enumer ated security features in the Ubuntu Sever installer pondered the merits of the disabled root account listed some security enhancing software packages 34 april 2008 www linuxjournal com available in Ubuntu Server and considered Ubuntu s fledgling AppArmor support My overall opinion Ubuntu Server 7 10 is a remarkably compact straightforward command line oriented Linux distribution with a reasonably secure s
180. p computer of any kind also plays administrator from time to time If you ve ever spent time looking for old files to clean up you ve done system administration Have you ever added and configured a printer Backed up your files Created folders and reorganized your music files into categories Installed a new game Yes mes amis every one of those examples 24 april 2008 www linuxjournal com represents part of what system administration is On the surface it may not sound like fun and although some of it is the drudgery of keeping your system up and running properly there is a lighter side to maintaining your system from set ting the default look and feel of your desktop to activating some serious eye candy Ah Francois you have returned Please pour for our guests Historically system administration may have gotten its Ubergeek reputation due to the command line intensive nature of administration In the sleek and modern world that is today s desktop Linux command line administration though still available is relegated to the past for most users GNOME users can find everything they need to administer their systems in the top panel menus starting with the System menu If you need help this is the place to start because the GNOME help sys tem is available from the System menu You also can lock your screen with a password when you run off for coffee or a muffin or log out of your current Linux session Right at
181. poration in the US and other countries COLUMNS PARANOID PENGUIN secure default settings which is actually a func tion of packages individual installation scripts The bad news is that the Ubuntu Server installer E Doesn t allow you to select specific individual software packages instead It just asks you the general role the server will play Figure 2 m Prompts you for the MySQL administrator s password but doesn t prompt you a second time to make sure you didn t mistype it mM Doesn t check passwords for complexity uppercase lowercase numerals and so forth Figure 2 Selecting Server Software Bundles After installation you may notice that most if not all the server applications you installed Apache Postfix and so forth are up and running even though you haven t really configured them yet You ll need to do that yourself by editing the appropriate configuration files in etc On the one hand my personal preference is that by default network services should be dis abled initially to make it harder for an attacker to exploit an application that has been overlooked altogether or that is still in the process of being configured On the other hand because Ubuntu s default application configurations tend to be fairly secure this probably doesn t pose a huge risk For example immediately after installation Apache is started displaying a simple It works page which announces to the wor
182. pose changelog entries from memory if other people do the work of gathering the patches together Now Dave has a big pile of commits ready for Linus to make good on once he s done with that maybe someone will have more commits for him to comment on In the meantime Dave already has accomplished something of tremendous benefit to anyone interested in the history of kernel development Pavel Machek has started a daring attempt to give Linux systems the ability to go to sleep in response to one desired event and to wake up in response to another The path is fraught with difficulties the main one being the plethora of hardware in the world all with different bugs and behaviors Trying to support this feature universally will be like threading a very strange and compli cated needle Most of the early comments trom other kernel folks were along the lines of this can t be done to which Pavel essentially responded well not fully no but this really cool part might be doable So by the end of the discussion various folks ended up suggesting other really cool parts that might be doable as well All in all it looks to be a very piecemeal project but one with fun results Pavel envisions a sys tem that might wake up playing particular MP3s in the morning or if particular network traffic comes down the wire With so many folks starting to show interest it may turn out that the whole thing is doable one way or the
183. r November 2007 7 20 Number of open source based Linux BSD Solaris hosting companies among Netcraft s top 50 most reliable for November 2007 30 1 2 Mobile Magazine 3 NComputing and DesktopLinux com 4 NComputing DesktopLinux com and Engadget 5 11 NComputing 12 16 PewInternet org 17 20 Netcraft com UPFRONT Let s Call It a UVPC Technically the Noahpad from E Lead Electronic is a Linux based UMPC or an Ultra Mobile PC Generally Speaking a UMPC is smaller than a notepad and bigger than a Mobile Internet Device MID But in fact the Noahpad is so versatile and odd it may deserve another category entirely Let s start with the keyboard Its two springy squares are divided into what you might call a bingo grid 5x5 of keys all printed on the square and separated by raised dark lines These serve to keep your fingers on the keys an alterna tive to the conventional approach which orients touch via spaces between keys and convex bowls for your fingertips Thus the Noahpad has just two barely moving key board parts even though the two squares also add 50 function keys to the usual QWERTY lineup But that s not the halt of it Both squares are touchpads big ones You can go trom typing to pointing without leaving the two pads Navigation is also novel For example you can use the touchpad to move around the window view expanding the perimeter
184. r key bindings and so forth Then you simply can add a source line to your muttrc file that points to the new file and mutt will load those options as well What like to do is take it a step further and create a mutt directory in my home directory and place all of those files including my muttrc in that directory Then create a new Tile in my home directory called muttrc local In this file store any options that are specific to just that particular machine IMAP settings local mailbox locations and SO on and keep the rest of the options organized in different files in the mutt directory Finally create a symlink from mutt muttrc to muttrc so mutt still will be able to find it In this muttrc you would tind source lines like source muttrc local source mutt colors source mutt aliases source mutt mailboxes The advantage to this arrangement is that once make a change to any of the files in mutt simply can rsync that entire directory to any other machine on which run mutt and all of my changes will be there If didn t segregate these to a directory and separate muttrc local would have to worry that any local settings from one machine would clobber the rest Colorize Important Words If you read through a lot of cron Nagios or other e mail your servers generate for you It s easy to let your eyes glaze over and miss important content What like to do Is tweak my mutt configu
185. ration so that certain words like warn ing are colored in bright yellow and words like error and fail show up in bright red This is surprisingly easy to do with mutt in only a few lines color body brightyellow default warning color body brightred default error color body white default no error color body brightred default fail ure ed Notice the line that matches no error noticed that some messages said no error in them and the error section still was being colored red If this happens with your keywords simply add a similar line in there to override the previous less specific match You don t have to limit yourself to just these keywords For instance you also could highlight certain server names with a particular color or assign different data center locations distinct colors Read Important Messages First Once had colorized all my e mail it was great l would browse through output and more critical e mail would jump to my attention As the number of messages started to grow though noticed would spend a lot of time reading the less important messages before found the important ones My solution was to use the limit feature in mutt When you are in the index view in mutt where mutt shows you only the From and the Subject lines you can tell mutt to limit the key by default the headers you currently can see based on a pattern For instance if wanted to see only all the headers that said Bob
186. re An initiative is only as good as the people and resources behind it Three green Linux Initiatives have formed recently two deep pocketed ones IBM s Big Green Linux initiative and Intel s Lesswatts org and a dot org effort the Linux Foundation s Green a mj n zie ae lt T Linux Initiative In August 2007 IBM launched its Big Green Linux initiative intended to help its clients integrate Linux into the enterprise as a way to reduce costs and energy consumption by building cooler data centers says IBM Big Green Linux is a subset of Project Big Green a broader initiative to reduce energy consumption in the data center both internally and for tts clients Although sparse to date some of the Big Green Linux initiatives have included improved data center ergonomics encouraging server consolidation onto System p servers and System z mainframes expanding on Linux innovations like the tickless kernel and collaboration on power manage ment with the Linux community Intel is another IT titan trying to go green at both the processor and appli cation levels The firm readily admits that its green innovations historically have been further ahead on the hardware side than the software side For instance Intel first focused power management improvements on the mobile Centrino processor and is now migrating those technologies to server platforms Regrettably the advan tageous hardwa
187. re Linux LVM Not Supported Not Supported Restore Linux Software RAID Not Supported Not Supported Easy To Use Web Interface Not Supported Not Supported Manage Thousands of Servers B Not Supported Not Supported Control Panel Integration oo vooo Not Supported Not Supported 99 server 699 server You Can t Afford It NEW CDP for MySQL add on Now available True Granular Restore Store over 50 recovery points per day Bare Metal Restore for MySQL Servers Restore tables or databases to original or alternate locations and more Data Centers serious about uptime and performance use R1Soft For more information visit www r1soft com or call us at 800 956 6198 tPrice includes 600 Data Protection Server cost Assumes minimum ratio of 25 protected servers per Data Protection Server Soft LINUX amp WINDOWS Copyright 2007 Righteous Software Inc All Rights Reserved R1Soft is a trademark of Righteous Software Inc Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners A Flexible Network Booting with Menus Set up a PXE server and then add menus to boot kickstart images rescue disks and diagnostic tools all from the network KYLE RANKIN It s funny how automation evolves as system administrators manage larger numbers of servers When you manage only a few servers It s fine to pop in an install CD and set options manually As the number of servers grows you might realize it makes sense to set up
188. re engineering often exists but remains unexploited In order to bridge the gulf between hardware and software development Intel created Lesswatts org The site is a nexus of collaboration on projects that drive improvements in power consumption that will lead to a cleaner environment and allow companies to spend less money powering their IT infrastructure Some of the projects included on Lesswatts org are 1 PowerTOP a Linux based tool that helps find programs that are need lessly consuming extra power when a computer is idle as well as the magnitude of overconsumption Power Policy Manager a layered system wide power policy framework that provides a way for users to select multiple power policies to fit their systems Processor Power Management a project to leverage the power management features of Intel processors fully Lesswatts org con tains all the features solutions and enhancements related to processor power management One example www linuxjournal com april 2008 47 FEATURE Go Green Save Green with Linux is the Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology which allows one proces sor core to deliver extra performance while the other core is idle m Display and Graphics Power Saving a project that aims to exploit the power saving features of Intel s graphics chipsets without sacrific ing performance Besides those listed above and several other projects Lesswatts org contains num
189. ready VMware Server 2 looks like a very promising product Unfortunately it has massive showstopper bugs that make this seem more like a pre alpha than a beta The feature set however is rela tively solid and particularly impressive given the price tag If these issues can be worked through the Web interface is a powerful enough tool that this could be a promising iteration in the VMware Server line Jes Hall is a Linux Technical Specialist and KDE developer from New Zealand She s passionate about helping open source software bring life changing information and tools to those who would otherwise not have them www linuxjournal com april 2008 41 REVIEWS HARDWARE iPod Rockbox Entertainment Extravaganza What s cooler than a box of rocks Well a lot but not much is cooler than Rockbox on your iPod SHAWN POWERS Wouldn t it be great if you could cus tomize an iPod and run third party soft ware on it Wouldn t it be great if you could download games and applications along with the songs and videos you already have Wouldn t it be great if all those features were open source and free Wish no longer Rockbox offers all those things wrapped in an easy to use installer Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a variety of music and video players The interface is very similar regardless of the device and as don t have access to anything other than an iPod this review focuses on
190. reer Hh JT LEGS EST oo P a Kd kA ra Frie Aeambm M FN LE ST Brida hesmba ii HATLI EIT TESTI RAH Hn m 7 i inl a e ir a a Week 47 Week 43 Week 45 Wek g f heer a ares F Men Tira Wied Thi lites ses Drar mi Sa Sur Lines Figure 2 SOGo as Seen from a Web Browser Figure 3 SOGo as Seen from Thunderbird and Lightning but using the Thunderbird and Lightning extension Although SOGo s Web interface allows you to access all infor mation from virtually any computer connected to the Internet some power users need access from their mobile devices such as cellular phones or personal digital assistants Supporting the plethora of devices out there is almost impossible but the SyncML standard finally emerged as an efficient protocol for synchronizing PIM related information between your mobile devices and groupware platform Funambol formerly known as Sync4j is middleware that sits between a groupware server and SyncML capable devices Luckily for SOGo a native connector is available for Funambol This plugin lets you connect the middleware to SOGo so users can synchro nize their contacts events and tasks with the SOGo server Mobiles devices require a SyncML client to synchronize data through Funambol Most cellular phones have a built in client but PDAs or smartphones lack one The recommended clients are as follows Synthesis Sy
191. rnal com april 2008 33 COLUMNS PARANOID PENGUIN doesn t have any specific mechanism for automatically downloading and installing security updates can explain why in two words change control On a production server that does real work it s a bad idea to apply any patches even security updates until after you ve tested them on a similar server in a lab to make sure they don t break any thing Sure you can run the commands aptitude y update aptitude y upgrade aptitude y dist upgrade and aptitude y autoclean froma cron job each night But that y option which allows aptitude to run unattended also might cause a package update to overwrite some custom configu ration file with a default configuration On a server you re better off running these com mands manually as needed without the y option after first doing so on a test system if you run in a change controlled environment That way you ll be prompted before any configuration files are overwrit ten and you ll be able to observe firsthand the changes aptitude makes to your system as they happen Subscribe to the ubuntu security announce mailing list via www ubuntu com support community mailinglists to receive e mail notifica tions of security patches as they re made available Novell AppArmor in Ubuntu As discussed last month the Ubuntu port of Novell AppArmor is installed by default in Ubuntu systems This is true of both Server and Deskto
192. rors These days some distributions even install it by default and make it available during the boot process because it is so useful Compared to Knoppix it is very simple to add memtest86 to your PXE server because it runs trom a single bootable file First install your distribution s memtest86 package most make it available or otherwise download it from the memtest86 4 site Then copy the program binary to var lib tftpboot memtest Finally add a new label to your pxelinux cftg detault file label 3 kernel memtest That s it When you type 3 at the boot prompt the memtest86 program loads over the network and starts the scan Conclusion There are a number of extra features beyond the ones give here For instance a number of DOS boot floppy images such as Peter Nordahl s NT Password and Registry Editor Boot Disk can be added to a PXE environment My own use of the pxelinux menu helps me streamline server kickstarts and makes it simple to kickstart many servers all at the same time At boot time can not only indicate which OS to load but also more specific options such as the type of server Web database and so forth to install what hostname to use and other very specific tweaks Besides the benefit of no longer tracking down MAC addresses you also can create a nice colorful user friendly boot menu that can be documented so it s simpler for new administrators to pick up Finally I ve been able to custom
193. s article explain how to implement a near line backup to a NAS to illustrate how easy it is to begin the transition from tapes to disks I ve chosen two programs for reaching the goal of a tape less backup FreeNAS to create a networked storage area for backup files and Bacula to automate backups and provide a pseudo daily weekly and monthly rotation To keep things simple let s build two systems one running FreeNAS and one running Bacula on top of Fedora 8 All configuration done on the Bacula system for this article was performed as root but it also could be done with sudo Bear in mind the options covered in both programs here represent only a handful of their full capabilities FreeNAS FreeNAS is one of the simplest programs have ever deployed It s small enough to run a system from a CD or USB key However for this example let s install it on our server to the local hard disk On your system suggest at least 256MB of memory and SATA drives for decent performance If you want to use RAID on your drives use hardware based solutions They are faster and there have been issues with the built in software RAID capabilities of FreeNAS If you opt to use hard ware RAID check the FreeBSD hardware compatibility list on which FreeNAS is based before making a purchase Download the latest ISO from the FreeNAS site and burn it to CD version 684b at the time of this writing Boot the 70 april 2008 www linuxjour
194. s know your Needs We will build you b Setution 2 AMD Opieron TM Value Server Starsat 847 1U 14 Deep 260W 7 a AMD Opteron 140 CPU ND gous PC 3200 DDR ECC Unbuttered Support upto 8GB DDR RAM 40GB SATA Hard Disk 2x 10 1000 Mbps Lan 1U AMD Opteron Model 840 2GB Memory Max 128 GB Supports upto 64GB FBDIMM OF 80 GB SATA II Hotswap Hard Drive jg nna 2xintegrated Dual 10000 LAN Dual AMD OpteronTM Storage Stats ct 4 120 5U Dual AMD Opteron Model 246 iSCSI or NAS Software Options Support upto 18TB of Storage Fail Hard Drive LED Indicator BU AMD Opteron Model 246 ATB of Storage 36TB Max 1GB RAM 2 x 10 100 1000 Gigabit LAN We Provide Approved EVAL Server Since 1989 ASA has served customers like Cisco Juniper Caltech Fermilab and most Universities We provide a total custom solution with OS of your choice Excellent pre and post sales support Reliable hardware at the most competitive prices Please call or contact us for your next hardware purchase AMD UNA Cabal updo Sante Clare CA 85054 Opteron Tel AU0 REAL PCS far MEET INDEPTH First Boot Life Cycle Details During the first PL boot users are prompted as follows Screen 1 select keyboard layout locale US is generally the default Screen 2 the Puppy Video Wizard prompts for two preferences m Step 1 X Window System server choice select X server X or
195. stem This is accomplished using the following 10 var cfengine sbin cfexecd F as a cron entry on Linux unless Solaris starts to understand 10 Note that this is fairly frequent and good only for a low number of servers We don t want 800 servers updating within SVN sandbox the same ten minutes The cfenvd is the environment d mon that runs on the client side of the cfengine implementation It gathers informa tion about the host machine such as hostname OS and IP address The cfenvd detects these factors about a host and uses them to determine to which groups the machine belongs This in effect creates a profile for each machine that cfengine uses to determine what work to perform on each host The master configuration file for each host is cfagent conf This tile can contain all the configuration information and cfengine code for the host a subset of hosts or all hosts in the cfengine network This file is often just a starting point where all configurations are stored in other files and imported into cfagent conf in a very similar fashion to Nagios configuration tiles The update conf file is the fundamental configuration file for the client It primarily just identifies the cfengine server and gets a copy of the cfagent conf chango client machines cfengine server Figure 2 Automated Distribution of Cfengine Files The update conf file tells the cfengine server to deploy a new
196. t each in its ordinal position that Is a is in the 1 position The while loop simply uses ordvalue as an index into the array incrementing it until it points to the array element that matches the desired letter Note Using O as the value of the first array element is quite arbitrary any value will do Solution 2 Do this string initialization prior to using LETTERS LETTERS Qabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz j z a Cost Effective Data Center Server Solutions with Customized Programs from ZT Systems Your data center hardware requirements are growing every day With ZT Systems you get validated high quality servers featuring the Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5400 Series for maximum Systems performance and efficiency but that s only part of the solution ZT Systems now offers customizable programs designed to enable the ultimate in value and ease of implementation for organizations operating infrastructure scale data centers Leading Edge Technology Innovative solutions from ZT Systems address the critical challenges faced by data centers today ZT servers feature high efficiency power supplies for cost savings and improved thermal performance and our innovative twin node servers enable an unprecedented combination of density and value with two discreet server motherboards in a 1U chassis Custom Hardware and Integration ZT Systems works with data center management to
197. t 27 file namelist input form formatted status old pgdbg all 0 gt 0 Stopped at 0x619B5A function init module wrf quilt file module io quilt f line 1181 1161 nio groups 1 oO Process on _ PPP JAY Age Process 0 Geom Window Consol ptem Produa 1c qruult_f Frores 0 ET Ta were P ope ert eer vif Prue i Frese i ie mn f IF mpi_inited THEN ENDIF CALL mpi_init ierr CALL wrf set dm communicator MPI_COMM WORLD CALL wrf_ termio dup CALL MPI Comm rank MPI_COMM WORLD mytask ierr CALL MPI Comm Size MPI COMM WORLD ntasks ierr IF mytask EQ 0 THEN nio tasks per group 0 READ 27 namelist quilt CLOSE 27 ENDIF Teepe M bose L I Gadde Babi ee ia ee fe et eid i ee X CALL wrf error fatal3 module io quilt b 1256 frame module io quilt F quilt initial OPEN unit 27 file namelist input form formatted status old ja iiit eduli erf gui Ate Timi LIBRO in egdula_i quilt addrwe Ont lissi g Eile prioni 0 mqdump MPI COMM WORLD Comm size Comm rank Pending sends Pending recieves Unexpected messages MPI_COMM WORLD collective 12 Comm size Comm rank Pending sends Pending recieves Unexpected messages MPI_COMM SELF Comm_size Comm rank Pending sends Pending recieves Unexpected messages Hi I Comm size Comm rank Pending sends Pending
198. t different operating systems have different conventions for how dialog boxes or even menus look and feel These often subtle design distinctions can play a major role in the usability of an application Thus it ll be interesting to see what happens when OpenSocial applications are unveiled and are supposed to work cleanly on all systems One of the Facebook platform s great advantages is the fact that it shoehorns application content into a standard look and feel This is missing with OpenSocial and although it encourages diversity l m far from convinced this will be good for end users Another and more serious issue with OpenSocial is that it is designed to let applications run in different contexts not seamlessly join data from diverse social networking systems Yes it s nice that software developers will be able to release their code on multiple platforms at the same time But as a user as well as a developer l m interested in getting a comprehensive list of all my triends contacts links from all the social networks to which belong Just a few weeks before wrote these words Order Today he net ip_transit TS 7800 High End Performance with Embedded Ruggedness 269 qty 1 229 qty 100 500 MHz ARM9 a New unbrickable design 3x faster a Backward compatible w TS 72xx a Low power 4W at 5V a 128MB DDR RAM a 512MB high speed onboard Flash a 12K LUT user programmable FPGA a Internal PCI Bus PC
199. t included some Webmin modules might not work so be careful If you are using a dis tribution derived from one that Is on the list it s a fair bet you won t have any problems but don t say didn t warn you By the way why this state of affairs The problem is a lack of standardization Distributions use different locations for various configuration files and if Webmin can t find them it won t be able to function This may change for the better over time when if all distributions fully embrace the Linux Standard Base LSB and comply with the standards related to tile placement But that certainly hasn t happened yet To mention a simple example I m currently using OpenSUSE and it uses srv www htdocs as the root for Web sites Most other distributions use var www html So you can see that a config uration module might have serious problems finding Web files if it didn t know about this difference What do you need to run Webmin Just a browser Perl a Java Runtime Environment URE for some functions and the root password After you become familiar with Webmin you ll be able to forget about ever editing configuration files like all those in the etc directory or starting stopping and reloading services If you set up Webmin correctly you even will be able to administer your server from a remote machine Installation Webmin is available under the GPL so you can get It without any problems The latest version
200. t it won t refresh on its own with the Running Processes option and you can tind plenty of information by clicking on a process id Finally to cut the list short the Software Packages option allows you to install or remove a software package on the server remotely Servers this category has to do with all the possible servers you might be running including Web related functions such as Apache or FTP mail functions Fetchmail Postfix Qmail Sendmail and filters ProcMail SoamAssassin file sharing Samba databases MySQL PostgreSQL network functions DHCP SSH DNS SLP proxying Squid and several similar functions There are several options for each of these modules so you ll want to click on each of them to see the available features Networking covers more specific network related options including contiguration interfaces routing gateways DNS client host addresses services connection ADSL client Bandwidth Monitoring PPP SSL tunnels VPN security Kerberos5 IPsec firewalls the Linux Firewall provides an iotables based configuration and there s an option for the Shoreline shorewall firewall too and more including NFS and NIS a a Vetr rrr er a uei aim 5 r D amp me m i Scheduled Cron Jobs Figure 7 You can manage future cron jobs easily a a a p a fe eee ee fee 4 41 OO e awe amp H pahia hoo Virtual Server Options C oy mj wj a S sf x a j
201. ta store has to be defined and the dialog to open VMs CD images and any other file type does not support browsing outside that data store Given that anyone logging in to VMware Server runs as root we imagine there might be some security implications of allowing VMware access to the entire filesystem but because VMware Server runs as root there definitely are some security implications as it can do what ever the heck it likes anyway Hopefully this design choice makes more sense when user authentication is implemented into the product later on particularly if data stores can be defined only by a root user and can t be modified later by Canem eC ame m E EO i Ankie H let a cider LD d See iefcgepegeiges feeb soe Figure 3 OpenSUSE 10 3 Running under VMware Server 2 Beta an unprivileged user Every attempt to add any of our three already configured Microsoft Windows virtual machines immediately crashed the browser Unfortunately for this reason we were unable to test run ning Microsoft Windows under VMware Server 2 0 Beta not having any free licenses to create another Windows VM We were able to add pre existing Debian virtual machines that had been created in Workstation 6 for Linux Server 2 0 Beta allows for the creation of two Virtual machine types Server 2 and legacy Server 2 VMs are Workstation 6 compatible and support ten virtual Ethernet devices instead of only three as well as paravirtua
202. the look and feel of your system configure hardware networking sound printers and a host of other things You ll usually see System Settings directly under the program launcher menu On KDE 4 s Kickoff launcher look for it under the computer icon When the System Settings window appears you ll see a two tabbed view with an Advanced tab in the background and the General tab selected by default Figure 3 Licey Dei ppi nr Bp b Lj Figure 3 The Systems Settings dialog from KDE 4 0 gives you access to most desktop administration functions General settings are broken up into four major categories Look amp Feel Personal Network amp Connectivity and Computer Administration isn t it all administration Although many settings affect personal desktop settings other functions that can affect the entire system do require Administrator privileges In those cases you ll see a button to 26 april 2008 www linuxjournal com activate system privileges Of course did mention that administering your system could involve playing with some serious flash pizzaz and glitzy eye candy KDE 4 users get a serious dose of this with the new Kwin composite desktop and its plasma desktop and related toys Simply click the Desktop icon from the General tab under Look amp Feel then under the two tabbed window that appears check Enable desktop effects Select all the so called common effects then click on the All Effects tab Fi
203. the top of the System menu is the Preferences submenu Figure 1 The Preferences menu is all about personalizing Applicatians Places Systeri Ww A a Preferences F a About Ma 2 Administration E Assistive Technology Support T Hel Se Desktop Background LZ Help i Fart About GNOME oat Keyboard Keyboard Shortcuts About Wibuntu ET Lock Screen mp Minus amp Toolbars l Log Out ubuntu pou p Network rosy LE Fower Management TS Preferred Applications csi Remate Desktop res Rernoveble Crowes and Media 3 STIM Input Method Setup a green Besolutian kd Sartana Seeciong Sound g Theme Wines Figure 1 The Preferences submenu allows you to change your personal settings the user experience Because these are personal options none of them require administrative privileges even though these are still considered administrative functions You can set a screen saver change the background and window deco rations or play with the colors If the fonts look a little small there s a simple option for changing the size of what you see on the screen And Speaking of your screen changing the screen resolution is easy and doesn t require you to restart your graphical environment Let s take one more step down into the System menu and look at the Administration submenu Figure 2 Granted when you go from Preferences to Administration it does sound a bit scarier but drink a litt
204. to universities corporations government labs and individual Linux enthusiasts Our laptops range from full featured ultra portables to desktop replacements All systems come with one year of Linux technical support by phone and e mail and full manufacturers warranties apply EmperorLinux specializes in the installation of Linux on a wide range of the finest laptops made by IBM Lenovo Dell Sony and Panasonic We customize your choice of Linux distribution to your laptop and provide support for ethernet wireless X server ACPI power management USB EVDO PCMCIA FireWire CD DVD CDRW sound and more EmperorLinux offers Linux laptops with unique features Ruggedized Panasonic laptops are designed for harsh environments drops vibrations sand rain and other extremes ThinkPad tablet PCs are like other laptops with an LCD digitizer for pen based input both as a mouse and with pressure sensitivity for writing and drawing on screen www EmperorLinux com Dell Latitude D830 Precision M6300 Toucan 161 T61p ThinkPad 161 T61p by Lenovo e Up to5 4 WUXGA w X 1920x1200 e NVidia Quadro FX 570M graphics 1 8 216 GHz Core 2 Duo e 512 MB 4 GB RAM e 30 200 GB hard drive e CDRW DVD or DVD RW e 5 2 6 0 pounds e 10 100 1000 Mbps ethernet e 802 11a b g 54Mbps WiFi e Starts at 1530 Rhino D830 M6300 e Up to 17 WUXGA w X 1920x1200 e NVidia Quadro FX 1600M graphics e 198 2 8 GHzCore 2 Duo Extreme
205. tory Web site These are in fact provided on the Ubuntu Server CD under pool These include the following aide E openssh server auth client config E libpam opie apparmor E shorewall chkrootkit E slapd Idap utils cryptsetup E squid dovecot imapd E vlan exim4 daemon heavy E vsftpd gnupg l Il leave it to you to explore the many other security related packages available iosec tools in the Ubuntu repositories One of the best ways to do this is to look them up libkrb53 on packages ubuntu com sasl2 bin No Automatic Updates in Ubuntu Server libselinux1 Given the importance of patching to maintain system security you might be libwrapO tcpd surprised to learn that Ubuntu Server The Beauty of High Performance The Sidewinder Single Board Computer SBC which utilizes a VIA Eden 1 2 GHz processor features a host of integrated I O in a compact RoHS compliant package Its elegant fanless design brings high per watt performance on board Analog and Digital I O CompactFlash socket SP X interface and an overall outstanding cost of ownership Customization is available on quantities as low as 100 pieces Contact us and discover how for more than 30 years we ve been perfecting the fine art of extra ordinary support and on time delivery One customer at a time International 1 800 824 3163 United States 1 541 ABs cer RSALOGIC CORPORATION www versalogic com side f www linuxjou
206. tt Packard s FOSSology Keeping track of the licensing conditions of the complete source code of an open source project can be a pain Such pain stimulated HP s FOSSology Project a tool that quickly and accurately describes how a given open source project Is licensed FOSSology analyzes all the source code for a given project and reports all the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell tale phrases that identify software licensing says HP The goal of FOSSology which literally means the study of FOSS is twofold First HP seeks to allow IT organizations to adopt open source software confidently as well as to uncover f 0 S S 0 0 g y what open source software is being used within their environments Second HP seeks to support open source developers and distributors to create a clear licensing picture of the projects and packages they produce The tool is available to all in order to promote a more vibrant open community of open source users and contributors fossology org 38 april 2008 www linuxjournal com NEW PRODUCTS Embedded Projects USBprog Developers of embedded systems are typically faced with the challenge that every new controller needs a separate debugging or programming adapter These often either are not available or disappointing on the Linux platform To the rescue is Embedded Products USBprog a free universal program ming adapter with a bootloader and tools t
207. tweak on the Eee is to add the IceWM panel menu and edit it to add those applications that aren t exposed through the easy mode interface repository or the Xandros one below deb http xnv4 xandros com 4 0 pkg xandros4 0 xn main contrib non free Then create the file etc apt preferences and add the lines Package Pin origin update eepc asus com Pin Priority 999 As apt sources default to a lower priority this ensures that packages from the ASUS repository are prioritised It s still pos sible though to break your Eee by installing packages willy nilly If it looks as though an action is going to upgrade a large number of packages especially if it looks like what It s upgrad ing is all of KDE cancel the change This limitation can be extremely frustrating if you want to make more drastic changes to your Eee PC s installed packages Another option is to install a generic Linux distribution on the Eee eeeXubuntu wiki eeeuser com ubuntu eeexubuntu home is a version of the Xubuntu 7 10 distribution with Eee specific drivers integrated and tweaks for low resolution displays It s an excellent choice if you want a more modern distribution on your Eee but would prefer not to compile the drivers from ASUS by hand The wiki page has in depth instructions on how to create a bootable USB stick for your Eee Boot your Eee from the USB 22 theme 1 7 HEL Fer pe FSD HE P3 d uu Figure 5 eeeXubuntu is a customised Xub
208. u should see a message saying that you need to add your hard drive to the disk list Click the icon to add it Figure 3 Leave all the options at their defaults except Pd er age Oe eee an eer at Ll SR a a F pu rr cage pee be gee es ee ee ee ee Ser Oam eatin om vein fei eine far BPm ee le F paa mi at ee a A E ir TT dah Hoe ED Dah nha Ma i es veel in roa rot a seit caida aed EE PEG op LES aa aa AG a Ds ae a ad E hi el ome lig m eo ee be ae bee Figure 2 Setting the Hostname on the FreeNAS Management Page Be pk se o pimi pai UP mg eni ae ain ie DPE H ee cred dps Bi ke Put fba hand diet to may rede arae he kiem Samm ghee pie Se ae Pa ee ae seed aero ee ee ee imir i TTE E Ao e E a eee heon Se a Sar Cir OF vai an aS a a ai Figure 3 Adding the Disks PreFormatted FS Set this to UFS as FreeNAS already has done the work for us Once you click the Apply Changes button the status column of your disk will change to ONLINE Now click the Mount Point link and click the icon again on this page to edit the Mount Point properties Figure 4 From this screen change the partition to 2 as partition 1 is the system partition which cannot be used Leave the File System as UFS and enter DATA as the share name Click Add when finished This takes you back to the original Mount Point page Click Apply Changes Under the Services links click NFS Check the Enabl
209. uctions from the pro ject s main Web page copy the supplied pxelinux 0 Tile to var lib tftpboot or your TFTP directory and then create a var lib tftpboot pxelinux ctg directory to hold pxelinux configuration files PXE Menu Magic You can configure pxelinux with or without menus and many administrators use pxelinux without them There are com pelling reasons to use pxelinux menus which discuss below but first here s how some pxelinux setups are configured When many people configure pxelinux they create configuration files for a machine or class of machines based on the fact that when pxelinux loads it searches the pxelinux ctg directory on the TFTP server for configuration files in the following order m Files named 01 MACADDRESS with hyphens in between each hex pair So for a server with a MAC address of 88 99 AA BB CC DD a configuration file that would target only that machine would be named 01 88 99 aa bb cc dd and I ve noticed it does matter that it is lowercase www linuxjournal com april 2008 59 FEATURE PXE Magic Flexible Network Booting with Menus m Files named after the host s IP address in hex Here pxelinux will drop a digit from the end of the hex IP and try again as each file search fails This is often used when an administra tor buys a lot of the same brand of machine which often will have very similar MAC addresses The administrator then can configure DHCP to assign a certain IP range to
210. udp wait root usr sbin in tftpd s var lib tftpboot usr sbin in tftpd As you can see in this example the s option used for tftod hpa specified var lib tftpboot as the directory to contain my files but on some systems these files are commonly stored in tftpboot so see your etc inetd conf file and your tftpd man page and check on its conventions if you are unsure If your distribution uses xinetd and doesn t create a file in etc xinetd d for you create a file called etc xinetd d tftp that contains the following default off description The tftp server serves files using the trivial file transfer protocol The tftp protocol is often used to boot diskless workstations download configuration files to network aware printers and to start the installation process for HH HH HH H H F some operating systems service tftp disable no socket_type dgram protocol udp wait yes user foot server usr sbin in tftpd server_args s var 1lib tftpboot per_source 11 cps 100 2 flags IPv4 As tftpd is part of inetd or xinetd you will not need to Start any service At most you might need to reload inetd or xinetd however make sure that any software firewall you have running allows the TFTP port port 69 udp as input Add Syslinux Now that TFTP is set up all that is left to do is to install the syslinux package available for most distributions or you can follow the installation instr
211. ulators personal finance m Personal Wiki address book password setting 92 april 2008 www linuxjournal com m Network firewall and other network services m Internet browser and all other network clients m Multimedia CD creation photo video and sound view and editing E Fun games m Help help topics and system documentation m Shutdown session control and restarting fundamental desktop services like the X Window System and the window manager The first thing you ll likely want to do after booting Is launch the Puppy Disk Mounter Refer to the upper right section of Figure 1 It can be launched through the top row drives icon Notice that drive partitions hda1 and hda2 are mounted under the mnt directory The output of the df h command shows the following Filesystem Size Used Available Use Mounted on tmpfs 219 9M 6 9M 213 0M 3 initrd pup_rw tmpfs 119M 77 0M 916 0k 99 initrd mnt tmpfs dev 1loop0 77 0M 77 0M 100 initrd pup_ro2 unionfs 219 9M 6 9M 213 0M 3 shmfs 87 0M 0 87 0M 0 dev shm dev hdal 5 0G 3436 1 7G 66 mnt hdal dev hda2 50 9G 32 36 18 5G 64 mnt hda2 Apart from the RAM Disk and shared memory entries notice the two drive partitions under mnt The very next thing you ll want to launch is the Internet Connection Wizard through the Connect Globe desktop icon lower left section of Figure 1 or the Menu gt Setup Network Wizard This lets you configure and set up a cabled or wire
212. untu for the Eee PC 86 april 2008 www linuxjournal com stick by pressing Esc at boot time to get to the boot options menu and from the GRUB bootloader select the option to load eeeXubuntu with Eee specific drivers and fixes From there it s all very familiar Click the Install icon on the desktop once the live CD loads and navigate your way through the Ubuntu installer If your Eee has 512MB or more of memory you probably can get away with not creating a swap partition In our testing running Firefox Pidgin and Thunderbird the Eee was using approximately 300MB of memory minus buffers caching If your Eee has 1 024MB or more of memory you ll never notice the difference Opting out of swap however does have the side effect that hibernate to disk is disabled The Eee does have suspend to RAM support under eeeXubuntu but this level of suspend does consume a fair amount of battery Leave your Eee suspended for 24 hours and expect to see your battery down to half when you resume it The simplest and most rewarding Eee hardware mod is upgrading the built in memory Note this mod requires removing a sticker that claims its removal will void your warranty According to a public statement by ASUS at uSa asus com news_show aspx id 9223 this is not the case and upgrading your memory will not void the warranty on your Eee However Linux Journal takes no responsibility for any damages to your Eee or loss of warranty incurred by foll
213. ure Apache Do echo GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT and remember the value as it will be required shortly Create the file etc apache2 cont d SOGo conf elsewhere if you are not using Debian with the content shown in Listing 1 You must replace lt GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT gt with the echoed value of GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT usr GNUstep Local under Debian Once the Tile has been created restart Apache Now you can proceed with the SOGo database creation Because we use PostgreSQL here perform the following steps su postgres createuser no createdb no adduser encrypted pwprompt sogo createdb 0 sogo sogo exit Before starting SOGo configure it with a basic set of con figuration parameters The configuration file is located in HOME GNUstep Defaults GNUstepDefaults where HOME is the home directory of your sogo user Create this file with the content shown in Listing 2 78 april 2008 www linuxjournal com Listing 2 SOGo Configuration Parameters NSGlobalDomain i sogod 0 9 AgenorProfileURL http sogo sogo 127 0 0 1 5432 sogo gt sogo user profile NGUseUTF8ASURLEncoding YES OCSFolderInfoURL http sogo sogo 127 0 0 1 5432 sogo sogo folder_info SOGoAppointmentSendEMailNotifications YES SOGoAuthentificationMethod LDAP SOGoDefaultLanguage English SOGoDefaultMailDomain example com SOGoDraftsFolderName INBOX Drafts SOGoFallbackIMAP4Server localhost SOGOLDAPSources CNFieldNa
214. utions put complete manageability at your fingertips We ve combined our innovative and powerful hardware and easy to use software to enable remote access and control of literally any system on the planet At anytime From anywhere Download our white paper today and find out how you can manage your physical and virtual world from one common interface Visit www avocent com ljournal amp Avocent Avocent the Avocent logo and The Power of Being There are registered trademarks of Avocent Corporation in the U S and other countries Copyright 2008 Avocent Corporation All rights reserved GO GREEN SAVE GREEN A S NUA Linux offers you ways to go green and save some green at the same time James Gray CFENGINE FOR CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT How to use cfengine to manage configuration files across large numbers of machines Scott Lackey PXE MAGIC FLEXIBLE NETWORK BOOTING WITH MENUS What if you never had to carry around an install or rescue CD again Set up a PXE boot server with menus and put them all on the network Kyle Rankin 2 april 2008 www linuxjournal com GRAPHIC ADMINISTRATION WITH WEBMIN New to Linux administration Webmin can help you out Federico Kereki e VMware Server 2 0 Beta p 40 le Greening the Data Canter p 46 gt Ciengine tor the Enterprise p52 e Set Up a PXE Server and Boot Kickstart Images p 58 E mplify Aa S W W D 64 e A Look at Puppy
215. ven an opportunity to override this name PETget is very straightforward to work with Typically it s used to download updates and additions trom the network using wget and it finds and resolves dependencies fairly seamlessly The PETget operations can be very interactive and the dialogs present a lot of information Be sure you understand what s being installed or updated and that you ll need to restart the window manager Menu gt Shutdown restart JVWVM before new applications are added to the Menu button structure Also depending on what s been installed because so much of the runtime is maintained on the RAM disk for efficiency the system may need to be rebooted So take time to read the PETget dialogs Just as noteworthy as the first boot is the first terminated session Here s some detail on a sample interaction the first time the system is rebooted or powered down rue Quad Core w Chl K entsneid gt 100 1GB RAM m Screen 1 save changes to file Yes No Specify yes if you want the changes you ve applied to be carried to sub sequent sessions 100 Mbps m Screen 2 if you ve decided to save your changes you ll be asked for a target what mounted filesystem or removable media Clo your Feel the speed of Power Quad Core 2x Sash Core BOT LE P Clo VE ertown 180 Vertov 3140 vl 500 250 GB SATA 1300 GB mo Included Dedicated Port A Dadir a mi a
216. ven without exploring beyond the surface material covered here PL can be used as a portable computing environment There s something very intriguing about carrying a computing desktop around on a key chain in a shirt pocket PL s Universal Installer can remaster a current system snapshot on a USB drive providing it s large enough and that carry along drive can be used to boot your customized PL and user data onto any PC that s capable of booting from a USB device An overview of the USB setup process is available at www pendrivelinux com 2006 03 25 puppy linux on usb If Windows or some other installed OS becomes inoperable that could present an untimely dilemma making your basic desktop services unavailable and blocking access to the data residing on the system drives Booting PL from removable media and gaining access to those drives provide the core of a data recovery tool and a temporary at the very least usable desktop environment Even if you re not dealing with an emer gency now it s a good idea to obtain and test a bootable PL image just to make sure you can boot it and see your system devices your internal disks the network and removable media devices You ll be that much closer to data recovery and or a functioning desktop platform should an emergency arise PL would be an excellent framework for any academic coursework that revolves around software development system internals or small device control and the like
217. volumes different standard schemes or if you preter pking Hlth guided parisien ing y ou wii stil hare a ass later to review and customise the result Ubuntu Server Installation As I ve often said security begins with operating te shed wien ot shuld e ne aoa A cans aati Aa system installation This is where you decide your system s role what set of applications will run on Lar peer the machine and what type and degree of user Gulden use entire disk and set up enerupted LWN access it will support So to what degree does the Go Bacio Ubuntu Server installer help system security The Ubuntu Server installer is very similar to the Ubuntu Desktop installer except that the Server installer is if anything even more minimalist It guides you through partitioning your hard disk asks what category of software packages to install walks mM Can create encrypted disk volumes you through creating a login account not root E Doesn t ask you for a root password because installs the software and then depending on what you never log on as root in Ubuntu you installed it may or may not ask you a few very basic questions with which it begins barely config Is surprisingly fast obviously thanks to its simplicity uring one or more of those applications The good news is that the Ubuntu Server installer Mm Generally installs things with conservative fairly Expert included Travis takes the concerns of his customers v
218. w mode 600 Owner root action fixall This brings us to an important topic in building a cfengine implementation groups There is a groups command that can be used to assign hosts to groups based on various criteria Custom groups that are created in this way are called soft groups The groups that are filled by the cfenvd d mon automatically are referred to as hard groups To use the groups feature of cfengine and assign some soft groups simply create a groups cf Tile and tell the cfagent cont to import it somewhere in the beginning of the file import any groups cf Cfengine will look in the default directory for the groups ct tile in var ctengine inputs Now you can create arbitrary groups based on any criteria It is important to remember that the terms groups and classes are completely interchangeable in cfengine groups development nfs 1 nfs0 2 10 0 0 17 production appO0l app0 2 development You also can combine hard groups that have been discovered by cfenvd with soft groups groups legacy irix compiled_on_cygwin sco Let s get our testing setup in order First install cfengine on a server and a client or workstation Cfengine has been com piled on almost everything so there should be a package for your OS distribution Because the source is usually the latest version and many versions are bug fixes recommend compil ing it yourself Installing cfengine gives you both the server and client b
219. words Instead of assigning rights to each user you can create groups Go to Webmin gt Webmin Users and click Create a new Webmin group Select what functions should be allowed to members of this group and finish by clicking Create From now on when you create new users you can specify to which group they belong and their rights will be assigned automatically You also should take a look at the Unix User Synchronization option which allows the automatic synchronization of Once you have Webmin installed correctly upgrading it or adding more modules is a breeze Linux users and Webmin users You can set it up so that every time a Linux user is created deleted a corresponding Webmin user also is created deleted The Unix User Authentication option also might be of interest if you have many users who should be allowed access to Webmin Additionally you can use the View Login Sessions to check whatever the users might have done Using Webmin Using Webmin is quite simple as you might already have guessed from the examples above Choose a category from the menu on the left side of the screen and it opens up 68 april 2008 www linuxjournal com showing a list of available modules The main page for each module usually includes a Module Contig link on its top left corner which lets you do some configuration and a Help link that provides documentation on the module s functions Here are the categories Webmin provides gen
220. x 18TA 50 Duel core 5050 CPU 148 667TMG FEDI MMe netalled Suppearts 16GB FADI Miri PE RISO hiswnp SATA II D rivna mai allaa Jd pon SATA II RAID CARD BRAL 2210 1001000 LAN onboard 030w Red PS 10TB Sierage inzialled Max 30TB BU Dual core 050 CPU FAS O50 installed 1AB 667M 27 FADI Miia Suppers 2708 FRADI MMA 3022750068 hiswap SATA I Drives inzialled 212 Pern SATA II Muttilane RAID centraller 1216 Pont SATA II Mutilane RAID amp ntr ll r ZW 0 10071 000 LAN onboard 1850 W Red Ps AN systems installed and tested with users choice af Linux distribution free ASA Collocation 75 per month 2354 Calle Del Mundo www N asa acomputers com ey inside P 1 800 REAL PCS FAX 408 654 2910 intag intek Xeon Intel Inside Intek ttanium emama i a othe mr Powerful Efficient Dodani and aualahiiiy wile vo dhii hba Not responsible for typographical errors COLUMNS MICK BAUER PARANOID PENGUIN Security Features in Ubuntu Server Use old school administration skills to benefit from modern tools on Ubuntu Server Last month offered a survey of security features in Ubuntu Desktop 7 10 a single CD Linux distribu tion that combines the flexibility of Debian with a very easy to use set of graphical setup administra tion tools Ubuntu also comes in a server version which in some ways is just a re configuration of
221. x 1TB 8TB Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e 1000W AC Power Supply w PFC e 560W AC Power Supply w PFC e 700W Redundant Hot Swap Power Supply e 5 Year Warranty e 5 Year Warranty e 5 Year Warranty Starting at Starting at Starting at ABERDEEN STIRLING X314 ABERDEEN STIRLING X418 ABERDEEN STIRLING X526 3U 12TB Dual Quad Core Storage Server 4U 16TB Dual Quad Core Storage Server 5U 24TB Dual Quad Core Storage Server e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Up to two Quad Core Intel Xeon processors e Intel 5000P Chipset with 64 Bit Support e Intel 5000P Chipset with 64 Bit Support e Intel 5000P Chipset with 64 Bit Support e Up to 32GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 32GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 32GB 667MHz ECC Fully Buffered FBDIMM Memory e Up to 12 x 1TB 121B Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to 16 x 1TB 161B Total Hot Swap SATA Hard Drives e Up to two Internal SATA Hard Drives for OS e Areca ARC 1231ML PCI Express 800MB sec RAID Controller e Areca ARC 1261ML PCI Express 800MB sec RAID Controller e Areca ARC 1280ML PCI Express 800MB sec RAID Controller e 650W 2 1 Redundant Hot Swap Power Supply e 650W 2 1 Redundant Hot Swap Power Supply e 950W 3 1 Triple Redundant Hot Swap Power Supply e 5 Year Warranty e 5 Year Warranty e 5 Year Warranty Starting at Starting at Starting at ABERDEEN STIRLING X633 i marae Dee K340 intel 6U 32TB Dual Qua
222. y the Standard And although such capabili ties would seem to be against the interests of the various social network ing companies it is most certainly in the interest of the individual users Of course given that OpenSocial is nothing more than a specification and set of JavaScript libraries there s still hope Perhaps someone will cre ate a JavaScript library that allows OpenSocial client applications to store and retrieve state on a remote server that is not on the OpenSocial con tainer s server in a format that can be unpacked and used across systems easily Such a library might be difficult to create particularly given the vari ous user visibility and privacy issues But it would be an additional step toward not just code portability but data portability that many people would like to see in OpenSocial should note that I m not the first or only person to raise some of these concerns Tim O Reilly among others has expressed his disappointment with the initial versions of OpenSocial see Resources Conclusion OpenSocial provides a standard library and packaging system for applications that fit into a social networking site Assuming that enough sites implement the OpenSocial specification this will greatly ease the burden from developers who still will have to develop for Facebook This month we took a short look at what the OpenSocial standard offers developers and how we can create applications t
223. yncJe for BlackBerry www nexthaus com Synthesis SyncML Standard for PalmOS www synthesis ch 36 m8i 4 Take a Screenshot from an X Terminal To take a screenshot of the entire screen and save the image as screenshot png use the command import window root screenshot png To select an area to capture with a crosshair use import without the window option To take a screenshot of a specific area of the screen 82 april 2008 www linuxjournal com use the crop option along with the dimension in pixels for example import crop 300X250 The import utility is part of the ImageMagick suite OT tools JAGADISH KAVUTURU Bare L J new Web 2 0 m The O Reilly Where 2 0 Conference champions leading trends creating value and change in the location industry Bringing together the people projects and issues building new technological foundations in a geospatial Where 2 0 seeks to expose and understand the tools pushing the boundaries of the location frontier Join technologists CTOs researchers geographers academics business developers and entrepreneurs at this cutting edge event Be at Where 2 0 debate and discuss what s viable now and what s lurking just below the radar gt gt gt REGISTER NOW AND SAVE 15 lt lt lt May 12 14 2008 Burlingame CA 2006 O Reilly Media Inc O Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O Reilly Media Inc All ot
224. you work for pretty much because nobody really cares if you re in a tech company and you have interest in something like the Linux kernel the reason you have interest in the Linux kernel probably has something to do with the kind of people you have working for you think most companies have slowly started to learn We have our differences one misleading thing is thinking that people kind of share ideals and goals and that s not true It s quite often the case that people have completely different goals you have commercial vendors who have their very clear commercial goals and in the Open Source so called community you often find individuals who really don t like commercial entities espe cially not the big ones So quite often the goals are very different Like Yoda said Trust either comes or it does not come and it largely depends on your actions it used to be a huge issue when companies kind of were talking about How do we interact with the community when the real answer always ends up being you don t interact with the community you just act as a mem ber of this non existent community you don t interact with it you are part of it Looks matter think the thing that more people worry about is actually interfaces It makes more of a difference that the way you connect to a mobile phone is different from the way you connect to a deskt
225. your favorite browser and navigate to http localhost 10000 or the equivalent http 127 0 0 1 10000 and you ll see Webmin s login page Next enter the user name and password for the system administrator in many distributions that would be root but Ubuntu and others grant sysadmin rights to specific users instead and click the Login button You could check the Remember login permanently box but that s a security risk so recommend not doing that bims a s p basm ee ee af BO an h amp 2 a i 4 Vay Tutt eE a T rd pane bx ing a the ea eee Oo Eel ee feresion kag Derry i Figure 1 Initial Webmin Login Screen TAR OO 8 Kae amp H C ee C3 CE same Y webmin Hama i Birn arina inter 5 igerra peter ee Lee 16 parae ehna verus T agt Teer on rer i lan 8 a oe 3 DA bel E T SPC mini p UE mira E Core viia etary CO total ovis tate Lena iBook spent TEETE Figure 2 After logging in you ll see a menu and system information on the screen If you want to save yourself some typing save that address as a bookmark For example in Firefox either press Ctrl D or go to Bookmarks gt Create new bookmark Alternatively for even less typing create a desktop icon If you use KDE 66 april 2008 www linuxjournal com right click on your desktop select Create New Link to Location URL enter the URL above and click OK The process is similar if you use GNOME You can make it even snazzier by right

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