November 17, 2004
Gandhi's Universal Truth
Those famous words of the Mahatma. RedHat seems to have hit the right spot with them. In the latest war of words with some other OS vendors. The response was most probably incited by outburst from Sun and Microsoft recently among all the earlier attempts to malign them.
They go on to say -
Over the years the establishment has claimed Linux wasn't ready, wrote it off as too expensive, and compared open source to cancer and communism. All while they declared it to be enemy number one. We know why. It starts with the open source. This is how we rapidly innovate and provide the levels of reliability and security the establishment can never match. In an open environment, everyone can participate and compete.
Very True.
May 27, 2004
The Great FiaSCO
A luminary posted an interesting message on the Yahoo! Financials message boards. He talked about a book he has co-authored with other luminaries. In one of the chapters he writes about a fictional pathetic little company called Fiasco which is falsely claiming ownership of Linux copyrights, trying to extort money from users, and filing multibillion dollar lawsuits. Sendai, his character, knows this is a scam. He decides to take down Fiasco's web site. How he does that using Nmap, Hping and Ndos is described in the chapter.
December 02, 2003
Talk Till You Drop
The ongoing community-driven Linux Bangalore 2003 is upto a record of sorts. There are, hold your breath, 96 scheduled talks. 
That's about 96 hours of open-source talk in three days! The first day with 30 talks is already over with star speakers like Nat Friedman, Miguel De Icaza and Sirtaj Singh Kang enthralling the audience with their refreshing perspectives on Linux and Open Source. Rasmus Lerdorf and Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Inc, amongst others, are also scheduled to talk at the event.
September 26, 2003
Shoo Schoo SCO
They are getting nastier by the day. But the community gurus were quick to reply back (1 | 2 | 3). But I think we need more than plain talk with these guys with shady reputations. We need someone like the big blue brother who can help us in needy times.
June 19, 2003
Ma, I want that money
On the recent SCO-IBM tussle, Forbes' Daniel Lyons has an interesting observation about SCO. Historically SCO and its executives have had a bad habit of earning money from lawsuits and horsetrading. In 1996, Ralph J Yarro III was responsible when Caldera sued Microsoft over DOS and settled out-of-court. In 1997, Darl Mcbride sued his former employer IKON and won a settlement in millions.
I'm not a guy who goes away quietly in the night. I fight
This what Yarro has to say about IBM. You need lots of good luck this time, Mr Yarro. If you compare the current SCO rhetoric against Linus and Linux in general with the praise that they showered on Linux when they launched Tarantella in Bangalore at bang!inux 2000, you might think they are altogether different companies.
April 09, 2003
Hamara Gnome
Yeah, Gnome 2.0 in Hindi on RedHat 8.0. These guys at IndLinux are doing a pretty good job. Got this from MS's darkcurrent.org (which has finally kicked off after a year of 404's, hurray!). I wonder what happened to the project that was localizing MT in Hindi. Arnab, I think we should move forward on it.
December 26, 2002
Politics of technology
After having tried every possible trick up its sleeves, calling Linux a cancer, calling it un-American, calling it as an evil to businesses and whatever, Microsoft is now, like a typical political leader who looks for a pretext to malign his opponent, concentrating on `business values'. It says that MS products are the best choice ``when you make a buying decision based on the business value.'' What does business value signify here? Is it busines value for MS?
December 09, 2002
Linux on the stall
What's with Newspaper vendors and Linux? Can't find anything common. Well, that is not the case with my newspaperwallah. This middle-aged guy who sits near the railway station on the west side, is my regular source for newspapers, magazines and journals. I used to think till recently that he might be just another vendor trying to sell tabloids and other 'exciting' stuff. The other day, I was pleasantly surprised by his knowledge. I was browsing through various tech mags and was a bit dissapointed to find not a single interesting one. He asked me what I was looking for. I told him, I am looking for something on Linux. Suddenly there is a glow on his face. He started off with how MS is getting the shivers about Linux and how recently Linux has gained popularity. I asked him if he could get me Linux Journal and Unix Magazine, he enthusiastically agreed and told me to come back in 2 days and enquire. Looks like he also reads what he sells!
October 18, 2002
UNICS
Did you know that Unix was jokingly called UNICS or UNiplexed Information and Computing Service? as opposed to MULTICS which was then an ambitious OS project involving several computer vendors. There were puns making rounds about "EUNUCHS" being a castrated MULTICS. :) It later got changed to Unix. Ken Thompson was thinking of a stripped down version of MULTICS when he wrote Unix. Also did you know that the C language was a by-product of Unix? Unix was initially written using assembler for the PDP-7 minicomputer. When the problem of porting it to other platforms arose, Ritchie wrote C and both Thompson and Ritchie rewrote Unix in C! They say it as if it's as easy as whipping up a perl script for a quickfix!
October 14, 2002
Linux for Academia
Following the footsteps of various governments around the world, the Indian Government has decided to standardize on Linux and open source software for academic purposes. The Department of Information Technology says, 'As a first step we are persuading all government institutions to offer courses on Linux and programming for Linux environment. We would also set up Linux Resource Centres in academic institutes (with co-funding from government and industry).' Going by the high targets they have set for mass adoption of IT, this is a step in the absolute right direction.
July 24, 2002
Cacti
If you are a networking guy and haven't heard of MRTG[traffic grapher] or RRDtool[a database backend], you should be sitting at home. These are tools used for monitoring traffic loads on network links. There's a good page on MRTG-RRDtool integration. Then there's Cacti which, using RRDtool, can graph almost any data including SNMP. Using Cacti one can do most of the configuration for RRD right from a web interface. Cacti also has 'graph hierarchies', round robin archives and admin management with delegation suitable for colocation situations. I am seriously considering using Cacti for my SNMP capable devices.
June 04, 2002
Ext2 and Ext3
An answer to the classical question of how to convert an ext2 partition to ext3 ? And how to convert back an ext3 partition to ext2 ?. I keep searching for these links whenever I need to resize my linux partitions. Most disk utilities do not understand ext3.
May 02, 2002
Some good links on IBM
Some good links on IBM for linux partitioning -
Getting the most out of swap
Partitioning in action: Consolidating data
Partitioning in action: Moving /home
Here's the homepage of Linux on IBM
April 10, 2002
Benchmarking Mail
It is a know fact that Milter slows down your mail delivery system. So you can check out the performance of your mail server before and after installing Milter interfaces using this tool, Postal. Basically its a benchmarking tools for SMTP servers.
MIMEDefang Tips
Wo! there already is a MIMEDefang Tips site.
libmilter
Hmm. Milter or libmilter is a cool API provided by Sendmail to play around with the content of mails (which was not possible in sendmail up till now) and look for interesting patterns. Depending upon the pattern, one can accept, reject, discard or alter the mail. I know of two interfaces to Milter, PerlMx (in perl) and the Python module for Milter. Another good one is MIMEDefang .
March 18, 2002
Man on web
What to do if you do not have your linux man pages nearby? You need to go here -
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/
June 03, 2001
HTTP benchmarking
Here is an article from UnixReview on HTTP bechmarking. If you want to benchmark your web server all by yourself, rather than relying on third parties, you can read it. Other good places are the Linux HTTP Benchmarking HOWTO, httperf and autobench.
Unrelated to the above topic, Here's a ZDNet review of Redhat Linux 7.1.
June 01, 2001
IP Personality
hehe, do you want to give a personality to your Linux Box?? Want your box to behave like say, a Windows machine or a Solaris box?? It's possible.... but only if you have a 2.4 or above kernel. Take a look at IP Personality. The Linux IP Personality patch adds to your Linux 2.4 kernel the ability to have different 'personalities' network wise, that is to change some characteristics of its network traffic, depending on different parameters (anything you can specify in an iptables rule: src/dst IP address, TCP or UDP port, etc.)
May 27, 2001
Linux Everywhere
[musing] Linux on the desktop, Linux on the workstation, Linux on the Server, Linux on the Mainframe, Linux on the laptop, Linux on the palmtop, Linux on the Palm, Linux in clusters, Linux in a floppy, Linux on the mobile, Linux on the miniature robot, Linux in a matchbox server, Linux on Windows, Linux on my mind, Linux on my comp, Linux on my neighbour's comp, Linux at workplace, ....err...... what next?....did I miss something?
Linux Distros
The Duke of URL has done a very good Linux Distribution Round-Up. Read it here.
May 19, 2001
SORHL
here's a link to the online book "Securing and Optimizing Linux"
Linux Newbies
There you all newbies, now watch how to do stuff in Linux. Here are video tutorials or how-tos for Linux.
Linux Progress Patch
You dont care about the junk that comes up on the screen when linux boots up. You want a startup screen just like in Mac with a progress bar? Go to Linux Progress patch
