Sameh Attia

75 Open Source Apps That Could Improve Your Life

2012-01-27T21:53:00.000+02:00

'Tis the season for New Year's resolutions. But if you're like many Americans you may have already fallen off the wagon. One study by psychologists at the University of Scranton found that 36 percent of the people who made New Year's resolutions had already broken them by the end of January, and less than half (44 percent) were still going strong in July.

Fortunately, the open source community has created a lot of tools to help you keep your promises to yourself. We last researched these types of open source apps in 2010, so we updated the list for 2012. We found apps to help you improve your financial situation, lose weight and get fit, quit smoking, break a bad computing habit, start your own business, get organized, make better use of your time, take up a new hobby, learn a new language, improve your mind and become more spiritual. At the end, we've also included a list of suggestions for those few people whose resolution is to try out an open source application for the first time.

As usual, feel free to make use of the comments section below to note of other apps we should consider the next time we update this list.

Improve Your Financial Situation

1. Buddi
Designed for home users who have "little or no financial experience," Buddi aims to offer all the features most people need while keeping the interface as simple as possible. It tracks account balances, transactions and budget categories, and it creates simple reports. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

2. Financisto
This open source Android app lets you track your budget from your smarphone or tablet. Key features include Quicken and CSV import, support for multiple accounts and currencies, recurring transactions, budgets and advanced reports. Operating System: Android

3. HomeBank Now nearly 17 years old, this personal finance solution boasts powerful filtering and graphing tools. It imports and exports data to other financial software, and it offers helpful features like auto-completion, transaction reminders and a "car cost" report that tallies up all your vehicle-related expenses. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

4. iFreeBudget
This extremely simple double-entry accounting budget is aimed at home or small business users. The interface is very basic, but the Android support is nice for tracking purchases as you make them. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android

5. jGnash
Java-based jGnash offers double-entry accounting for your home finances. It imports data from Quicken and Microsoft Money, and it tracks investments and supports multiple currencies. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

6. JStock
This portfolio manager offers near real-time data from 24 world stock markets. Two features that set this project apart are the cloud-based storage option and the integrated chat capabilities for exchanging tips with other investors. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

7. KMyMoney
This app from KDE claims to be "the BEST Personal Finance Manager for FREE Users, full stop." If you've ever used Quicken or Microsoft Money, you should find it easy to use, and it also imports and exports Quicken files. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

8. Money Manager Ex
With "all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application," Money Manager Ex offers a very user-friendly, simple interface. Key capabilities include AES encryption, one-click reporting, the ability to run from a USB drive without an install, depreciation tracking, investment tracking, international support and import from CSV and Quicken file formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

9. StockManiac
StockManiac describes itself as an "investment time machine" for private investors. It tracks transactions and stores documents related to your portfolio, and it makes it easy to track multiple accounts and multiple portfolios. It automatically updates stock prices with Internet data, and it includes a feed reader that lets you keep up on relevant news. Operating System: OS Independent

10. UnkleBill
One of the newer double-entry accounting apps on our list, UnkleBill offers a particularly attractive interface, complete with a cute UnkleBill cartoon character who offers tips and advice for new users. It supports multiple users and multiple accounts, and it creates PDF reports. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Lose Weight/Get Fit

11. Cronometer
If you're on a restricted calorie diet, this app can help you track the calories in the foods you eat as well as other health data. The link above will take you to the free Web app; you can find the source code at SourceForge. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, iOS

12. eFit Calorie Counter
With a database of nutrition information for 10,000 foods, this app helps you plan meals and count the calories you consume. It also includes a helpful recipe creator and a tool for tracking your body measurements. Operating System: Windows

13. iDiet
This app supports multiple diets, including Atkins, Summer Fresh, The Zone and Body for Life. Simply input the diet you're following and your goal. The app calculates how many calories, fat, protein, carbs, etc. you should be eating and then tracks your actual food consumption to see if you are staying on your plan. Operating System: OS Independent

14. My Tracks
This Android app uses your smartphone's GPS to trace your path when you go running, walking, biking or hiking. When you're finished, you can import your time, distance, speed and elevation change to a spreadsheet so that you can track your fitness or share your stats with others. Operating System: OS Independent

15. SportsTracker
Whether you're training for a specific event or just want to track your progress toward a more healthful lifestyle, Sports Tracker makes it easy to set up a plan and track your statistics. It also integrates with several popular heart monitors. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

16. TurtleSport
If you have a Garmin fitness device like the Forerunner or the Edge, this app can retrieve your data and create reports. It also integrates with Google Earth and Google Maps so that you can see where you've been. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Quit Smoking

17. QuitCount
This Linux-only app helps keep you motivated to stop smoking. You tell it the day you quit, and it keeps a running total of how much money you've saved, how much tar you didn't put into your body and how much time you have added to your life expectancy. Operating System: Linux

18. Smoke Reducer
Smoke Reducer keeps track of how long it's been since your last cigarette. It plays an alarm when it's time to smoke again, gradually lengthening out the time between smoking sessions until you stop completely. Operating System: Android

Stop a Bad Computing Habit

19. Amanda
Short for "Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver," Amanda is one of the most popular backup solutions available. It's designed for businesses or other other organizations with a large network of computers that needs to be backup up regularly. Operating System: Windows, Linux

20. Areca Backup
Not backing up your system is one of the worst of the bad computing habits. Fortunately, Areca Backup makes it fast and easy to copy your files to an external drive, and it offers advanced features like compression, encryption, delta backup and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux

21. BleachBit
How long has it been since you performed basic system maintenance on your PC? BleachBit helps speed up your system and protect your privacy by cleaning out your cache, deleting temp files and other junk, and erasing cookies. It also includes a file shredder to eliminate completely all traces of files containing sensitive or personal information. Operating System: Windows, Linux

22. AxCrypt
If you store personal information or data from your small business on your PC, you really should encrypt those files, especially if you are using a laptop. Downloaded more than 2.4 million times, AxCrypt integrates with Windows Explorer to make encrypting or decrypting individual files fast and easy. Operating System: Windows

23. TrueCrypt
If you don't want other people to be able to access any of the data on your drive, try TrueCrypt. It encrypts entire drives or partitions on the fly. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

24. KeePass
If your bad habit is using the same password for everything, KeePass can help. It stores unique passwords for every site or service you use in an encrypted database—you just have to remember one master password, and KeePass does the rest. Operating System: Windows

25. PWGen
Using easy-to-guess passwords is just as bad as using the same password all the time. PWGen creates strong passwords for you, so you won't be tempted to use "password" or "123456." Operating System: Windows

Start Your Own Business

26. Apache OFBiz
The Apache Open for Business Project includes much of the software you need to run a business—ERP, CRM, e-commerce, warehouse management, fulfillment, accounting, point of sale, and more—all in one free package. If you need support or consulting services to help you get started, check out the list of service providers on the site. Operating System: OS Independent

27. PrestaShop
If you're considering starting your own online business, PrestaShop might be for you. This award-winning shopping cart has been used to power more than 100,000 online stores, and it's very easy to use. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

28. Magento
Acquired by eBay last year, the Magento e-commerce platform powers more than 110,000 sites, including stores for Office Max, Harbor Freight Tool and The North Face. The community version is free; paid professional and enterprise versions and an SaaS version are also available. Operating System: Windows, Linux

29. Zen Cart
Designed in part by actual small business owners, this e-commerce tool is aimed at users without a lot of technical skills. The site includes plenty of tutorials and links to other services that are helpful when you're starting your own online business. Operating System: Windows, Linux

Get Organized

30.Data Crow
If your resolution involved organizing a large collection of CDs, DVDs, books or other stuff, Data Crow can help. This self-proclaimed "ultimate media cataloger" connects to online services to provide detailed data about the items in your library, and it even includes a feature to help you keep track of who borrowed your things. Operating System: OS Independent

31. Dia
Need to create a flowchart or org tree? Dia is the perfect tool for the job, and it's free. Operating System: Windows, Linux/Unix

32. GanttProject
If you're organizing a very large project, you may want to check out GanttProject. It's similar to Microsoft Project, and it allows you to divide a project into smaller subtasks, assign people to each task, and schedule it all. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

33. FreePlane
This fork of FreeMind (see below) has been racking up thousands of downloads. It offers traditional mind-mapping features, plus some advanced functionality. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

34. FreeMind
This mind-mapping software makes it easy to organize your thoughts, plan your activities, brainstorm or take notes. It's like an electronic whiteboard that lets you draw arrows and lines between words to show the relationships between your ideas. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

35. Gourmet
Gourmet helps you organize your recipes. It imports recipes from multiple formats, including websites, plus it generates shopping lists and counts the calories in the meals you're making. Operating System: Windows, Linux

36. OpenProj
OpenProj offers similar features as GanttProject and Microsoft Project. Note that the feature that allows you to export to PDFs is not open source, but the rest of the software is. Operating System: Windows, Linux, Unix, OS X.

37. PNotes
Much like real-world sticky notes, PNotes lets you leave virtual sticky notes for yourself on your computer. Interesting features of this app include audio notes, scheduling, password protection, encryption, transparency and more. Operating System: Windows

38. Stuff Organizer
Stuff Organizer makes it easy to organize and find any kinds of files on your computer—whether they're music, video, or just documents. Features include a compression extracting utility, tagging support and integration with several Web services that provide data about multimedia files. Operating System: Windows

Make Better Use of Your Time

39. eHour
If you're a freelancer, consultant or other professional who bills by the hour, eHour can help you track and bill for the time you spend on projects. It also has some multi-user capabilities suitable for small offices. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

40. Rachota
One way to make sure you're being as efficient as possible is to track the amount of time you spend on tasks. Rachota does just that—for both work and home situations. It's also portable, so you can take it with you. Operating System: OS Independent

41. RedNotebook
This innovative app adds a text editor to a calendar/to-do list app. The result is perfect for keeping a diary or making notes about upcoming events. Operating System: Windows, Linux

42. Makagiga
Makagiga offers the same schedule/journal functionality as RedNotebook, plus it adds a sticky notes widget and a feedreader. Other optional add-ons are also available. Operating System: Windows, Linux

43. qOrganizer
Like several of the other options in this category, qOrganizer offers a calendar, to-do list and an integrated journal. However, this one also adds special student-focused features, such as a booklet for tracking grades and attendance, a timetable for tracking classes and an extra loud alarm in case you've dozed off while studying. Operating System: Windows, Linux

44. Task Coach
Unlike many similar to-do list managers, Task Coach allows you to break tasks down into smaller sub-tasks. It also allows you to tag and organize tasks, and it integrates with some of most well-known e-mail clients, including Outlook and Thunderbird. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Take Up a New Hobby

45. Storybook
If writing a novel is on your to-do list for this year, Storybook can help you get started. It keeps an overview of characters and scenes in one place, helps you organize your book and includes features to help you maintain continuity. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

46. Celtx
Planning to tackle writing a screenplay or producing your own film? This "all-in-one movie pre-production system" can help you write scripts, produce storyboards, and much more. It boasts more than 1.5 million users in 170 countries. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

47. Stellarium
Have you always wanted to learn more about astronomy? Stellarium can show you the stars in the night sky as seen from any point on earth at any time—it's the same software used by many planetariums. You can use it to help plan your nightly viewing or just to learn more about the universe. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

48. Celestia
Like Stellarium, Celestia helps amateur astronomers explore the night sky, but this project goes one step further. It also lets you virtually "fly" throughout the galaxy and see how the stars would look from Mars, Jupiter or any other point in space. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

49. Gramps
Short for "Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System," Gramps is one of the best acronyms we've ever seen on an open source project. It's a professional-quality genealogical program with a very active user community and more than 1,100 pages of online documentation to help you trace your own family history. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

50. GenealogyJ
Like Gramps, GenealogyJ is a tool for viewing and editing your family history, but it was designed for amateurs, not professionals. Java-based, it creates family trees, timelines, maps, reports and more. Operating System: OS Independent

51. Sweet Home 3D
Determined to spruce up your home this year? This app helps you create 2D and 3D layouts of your rooms, complete with a preview of how the finished product will look. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

52. LenMus Phonascus
Phonascus is a music theory and aural (ear) training program for musicians of all levels. It includes a wide variety of audio and written exercises, as well as a score editor for composing your own works. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

53. GNU Solfege
You might not have been born with perfect pitch, but you can get better with practice. This app will help you improve your ability to identify and sing intervals, chords, scales and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

54. ScoreDate
First, let's make it clear that this app is not at all about dating—the "score" refers to musical scores. ScoreDate aims to teach anyone the basics of reading music. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

55. Numismatic
Yes, there's even an open source project for coin collectors. Numismatica stores data related to your collection in a MySQL database that you can access through a Web app. Operating System: OS Independent

Learn a New Language

56. jVLT
The Java Vocabulary Learning Tool, aka jVLT, aims to help users learn vocabulary for new languages. You can make up your own cardset or use the pre-built sets to learn French, English, Spanish, Thai, Chinese, German, Czech, Finnish or Russian. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

57. Parley
KDE's flashcard program can be used to learn any type of information, but it's particularly well adapted to learning new vocabulary. In addition to standard flashcards, it also offers anagram, multiple choice, fill in the blank, conjugation and other types of exercises. Operating System: Windows, Linux.

58. Step Into Chinese
This app can serve as both a Chinese-English dictionary and a flashcard system for mastering vocabulary. It includes pronunciation, translation and contextual information for more than 26,000 modern Chinese words and concepts. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

59. Zkanji
Zkanji is an elaborate English-Japanese dictionary. Included features can help you learn to write Japanese characters, study vocabulary or find meanings for words you don't know. Operating System: Windows

60. ZWDisplay
ZWDisplay helps those studying Chinese learn to pronounce Chinese words and read Chinese text. Clicking the Chinese characters displays a pinyin pronunciation guide and an English translation. Operating System: Linux

Improve Your Mind

61. Brain Workshop
Research suggests that dual n-back activities can improve working memory and fluid intelligence, and they also seem to help some ADHD/ADD sufferers. Downloaded more than 384,000 times, Brain Workshop lets you give your brain a workout by trying dual n-back exercises for yourself. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

62. CoolReader
If your resolution was to read more, this app can help. CoolReader lets you read e-books on your desktop, laptop or Android device. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

63. FlashQard
This learning tool is founded on two basic principles: different cards for different purposes and the Leitner System. Developed in the 1970s, the Leitner System is a proven methodology for spending more time on more difficult material and less time on materials that's already been mastered. As with many of the flashcard-type apps, this app lets you create your own cards or download sets that have already been created. Operating System: Windows, Linux

64. Genius
If you need to memorize something—anything—Genius can help. It's a spaced repetition flashcard program that can help you pass a test, master a subject, prepare for a speech and more. Operating System: OS X

65. The Mnemosyne Project
Another flashcard-type study aid, The Mnemosyne Project relies on a sophisticated algorithm to determine which card shows up when. Users also have the option of transmitting their data and progress to the project's owners, who are conducting a research project about the nature of memory. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android

66. Pauker
This flashcard app claims to help strengthen your ultra-short-term, short-term, and long-term memory. You can make your own cards if you want to learn something in particular, or you can use one of the many pre-written lessons, which include foreign languages, states/provinces and capitals, chemical elements, multiplication tables, musical terms and even European license plates. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

67. OpenCourseWare
The Open Courseware Consortium offers links to hundreds of "open source" university classes. Study nearly any subject you want with materials from institutions like MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, University of California and dozens of others. Operating System: OS Independent

Become More Spiritual

68. BibleTime
The BibleTime free Bible study software includes data from more than 100 Bibles, commentaries and other reference materials. It's a good alternative to similar commercial software which can cost hundreds of dollars. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

69. Xiphos
This app works much like BibleTime and even links to the same set of free reference materials. However, Xiphos' modular design allows for user-built add-ons, including some that add journaling and prayer list features. Operating System: Windows, Linux

70. Zekr
Zekr brings the text of the Qu'ran to your PC with advanced search, read aloud and other functions. It's open source because the project owners believe you should "never profit off the prophet." Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Give Open-Source a Try

71. Firefox
One of the most well-known open source projects, Mozilla's Firefox browser boasts fast performance, personalization capabilities, and good security. Now it also comes in mobile versions, including a version optimized for tablets. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android

72. OpenOffice.org
Now an Apache Foundation project, OpenOffice.org offers an office productivity suite that reads and saves in Microsoft Office formats. It includes a word processer, spreadsheets, presentations, database and graphics applications. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

73. OpenDisc
This project combines many of the most popular open source apps for Windows into one package. It includes LibreOffice, Firefox, Celestia, The Gimp, Inkscape, Dia, and many other very good open source progams. Operating System: Windows

74. PortableApps.com
This project also collects a ton of open source apps—only this time the apps are formatted so that you can put them on a USB thumb drive and take them with you wherever you go. The standard download comes with some of the most popular open source apps, but the site also includes a library of hundreds of other apps that you can add to your portable drive. Operating System: Windows

75. Ubuntu
Used by 20 million people every day, Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions and one of the most user-friendly to people who are switching from Windows or a Mac. If you have an older PC sitting around, it's easy to install Ubuntu to take it for a test drive—and it comes with a huge library of free apps.

8 Best Free Android Launchers

2012-01-27T21:45:00.000+02:00

The Android platform is arguably one of the most flexible mobile operating systems in the customization stakes. Almost every part of the Android interface can be modified to meet the requirements of the user without having to gain privileged control (often referred to as "root access"). Customization extends far beyond simply changing the wallpaper, sounds, and widgets.

When the Home button on an Android phone is pressed, the stock launcher is displayed. Whilst the concept of this launcher is well thought out, its implementation is not to everyone's taste. Fortunately, there are a whole raft of home replacement applications available for Android, ranging from the slickest and most feature-laden launchers, to the decidedly weird and wacky.

Given the plethora of software, the purpose of this article is to provide an insight into the best free home replacement apps available for the Android platform. Hopefully, there will be something here that will rejuvenate your phone, however old it is.

Now, let's explore the 8 launchers at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews. We give our highest recommendation to LauncherPro, ADW.Launcher, and GO Launcher EX.

Launchers
LauncherPro	Super-smooth home app replacement
ADW.Launcher	Jam packed with features, eye candy, functions and hugely customizable
GO Launcher Ex	Brings a fresh and extraordinary mobile operation experience
Zeam Launcher	Minimalistic and lightweight launcher
MXHome Launcher	Sports a 3D cover page and a classy coffee theme
QQLauncher Pro	Good screen and program management
Launcher 7	Windows Phone 7 style launcher for Android
HelixLauncher	Extends the functions of Launcher

Resize Linux storage with LVM

2012-01-27T21:43:00.000+02:00

You need more space on your server/desktop/etc.. This guide will help you add it to the volume you’re currently using on your system. For the sake of making this an easy-to-follow guide, we’ll assume that you already have the new drive showing in your Linux installation from fdisk, but it’s not yet usable (ie: you made it available from shared storage, you installed a new harddrive, etc..).

First, let’s see if the system can see the new storage:

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table

Note: you’ll also see information about your current drives..
First things first, create a partition on the drive using fdisk, cfdisk, etc.. toggle it type ’8e’.

# fdisk /dev/sdc

Now it should show up a little better in the fdisk -l command.
Next, create the physical volume on the new partition on the new drive:

# pvcreate /dev/sdc1
Physical volume "/dev/sdc1" successfully created

Now, find out the volume group and logical volume names on your system. Make note of these..

# vgdisplay
# lvdisplay

We’ll assume that the information is:
Volume Group: test_vg
Logical Volume: test_lv
Now, use vgextend to add your new drive to the existing volume group:

# vgextend test_vg /dev/sdc1
  Volume group "test_vg" successfully extended

You can see, by viewing ‘vgdisplay’ again, it will show you the added space:

# vgdisplay

Now, pull it across into the logical volume:

# lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/test_vg/test_lv
  Extending logical volume test_lv to 6.88 TiB
  Logical volume test_lv successfully resized

You’re almost home free – now, vgdisplay shows the correct info and so does lvdisplay – but a simple df -h still shows the filesystem size has not changed. Let’s tell the filesystem to stretch out across the full logical volume:

# resize2fs /dev/test_vg/test_lv
resize2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem at /dev/test_vg/test_lv is mounted on /TEST; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 347, new_desc_blocks = 441
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/test_vg/test_lv to 1848109056 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/test_vg/test_lv is now 1848109056 blocks long.

And to see how it worked out:

# df -h
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/test_vg-test_lv   6.8T  4.9T  1.9T  73% /TEST

It worked!

50 Android Apps to Customize Your Smartphone

2012-01-26T08:10:00.000+02:00

Looking for more Android apps to customize your smartphone? Look no further. Here's a list of 50 sweet apps that should be on your radar.

1) Amazon AppStore for Android
This alternative app market is new but gaining ground fast. It doesn't hurt that it gives away a different paid app for free every day. Free.

2) Stats Free
This very useful app lets you track all sorts of usage data from your Android device. It can even alert you if you're about to exceed usage limits or disconnect mobile data if necessary. Free.

3) LastPass Password Manager Premium
Juggling more passwords than you can keep track of? This app may be just what you need. It's a secure password generator that securely syncs your passwords across all your browsers and devices and automatically fills forms on all sites. The app is free, but the service costs $1 per month.

4) Llama – Location Profiles
Do you want or need your phone to change its behavior based on where you are? Look no further than this app. It can change your phone's ringer and ringtones—and a host of other settings as well—based on your location. Free.

5) Tasker
If you need something with even more functionality than Llama, this handy app let's you tweak and automate just about any process on your device. For instance, you could set your device to go into silent mode when you set it face down and to switch back to its prior state when you pick it up. Paid: $6.49.

6) GO Launcher Ex
This launcher app offers smooth and easy customization of your home screen with lots of beautiful themes, fast flip speed and tons of useful functions. Free.

7) GetGlue
Sometimes finding a new television show, movie or music that's up your alley can be tricky. That's where this app comes in. GetGlue is a social network for entertainment. You can check-in to what you're watching, reading or listening to, get recommendations based on your likes and dislikes and see what your friends are into. Free.

8) Vlingo
Need to text, call, tweet or set your Facebook status and your hands are already occupied? That's no problem if you have Vlingo, which allows you to operate your Android phone with your voice. It even works with a wireless Bluetooth headset. Free.

9) chompSMS
Want more control over your SMS app? The highly configurable chompSMS app gives it to you in spades. You can alter the style of your chat bubbles, add themes, a passcode lock, signatures and lots more. There are even blacklisting and Quick Reply features. Free.

10) Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro
Carry your personal trainer in your pocket with this app, which uses GPS to help track your running, cycling and walking and even gives you audio feedback. It even syncs with a number of heart rate and cadence monitors. Paid: $3.99.

11) Anti-Virus Pro
Concerned about malware, viruses and SMS spam? Anti-Virus Pro is a comprehensive security suite for Android that can scan apps, files, settings and media in real time. Paid: $9.99.

12) JuiceDefender
Is the battery on your Android phone consistently running on empty? JuiceDefender can help you extend it! The app intelligently manages your mobile connectivity and other battery-sensitive components to ensure your phone runs as efficiently as possible. For example, the default mode switches your phone from battery-intensive 3G mode to the less-draining 2G mode when you're not actually using the phone, and it turns of the Wi-Fi radio if the charge goes below a certain level. The Advanced Mode allows you to tune the app's triggers based on your individual needs. Free.

13) Seesmic
This Twitter client integrates streams from Twitter, Facebook and even Salesforce.com Chatter into a single client, allowing you to stay on top of all your messages from various sources. Unlike many clients, it supports multiple accounts, giving you the ability when composing a message to send it out via one of your accounts or all of them at once. You can also customize a large number of features. Free.

14) TiKL – Touch to Talk (PTT)
Turn your Android phone into a walkie-talkie with this app. It provides push to talk capabilities between Android phones without additional hardware and without using minutes. Communication is near instantaneous on 3G and 4G networks. Free.

15) Document Scanner
This app allows you to scan documents with your phone's camera, convert it to PDF and e-mail the PDF to anyone. You can even upload the PDF to Google Docs. Paid: $2.98.

16) Bluetooth File Transfer
With this app, you can explore and manage the files on any Bluetooth-enabled device, receive files and send contacts. It's built on FTP and Object Push Profile (OPP). Free.

17) Amazon Kindle for Android
Want to read an electronic book, newspaper or magazine but don't have your Kindle with you? Or don't have a Kindle at all? It's not a problem with this app, which allows you to read any of 900,000 Kindle-formatted books with your Android device. And Amazon's Whispersync that your last page read, bookmarks, notes and highlights will sync across your various devices. Free.

18) Kongregate Arcade for Android
Want to stay up on the newest and hottest Flash games around? This app gives you free access to more than 300 games from the Kongregate community and fully integrates with your existing Kongregate Web account. Free.

19) WolframAlpha
Access WolframAlpha's computational knowledge engine from your phone with this app. Also available for free via the WolframAlpha Web site, the app calculates the answers to complex mathematic and scientific problems in an instant. The app version adds a keyboard with all manner of mathematic and scientific symbols to make entering queries a snap. Paid: $1.99.

20) Evernote
This app allows you to log, index and search all manner of information, from notes to audio to photos. For instance, you can take a photo of a white board and Evernote will recognize the text in the photo, index it and then allow you to find it later by entering a search term from the information on the white board. It even synchs with the Web. Free.

21) EverPaper
EverPaper is a simple but excellent Instapaper client. It doesn't support folders yet, but it's under constant development. It also syncs with EverNote. Free.

22) ActionComplete
ActionComplete is a robust task manager. It is built around projects you create, which are made up of individual actions that serve as milestones in the project. The app is based on the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology created by David Allen in his book: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Free.

23) Fusion Voicemail Plus
Centralize all your voicemail boxes, including mobile, home and office, on your Android phone with this app. It can receive and display FAXes too. Free.

24) NewsRob
This is an excellent, plain but functional Google Reader client with built-in syncing for off-line reading. Free and paid. The free version features ads. NewsRob Pro goes for $7; it removes the ads and adds exclusive features for power users.

25) Astrid Task Todo List
Get yourself organized with this todo list app. It features tagging, timers, reminders, smart task sorting and even tracks partial progress. You can sync your todo list with Remember the Milk, which can sync with Gmail. Free.

26) Google Chrome to Phone
Run the Google Chrome browser on your computer? This app lets you share links, maps and currently selected phone numbers and text between your computer running Chrome and your phone. Free.

27) GDocs for Android
This editor/viewer for Google Documents allows you to create, edit, view, import, export, send documents and sync them with your Google Docs account. Free.

28) Exchange for Android
This app offers Exchange/Outlook sync for your Android! It works with Exchange 2003/2007 and allows you to sync your e-mail, contacts and calendar. It's available for a free five-day trial. After that, a license costs $19.99.

29) SMS2PC
This app automatically forwards SMS messages to your PC if you're working on it so you don't have to reach for your phone. You can reply to messages and create new ones from your Android address book. Paid: $2.50

30) Dropbox
Dropbox is a client for the Dropbox cloud-sharing file storage service. It makes it easy to get files onto your phone without explicit synching. You can add files to it from any of your computers and then access them from any other computer or phone. Free.

31) Lookout
Want to protect your phone? Lookout does just about everything. It provides security against mobile viruses, malware and hackers, backs up your data and even locates your lost or stolen device on a map from the Web. And if you can't find it, you can use Lookout to make your phone "scream" or simply wipe out all the data on it. Free.

32) App Protector Pro
Want a little extra security for your Android phone? App Protector Pro allows you to password protect any application on your phone, including e-mail, SMS, photos and more. Paid: $1.99.

33) Memory Booster – RAM Optimizer
Keep your Android phone running at its fastest with this app. Memory Booster optimizes our phone's memory by recovering memory leaks, flushing temporary libraries and defragmenting your phone's memory. Free.

34) Dolphin Browser HD
Don't like the stock browser that came with your Android phone? The Dolphin Browser HD adds a boatload of features, including multiple tab viewing, full multitouch gestures, a thumbnail "flick" menu, gesture-based search and URLs, a YouTube downloader and browser extensions. Free.

35) handyCalc Calculator
The app adds just about every calculator function you can think of to your Android phone, allowing you to put your scientific calculator in the drawer forever. Free.

36) Fuze Meeting HD
Need an audio- or video-conferencing solution for your Android device? Look no further than this app from FuzeBox. You can invite schedule and start meetings, as well as invite attendees from your address book, and even upload PowerPoint decks, Word documents, PDFs, and HD movies and images from your device. The app is free but the conferencing service is not, though there is a free trial period.

37) MasterCard ATM Hunter
This highly useful app uses your phone's location to find the nearest ATMs. You can even sort according to criteria including: drive through, 24-hour service, wheel chair accessibility and surcharge fees. Free.

38) Gasbuddy – Find Cheap Gas
This app provides comprehensive, real-time gas prices in your area (US and Canada) with maps. Users who pitch in by reporting gas prices in their area can win free gas. Free.

39) Dial Zero
Need to get in touch with customer service and don't want to wait on hold? Dial Zero maintains an index of more than 600 companies and how to cut through their automated answering services to get a live human being in no time. Free.

40) Nesoid Lite
This Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator allows you to play every NES game ever made right on your Android phone. You'll have to take responsibility for the legality of your ROMs. Free.

41) Angry Birds
It's one of the most popular mobile games around for a reason. Use physics to help the Angry Birds destroy the piggies that have stolen their eggs. Free.

42) Slacker Radio
Want to create favorite radio stations and take them with you wherever you go? This app has you covered. While other apps—notably Pandora and Last.fm—also allow you to create your own radio stations, Slacker Radio has the added capability of caching music on your device for whenever you have a data signal so that you still have access to your music when you're offline, like on the subway or a long flight. Free and Paid. The free version gives you access to music streaming, while the paid version gives access to off-line caching for $4.99 a month.

43) Wikidroid
Use Wikipedia often? Wikidroid formats Wikipedia articles for your device with a sleek interface. It even includes voice search and bookmarks. Free.

44) Words with Friends Free
Enjoying playing Scrabble? Take it to you phone with this game. Best of all, you can play your friends whether they're using an Android phone or an iPhone. Free.

45) Sketchbook Mobile
Keep a sketchbook with you wherever you go with this full-featured app from CAD specialist Autodesk. Sketchbook Pro is a professional-grade paint and drawing application with a whole host of tools. It's great for graphic designers on the go. Paid: $0.99.

46) Beautiful Widgets
Not content with the widgets, themes and skins that came with your Android device? This app is what you need. It features hundreds of downloadable skins. Paid: $2.82.

47) Easytether Pro
Looking for a solution to turn your Android phone into a mobile modem? Easytether Pro lets you tether your phone to Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 devices with no tether fees and without requiring root. An easy-to-use wizard guides you through the tethering process. Paid: $9.99.

48) EStrongs File Explorer
File Explorer is a local and network file manager that provides a file explorer for both the local phone and your remote computer. You can view files on your phone and in your computer's shared folder and transfer files between them. You can even play audio and video, browse images and view text. Free.

49) Free Dictionary Org
This simple, no-nonsense English dictionary provides definitions, synonyms, pronunciation and spelling. Free.

50) Ringdroid
Don't like the default ring tones that come with your Android phone? Ringdroid allows you to record and edit sounds and create ring tones from any song you like. Free.

Free Android Apps for Students

2012-01-24T12:15:00.000+02:00

Are you a high school student looking for straight A’s? Or are you a sophomore at college, struggling through the pressure of exams and grades? Do you have an Android? Well here are some apps that you can get to make your life easier. Yeah, that’s right- Android caters to all user groups.

Evernote

My best guess is that you already have it. But if you don’t, get it now. It is a must-have for all campus-trekkers. It combines the best features of note taking into a single app. Evernote would help you keep track of… well… everything. From pictures and notes to to-do lists. You can stay organized with this app even if you have hundreds of notes- thanks to the search feature that helps you find just the right note, thus saving your efforts and time.

WikiDroid

We all know what Wikipedia is. It has become almost as famous as Google. If you are on internet, you know what Wikipedia is. And now it is available on your phone- thanks to Wikidroid. If you are a student, I’m sure you’ve taken help from Wikipedia at one point or another. It is the favorite of millions of students. But the problem with opening Wikipedia on phone is that it takes time to load. This is why they came up with Wikidroid, a Wikipedia app for your Android. Now whenever you have to collect data about any topic, you can easily do so using Wikidroid.

Merriam Webster Dictionary

No need to carry a bulky dictionary in your bag anymore. The Merriam Webster dictionary now fits right into your Android phone. You can also use speech feature to look for words. It not just shows the meanings of words, but a lot more as well. It can show you the synonyms and antonyms of words. Plus if you want to enhance your vocabulary, you can use its Word of the Day feature.

Math Formulary

Personally, I don’t like math. But if you have to prepare for a math test, this app can help you out. This app has almost all formulae that you will ever have to use through high school or college. I saw some formulae and I think this app has it all. I’m no mathematician! Download it and see for yourself.

Student Budget Planner

If you have cash flowing in from your parents, you might not need it. But if you were a student like me who had to plan expenses, this would be the right app for you. If you want to eat every day, your finances should be well organized. This is where you would need this app. It helps you track your expenses so that you know where your money is going. I’m not a big fan of this app by the way, but it’s ok- worth a shot.

10 New Open Source Projects You May Not Know About

2012-01-24T12:10:00.000+02:00

With so many open source software projects under way at any given moment, it can be difficult to keep tabs on all that's going on.

How to Access a PostgreSQL Database from Any Language

2012-01-24T12:06:00.000+02:00

If you’re a system administrator, chances are you use programs that interface with databases every day. One great advantage of open source software is that you can modify your applications’ code to customize it for your needs. If your application uses PostgreSQL on the back end, it’s not hard to access your database from a variety of languages. Here’s how to get started, whether your code is in C, C++, PHP, Tcl, Python, or Perl.
If you’re a complete neophyte when it comes to programming, this process probably isn’t for you. However, if you have at least basic knowledge of SQL and of at least one programming language, I’ll walk you past the first hurdles. You can also turn to the PostgreSQL manual for specific information. While you’re probably running Linux, the same program code should work on other operating systems, as long the same client interfaces are available there. My examples rely on Postgres 9.1, the latest stable release, being already installed and tested. My setup has the server running on a different machine from the client, but on the same LAN; in such a setup, you can easily connect to the server with the command pgsql -U postgres -h x.x.x.x.
Once you know your server accepts connections, make sure you have the rights to install software on the client machine. Also make sure that the database you’re working with is for testing only, so as not to accidentally corrupt anything crucial.

C Interface

C is a popular language when it comes to interfacing with a database. Many database systems are themselves written in C. The language offers speed and flexibility, so if you want to write a client interface, be it console-only or GUI-based, and you don’t want to hear about browsers, C might be your best choice.
The software you need to interface C with Postgres is named libpq. It comes bundled with the PostgreSQL source tree. If you installed the database system from binaries rather than from source, you can always get libpq separately, but keep in mind that you need the -dev package as well (or -devel, depending on your Linux distribution). On Debian and derivatives, the command to install it is # aptitude install libpq-dev. On Red Hat-based systems like CentOS, you can find libpq in the postgresqlxx-libs package, where xx is the major and minor version number. So if you want to interface with a PostgreSQL 9.1 database, you will need to install postgresql91-libs, or postgresql-devel if you’re running Fedora 16. The difference in the names is because RHEL/CentOS users use mostly the Postgres repository, while Fedora users have more up-to-date packages and need a third-party repository only if they’re after an older version. Long story short, any system that supports PostgreSQL will have libpq available, one way or another.
libpq is the API engine for not only C, but also C++, Perl, and Tcl. It gives you the basic functions to connect, query, and alter a database. Most of the functions that you’ll use frequently have names that start with “PQ,” such as PQconnectdb or PQerrormessage. For more examples, turn to the PostgreSQL documentation, or look in src/test/examples. In your C program files, include libpq-fe.h and add the appropriate linker flag, which is -lpq when compiling.
The first thing you’ll want to do is connect to an existing database. PQconnectdb() takes an argument in the form of const char *conninfo that contains the keywords you want, such as dbname=[database_name], and you use this pairing format with the other keywords as well. The most used ones are host, hostaddr (numeric form, to avoid useless DNS lookups), port, user, password, and sslmode. If you don’t provide any arguments, the default options will be used, which is probably not what you want. Suppose your database server has the address 192.168.0.101, the username is postgres, and the database name is testdb1. A first attempt to connect might look like this:

#include 
#include 
int main(int argc,char argv[])
{
    const char *conninfo;
    PGconn *conn;
    if (argc > 1)
        conninfo = argc[1];
    else
    {
        printf("Not enough arguments, exiting...");
        return 1;
    }
    conn = PQconnectdb(conninfo);
    /*Check to see how I did */
    if(PQstatus(conn) = CONNECTION_OK)
        printf("Connection succeeded.\n");
    else
    {
        /*Do something to deal with the error*/
    }
}

Save this code as testlibpq, compile it, and use it like this:

$ testlibpg "hostaddr=192.168.0.101 user=postgres dbname=testdb1"

If everything goes well, you should see “Connection succeeded.” on the screen. That’s gratifying, but so far not very practical. To get anything useful, you need to query the database – but since I started with connecting, I should tell you that in order to disconnect, you call PQfinish, which returns a void and takes *conn as the sole argument.
PQexec, the function for executing queries, returns a PGresult and takes *conn and const char *command as arguments. In our example, let’s just declare a PGresult variable and send a command to the server. I leave to you the part where you check whether the connection is there, and error checking.

PGresult *res;
res = PQexec(conn, "SELECT * FROM mydatabase");
PQclear(res);

Needless to say, the code presented here is nowhere near complete. Its purpose is to show you what the library offers, not to offer ready-to-use code. Nevertheless, with this code, res contains the result of the query, and you can parse it at will. PQresultStatus lets you know how the command went, and returns a status of the form PGRES_COMMAND_OK or PGRES_FATAL_ERROR. You can find a comprehensive list of the exec functions on the PostgreSQL project’s website.
Let’s move on to some more useful functions. For example, PQntuples, given res as an argument, returns the number of columns in the table as an int. It takes a PGresult object as an argument if the query’s status is PGRES_TUPLES_OK, and returns an integer value. PQnfields gives you the number of columns in each row. PQfname returns the column name associated with a number, while PQfnumber does the opposite. To get the value of a single cell, pass to PQgetvalue the usual PG result, along with the cell’s column and row numbers.
All this is good, but PQexec isn’t a genius when it comes to handling multiple SQL commands. Because it returns only one structure, if you have more than one command, it will take into consideration only the results from the last command. Another drawback is that PQexec waits for a command until it’s completed, so you must take extra care when it comes to blocking execution. You can use a series of functions if these shortcomings affect you, such as PQsendQuery and PQgetResult, and use them intelligently for async-friendly code.

C++ Interface

The official PostgreSQL client API for C++ is called libpqxx, but it doesn’t come bundled with the PostgreSQL source. Instead, you can install it from your distribution’s repository or just download it. The README file says you can use libpqxx on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, AIX, and Windows, with Cygwin. You must install libpq before installing libpqxx, as the latter is based on the former.
In C++, the namespace is named pqxx, and you must include a header with that name. Here’s a simple connection and query:

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    pqxx::connection conn;
    pqxx::work w(conn);
    pqxx::result res = w.exec("SELECT 1");
    w.commit();

    cout << res[0][0].as() << endl;
}

This program will print 1 if everything goes as it should. Use and abuse the try/catch keywords to defend against connection errors. If you want to use argv[x], as I did in the C example, you can concatenate the string like this:

pqxx::result res = w.exec("SELECT" + w.quote(argv[1]));

Again, not very useful so far, so how do you actually access results that a query returns? Since res, which stores the data, is an array of tuples, you can use for loops to iterate through the elements:

for (int rownr=0; rownr < res.size(); ++rownr)
{
    const result::tuple row = res[rownr];
    for (int colnr=0; colnr < row.size(); ++colnr)
    {
        const result::field = row[colnr];
        cout << field.c_str() << \t;
    }
    cout << endl;
}

Remember that I used using namespace std;; if you don't use it, alter the lines with cout and endl accordingly.
libpqxx offers a lot of options when it comes to string conversion. The most interesting functions are from_string and to_string; the first basically takes a string argument and a T & obj, which is an existing built-in type, and the second takes only the T & obj, converting it to a string. The complete documentation on this is a useful read.

Connections, Queries, and Transactions

For the rest of this section, I recommend you insert using namespace pqxx;, as I did when writing the code, in order to save some typing, so you won't have to type pqxx::.... With that in mind, let's open a connection to an existing database and perform a transaction and then a query. You will notice the code does about the same as the C code above.
I can use a constructor that takes only one argument, again a string, which will define the connection options (dbname, user, and so on). Since the default username is postgres, I won't include it in my string this time.

connection Conn("dbname=testdb1 hostaddr=192.168.0.101");

I now have an open connection, provided everything went well (again, take care of exceptions!). This, however, is not enough for executing queries – you need to open a transaction by using a transactor, which will save you hassle and time when a connection drops off on you. A transactor is a functor, and functors are handy when dealing with problems that create connections, when you need to know the state of said connection. You can't get that information with simple functions or function pointers, given the way the language is designed.
A functor is a function object, so you can treat it as a function that is state-aware. Let me explain. The operator() in C++ can be overloaded, so you can put any number of elements inside the parentheses. You could say that a functor is a class that defines operator(). If you want a function that adds two values (given as arguments), you would have to hard-code those values. Functors take care of the hardcode limitation, allowing you to use a constructor and add a new object that "overrides" the first values to be added, thus giving the developer more flexibility.
Now that you know what a functor is, let's see how to use the transactor.

// I already have a connection open, as above
class Transaction : public transactor<>
{
 public:
     void operator () (transaction<> & t)
     {
         t.exec ("INSERT INTO mytable VALUES(val1,val2)");

     }

     void on_abort (const string & msg)
     {
         cout << "Transaction failed with message: " << msg << endl;
     }
};
//Inside main()
conn.perform (Transaction());

As you can see, coding queries in C++ isn't hard. You can define transactions and properly format the results you get from the queries (think stringstream), and the rest is easy to accomplish, using loops.

PHP Interface

PHP is widely used for database integration with web pages. The language offers a simple way for programmers to interface with databases.
Make sure you have PHP installed and its PostgreSQL module, which is named php5-pgsql on Debian and derivatives and php-pgsql if you're using CentOS 5. If you compile from source, use the --with-pgsql=[DIR] configure option, where DIR is the directory where Postgres lies. You can use phpinfo() on a web page to check whether PostgreSQL support is enabled and what options have what values. Note that the examples below work with PHP 5, and not necessarily with older versions.
It's more straightforward to open a connection, make a query, and print out the results using PHP than it is with C/C++:

xxx")
    or die('Could not connect: ' . pg_last_error());
$query = 'SELECT * FROM mytable';
$result = pg_query($query) or die('Query failed: ' . pg_last_error());
echo "
\n";
while ($line = pg_fetch_array($result, null, PGSQL_ASSOC)) {
    echo "\t
\n";
    foreach ($line as $col_value) {
        echo "\t\t


\n";
    }
    echo "\t

\n";
}
echo "

$col_value
\n";
//I printed the result in a nice table; thanks to the PHP manual
pg_free_result($result);
pg_close($dbconn);
?>

As you can see, connecting, making a query, and using the results are all a breeze. However, beware when you get user/password information interactively from users. A SQL injection attack might gain a malicious individual access to your database, so make sure you keep informed about security issues.
When working with arrays, and you will need them sooner or later, you can start with the pg_fetch_array() function and move from there:

//I presume I have a connection and a result/query that returns something suitable
$arr = pg_fetch_array($result);
echo $arr[0];

Look at other pg_fetch* functions and use one that fits the task you need to do. pg_num_fields and pg_num_rows can be useful when you want to alter the way you display the results from a query depending on their size.

Tcl Interface

The Tcl language is known for its string processing capabilities, so it might be a good choice if you want powerful parsing of query results. Another cool feature is security, because PL/Tcl (yes, we're talking about an integrated Tcl interface provided by PostgreSQL) has no means to access the inner workings of the database server. If, however, you do need more capabilities, you can look at PL/TclU, where U stands for untrusted. You need superuser access to the database to use it, and the usual extra care is recommended.
Because PL/Tcl is integrated, you don't need to install anything before you use it, but you do need to add to your code the line

CREATE EXTENSION pltcl #or pltclu

Since PL/Tcl is integrated into the Postgres system, it's more useful when it comes to functions and triggers rather than queries and transactions. Generally speaking, languages starting with PL/ are more useful for extending some capabilities instead of providing a complete database-interfacing environment. The general syntax to create your own functions takes the form

CREATE FUNCTION name (argtypes) RETURNS type AS $$
#here goes the function body
$$ LANGUAGE pltcl;

So, for instance, here's a simple add function:

CREATE FUNCTION tcl_add (integer, integer) RETURNS integer AS $$
    return $1 + $2
$$ LANGUAGE pltcl;

If you use STRICT at the end of the line with the LANGUAGE instruction, you don't have to check for null input. If you don't want to use STRICT, use some if blocks and the argisnull keyword (the manual has more on this).
Using values from the database is easy. Say you have a table with computer specs and you want a function to see whether the hardware in question is obsolete and should be changed. You could use code like this:

CREATE TABLE machine (
    name text,
    cpuspeed integer #Mhz
    memory integer #MB
    hard_drive integer #GB
);
CREATE FUNCTION isObsolete (machine) RETURNS boolean AS $$
    if {$1(cpuspeed) < 266 && $1(memory) < 256 && $1(hard_drive) < 2} {
        return "t"
    }
return "f"
$$ LANGUAGE pltcl;

As a small mnemonic, remember the string "spi" (server programming interface) for functions you can use to select, insert, and update objects in a Postgres database. spi functions, such as spi_exec, spi_prepare, spi_execp, and quote, are somewhat similar to PQ functions in libpq. spi_exec takes a SQL command and executes it, and returns the number of rows it processed. You can specify the max number of rows to be returned, and save the values of the selected columns inside Tcl variables, as follows.

spi_exec "SELECT count(*) AS cnt FROM mytable"

spi_prepare prepares and stores a query for later use. When you're ready to use it, you can do that with spi_execp. spi_prepare returns a query ID, so that spi_execp knows what to execute. Finally, quote is useful when single quotes and/or escape chars give you nothing but trouble. Here's an example:

"SELECT $myvar AS ret"
# myvar contains the string "won't"
# when expanding, the parser will give you a nice error message.
"SELECT '[ quote $val ]' AS ret" # this will do just fine

Python Interface

To use PL/Python, make sure you have the following line in the database code you want to work with:

CREATE EXTENSION plpythonu

The final "u" in the above statement stands for untrusted, as we saw with PL/Tcl. Since PostgreSQL 7.4 it's the only available variant. With it, your code can execute with the privileges of a DBA, which again means you must take extra steps to ensure everything is right. PL/Python supports Python 2 and 3, with 2 as the default, which is to say that the plpythonu extension refers to Python 2. If you need one or the other explicitly, use plpython2u or plpython3u.
Function creation in PL/Python has the exact same syntax as the Tcl example, except that you substitute pltcl with plpythonu. Since I don't want to be redundant, I won't repeat the code here. Of course, the function body is simply Python code, as you can see in this reiteration of the add function:

CREATE FUNCTION pyadd (x integer, y integer)
  RETURNS integer
AS $$
  return x + y
$$ LANGUAGE plpythonu;

Before you move on, I recommend you see the subchapter in the manual (42.3.1 and following) on data mapping between PostgreSQL and Python. I guarantee this will save you lots of headaches later.
Using Postgres with Python and even the function names will seem familiar if you read the Tcl section above. Here, the module is called plpy, it's imported automatically, and it offers two functions, execute and prepare:

myobj = plpy.execute("SELECT * FROM mytable", 10)

After you execute this statement, you can access myobj by indexes, as you'd do with any array-type variable. Just as in Tcl, plpy.execute can limit the number of rows it returns; I specified 10.
Some other functions you might find useful are easy to understand because they're named appropriately: plpy.debug(message), plpy.log(message), plpy.info(message), plpy.notice(message), plpy.warning(message), and plpy.error(message). Quoting functions, similar to those in the Tcl example, include quote_nullable(string) and quote_ident(string).

Perl Interface

Perl's string-processing capabilities are second to none, but it's also adept at handling complex query results. Remember to use CREATE EXTENSION plperl in your database code.
Creating a function with PL/Perl is just as simple as it would be with Tcl or Python; just replace the last line with $$ LANGUAGE plperl;. Here's a simple function that returns the bigger of two integers:

CREATE FUNCTION perlmax (integer, integer) RETURNS integer AS $$
    if ($_[0] > $_[1]) { return $_[0]; }
    return $_[1];
$$ LANGUAGE plperl;

If you choose to use STRICT, and I personally recommend it, the function will not get executed at all if it receives null input, and you'll have to write some conditional code to take care of that possibility:

CREATE FUNCTION perl_max (integer, integer) RETURNS integer AS $$
    my ($x, $y) = @_;
    if (not defined $x) {
        return undef if not defined $y;
        return $y;
    }
    return $x if not defined $y;
    return $x if $x > $y;
    return $y;
$$ LANGUAGE plperl;

Remember spi_exec from PL/Tcl? In PL/Perl it's called spi_exec_query and, you guessed it, it does the same thing with the same arguments, the limiter on the rows returned being optional. However, the manual warns us of shortcomings when having huge result sets, so the query I used as an example for Tcl becomes:

$myobject = spi_exec_query('SELECT * FROM mytable', 10);
#Let's get the value of row $i corresponding to mycolumn
$myrow = $myobject->{rows}[$i]->{mycolumn};
#Here's the total number of rows resulted from a query
$nrows = $myobject->{processed};
#What's the command's status?
$rp = $myobject->{status};

As you would expect, the same logging, error message, and quoting functionalities we've seen before are present here as well: elog(level, message) emits a log/warning/error message, quote_literal(string) and quote_ident(string) do what you'd expect, looks_like_number(string) returns true if the arguments seems like a string, and is_array_ref(arg) returns true if the argument can be treated as an array reference.
Had enough? I'll stop here. This should be enough to get you started and to give you an idea of how simple program interfaces to a PostgreSQL database can be.

92 Open Source Apps That Replace Everyday Software

2012-01-21T13:28:00.000+02:00

If you've never tried open source software, you might think that free applications couldn't possibly be as good as those you pay for. This list might change your mind.

Nearly two years ago, we put together a list of 75 Open Source Tools to Replace Apps You Use Every Day.

This year, we made that list a little longer, edited out some of the projects that are no longer actively maintained, updated our descriptions and added some newer projects.

On this list, you'll find a mix of apps for home users, schools, small businesses and enterprises. These applications are all noteworthy for their ease of use and overall quality. In fact, you might even find some that are arguably better than their commercial counterparts.

If you know of other open source projects that you think should be on the list the next time we do an update, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments section below.

Audio/Music

1. Amarok Replaces: iTunes
Like iTunes, Amarok helps you manage and play your music. It integrates with a large number of Web services, including Last.fm, Ampache, Magnatune, Echo Nest and others, so that you can discover new music, and it offers a unique dynamic playlist feature that allows you to search for and play songs by typing phrases like "tracks from around the year 1982." Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

2. aTunes Replaces: iTunes
Java-based aTunes offers a customizable, intuitive user interface for organizing large music collections and playing most types of audio files. Notable features include a karaoke function, an easy-to-use navigator for finding songs and artists quickly, multiple playlists, filters, Last.fm integration, podcast support and advanced statistics about songs played. Operating System: OS Independent

3. Jajuk Replaces: iTunes
Critically acclaimed Jajuk has been called "a powerful iTunes replacement" and "the most powerful jukebox out there." Designed for those with large or scattered music collections, it's extremely fast and intuitive and offers helpful functions like the digital DJ rules-based playlist, advanced rating system, smart shuffle, quick copy and more. Operating System: OS Independent

4. Songbird Replaces: iTunes
Because it also comes in an Android version, this iTunes replacement lets you sync your music collection between your desktop and your smartphone or tablet. It boasts an attractive interface, integrated artist info and the ability to purchase tracks or concert tickets right from the app. Operating System: Windows, OS X, Android

Backup

5. Amanda Replaces: CommVault Simpana, Arkeia, Barracuda Backup Service, Zetta
Amanda calls itself the "most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world" and boasts more than 500,000 users. In addition to the free open source version, it's also available in a supported enterprise version or as a hosted cloud-based service through Zmanda. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

6. Areca Backup Replaces: Carbonite, Nova Backup, Acronis True Image
Best for home users, Areca Backup offers a simple but flexible interface for backing up a single PC or a network. It offers encryption, compression, Delta backup capabilities, as of date recovery and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux

7. Clonezilla Replaces: Norton Ghost
Clonezilla's developers specifically designed it as a replacement for Norton Ghost. This bare metal backup and recovery program comes in two free versions: Clonezilla Live for backing up or cloning a single PC and Clonezilla Server for backing up networks or cloning multiple PCs at once. Operating System: Linux

Blogging

8. WordPress Replaces: TypePad
Used by more than 60 million bloggers, WordPress is one of the best known blogging applications available. You can download the software for free and host it on your own Web server or you can use the hosted service available through WordPress.com. Operating System: OS Independent

Browsers

9. Firefox Replaces: Internet Explorer
Available in both mobile and desktop versions, Firefox offers better speed, personalization and security than Microsoft's browser. Key features include the "Awesome Bar" for easier Web searches, tabbed browsing, one-touch bookmarking and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android.

Compression

10. PeaZip Replaces: WinZip
While WinZip creates just one type of files, PeaZip can write to 12 different archive formats and read more than 130 different kinds of compressed files. It also supports self-extracting archives, strong encryption, two-factor authentication, secure deletion and other functions. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Content Management

11. Alfresco Replaces: Sharepoint
Used by companies like Toyota, Fox, Land's End, Marriott, Merck and many others, this multi-function solution combines document management, records management andWeb content management with a number of other enterprise collaboration features. The core software is available for free, but paid support, training, consulting and a cloud-based version are also available. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

12. Drupal Replaces: OpenText,Sitecore CMS, Kentico
With more than 630,000 users and developers in its community, Drupal is a tremendously popular Web content management system. Its users include publishers like the New York Observer and Popular Science, universities like Harvard and MIT, and well-known brand names like MTV and AOL. Operating System: OS Independent

13. Joomla Replaces: OpenText,Sitecore CMS, Kentico
Approximately 2.7 percent of all websites use this very popular open source Web content management system. Version 1.7 offers easier installation, one-click version updating, automatic form data validation, batch processing and more. Operating System: OS Independent

14. XOOPS Replaces: OpenText,Sitecore CMS, Kentico
XOOPS (an acronym for "eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System) is a modular, database-driven Web content management system with a large user base and an impressive number of awards to its credit. It also offers excellent personalization capabilities, a skinnable interface, versatile group permissions and support for multiple languages. Operating System: OS Independent

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

15. SugarCRM Replaces: SalesForce.com
Used by more than 250,000 customers, SugarCRM offers the full range of features you would expect in a top-notch CRM solution, plus better flexibility and no vendor lock-in. In addition to the free community version, it comes in several different paid versions that can be deployed on premises or in the cloud. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

16. vtiger CRM Replaces: SalesForce.com
VTiger boasts that it is "one of the most dynamic and customizable CRM solutions with the lowest cost of ownership available today." It's available in open source, on demand and mobile versions. Operating System: Windows, Linux, iOS, Android

Database

17. Kexi Replaces: Microsoft Access, Filemaker
Intended as a replacement for Access and Filemaker, KDE's Kexi offers rapid database application development. Features include migration assistants for transition from other databases; support for parametrized queries, lookup columns and simple templates; and visual designers for tables, queries and forms. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

18. MySQL Replaces: Microsoft SQL Server
The "world's most popular open source database," Oracle-owned MySQL offers high reliability, high scalability, security and ease of use. It's downloaded more than 65,000 times every day, and it's won numerous awards. Operating System: Windows, Linux, Unix, OS X

19. PostgreSQL Replaces: Microsoft SQL Server
Now more than 15 years old, PostgreSQL has won numerous awards for its reliable, sophisticated, standards-compliant database. Notable features include multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), point in time recovery, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, support for international character sets and much more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, Unix, OS X

Data Destruction

20. BleachBit Replaces: Easy System Cleaner, standard file delete functions
This multi-function tool not only "shreds" deleted files, it also protects your privacy in a myriad of other ways like deleting cookies, erasing browsing history, deleting logs and cleaning up temp files. By getting rid of unwanted junk, it also helps speed your system and open up extra disk space. Operating System: Windows, Linux

21. Eraser Replaces: BCWipe Enterprise, standard file delete functions
When you simply "delete" a file from your drive, it can usually be recovered with forensic tools. However, Eraser uses tools approved by the Department of Defense to eliminate all traces of a file from your drive, protecting your privacy and preventing the spread of sensitive or classified information. Operating System: Windows

Desktop Publishing

22. Scribus Replaces: InDesign, QuarkXPress, Microsoft Office Publisher Scribus offers the advanced features professional graphic designers need along with an intuitive interface that anyone can master. With it, you can create press-ready output or PDFs of documents you plan to publish online. However, you should note that Scribus cannot convert files made with proprietary formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

E-Commerce

23. Magento Replaces: Big Commerce, Volusion, NetSuite Ecommerce
Used by more than 100,000 merchants, including Office Max, Harbor Freight Tools, K-Swiss and others, eBay-owned Magento has been called "an emerging player to watch" by Forrester. In addition to the free community editions, it also comes in supported professional and enterprise editions, as well as a hosted turnkey version known as Magento Go. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

24. osCommerce Replaces: Big Commerce, Volusion, NetSuite Ecommerce
Boasting a community 256,900 members strong, the award-winning osCommerce powers thousands of shops worldwide, including 12,700 that are linked on the site. More than 6,000 add-ons are also available to help you customize the software for your specific needs. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

25. PrestaShop Replaces: Big Commerce, Volusion, NetSuite Ecommerce
One of the most popular eCommerce apps in Europe, PrestaShop boasts that it is used to open 30 new online stores every day. Paid support and training are available. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

26. X-Cart Replaces: Big Commerce, Volusion, NetSuite Ecommerce
This feature-rich e-commerce solution touts itself as SEO-friendly, easy to customize, fast, secure and 100% PCI-DSS compliant. It comes in supported Gold and Pro editions, and hosting is also available from X-Cart. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

E-mail/Collaboration/Groupware

27. Collabtive Replaces: Basecamp This Basecamp replacement tracks projects, milestones and tasks for small groups, and it even imports data from Basecamp. You can host it yourself or purchase hosting from Collabtive. Operating System: OS Independent.

28. EGroupware Replaces: Microsoft Office Outlook and SharePoint
This self-proclaimed "leading Online Collaboration Tool" combines e-mail, shared calendar, project management, content management and other collaboration capabilities into a single package. In addition to the community version, it also comes in supported on-premise and cloud-based versions. Operating System: OS Independent

29. Evolution Replaces: Microsoft Office Outlook
Sometimes called "the Outlook of Linux," Evolution offers e-mail, calendar, to-do list and contact management for the Gnome desktop. The interface should feel very familiar for anyone who's ever used Outlook. Operating System: Linux

30. Group-Office Replaces: Microsoft Office Outlook
Like Outlook, Group-Office features shared calendar and e-mail capabilities. In addition, it includes some basic project management, file sharing and CRM features. You can deploy server version on your own hardware (with or without paid support), or you can buy the SaaS version. Operating System: OS Independent

31. phpGroupWare Replaces: Microsoft Office Outlook, Sharepoint
This project includes more than 50 separate groupware apps that you can mix and match to suit your needs. Key features include e-mail, contact management, shared calendar, content management, project management, a bug tracker and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux

32. Thunderbird Replaces: Microsoft Office Outlook
Made by Mozilla, the organization best known for the Firefox browser, Thunderbird offers e-mail with a tabbed interface and excellent customization capabilities. If you would like to add calendar functionality, you'll need to download Mozilla's Lightning as well. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

33. Zimbra Replaces: Microsoft Exchange
Zimbra's open source edition provides an alternative to Microsoft Exchange, with e-mail, shared calendar, contact and document management capabilities that can be accessed from a variety of desktop clients. The company also offers a free desktop client of its own, plus paid network or appliance versions. Operating System: Linux, Unix, OS X

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

34. Apache OFBiz Replaces: NetSuite , Sage ERP
Apache's software suite for small businesses includes ERP, CRM, e-commerce, supply chain management, manufacturing resources planning, enterprise asset management and POS from a single solution. Apache does not provide support directly, but the site does list a number of third-party service providers who can assist with deployment and ongoing support needs. Operating System: OS Independent

35. Open ERP Replaces: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics For mid-size and larger enterprises, Open ERP offers more than 700 accounting, ERP and other business modules that can be tailored to a specific company's needs. Both a supported version and an online hosted version are also available with a monthly subscription. Operating System: Windows, Linux

36. Openbravo Replaces: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics
Used by more than 15,000 customers, Openbravo offers Web-based ERP capabilities, with a focus on agility and ROI. Besides the free community edition, it offers basic and professional versions which can be purchased through third-party partners. Operating System: OS Independent

37. ADempiere Replaces: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics
This community-run ERP project integrates well with Drupal and other open source projects to create a complete suite of business software. A wealth of documentation is available on the site, and the group also holds regular international conferences and training events. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

File Transfer

38. FileZilla Replaces: CuteFTP, FTP Commander This project includes both an FTP server for Windows and a cross-platform FTP client. Both support FTP, FTPS and SFTP file transfer with an easy-to-use tabbed interface. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

39. FireFTP Replaces: CuteFTP, FTP Commander
This Firefox add-on has been downloaded more than 22 million times. It allows you to download files via FTP or SFTP right from your browser window. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

40. WinSCP Replaces: CuteFTP, FTP Commander
This award-winning FTP, SFTP, and SCP client comes with two different interfaces, so that you can pick the one that suits you best. Other notable features include an integrated text editor, authentication support, batch file scripting and more. Operating System: Windows

Financial Management

41. Buddi Replaces: Quicken
While it's not as full-featured as Quicken, Buddi is a simple, understandable personal finance program designed for people with little or no financial experience. It's Java-based, so it works on nearly all operating systems, and the website has tutorials available for new users. Operating System: OS Independent

42. KMyMoney Replaces: Quicken
This personal finance software from KDE features double-entry accounting and an intuitive GUI. The project's stated goal is "to be the best free software personal finance manager, period." Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

43. Money Manager Ex Replaces: Quicken
Another personal finance manager with an emphasis on simplicity, Money Manager Ex aims to offer "all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application." Key capabilities include budgeting, one-click reporting, charts and graphs, depreciation tracking, AES encryption support, bill reminders and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

44. TurboCASH Replaces: QuickBooks, Sage Accounting Software
This free, open source small business accounting package invites potential users to compare its features against those of its commercial competitors. It supports multiple languages, multiple currencies, multiple companies, batch data entry, VAT/tax reports and much more. Operating System: Windows

Games

45. 0 A.D. Replaces: Microsoft Age of Empires
Now in its eighth alpha release, 0 A.D. is a real-time civilization-building strategy game that plays a lot like Age of Empires. It offers excellent graphics, six different civilizations to play, and several multiplayer modes. Operating System: Linux, Windows, OS X

46. Alien Arena Replaces: Quake, Unreal Tournament
This self-described "furious frag fest" is a first-person shooter in the style of Quake III and Unreal Tournament. Boasting "one of the most active, loyal and committed communities of any free game in existence," Alien Arena has a large user base that makes it easy to find online competitors any time of day. Operating System: Linux, Windows, OS X

47. FlightGear Replaces: Microsoft Flight Simulator X
FlightGear describes itself as "sophisticated, professional, open source." It includes realistic graphics for more than 20,000 real world airports, 3 DVDs worth of accurate world scenery, several aircraft options and the ability to model your own aircraft. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, others

48. FreeCiv Replaces: Civilization
Like many games in this genre, FreeCiv challenges players to manage a civilization from the Stone Age through the Space Age. The graphics and game play are fairly similar to Civilization I and II, but not as advanced as the more recent Civilization games. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

49. Frets on Fire Replaces: Guitar Hero
Very similar to Guitar Hero, Frets on Fire lets you use your keyboard or a guitar controller to play along with tracks. This project has a huge community of users who have composed songs for the game, or you can import Guitar Hero tracks or your own songs. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

50. Secret Maryo Chronicles Replaces: Mario Bros. Games
If you remember the old 2D Mario Bros. games fondly, you'll probably enjoy Secret Maryo Chronicles. It offers great old-school jump and run gameplay with plenty of levels. Operating System: Windows, Linux

51. StepMania Replaces: Dance Dance Revolution
This fun rhythm game works with your keyboards or dance pads (if you have them). You'll need to download songs separately from the game, but the site offers plenty of free songs. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Gateway Security Appliances

52. Endian Firewall Community Replaces: Check Point Security Gateways, McAfee Total Protection, SonicWall Appliances, others
With the Endian Community version, you can create your own network security appliance using an older PC. It offers firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, content filtering, a VPN and other security capabilities in a single package. Pre-configured hardware appliances and commercially supported software appliances are also available at the site. Operating System: Linux

53. Untangle Replaces: Check Point Security Gateways, McAfee Total Protection, SonicWall Appliances, others
Much like Endian, Untangle offers an integrated security appliance that you can deploy on your own hardware, or you can purchase a pre-configured hardware appliance from the company. Untangle also has a network of third-party partners who offer Untangle-based products and services. Operating System: Windows, Linux

Graphics/Drawing

54. Dia Replaces: Visio
"Roughly inspired by Visio," Dia is perfect for creating org charts, network diagrams, flowcharts, and other simple diagrams. It saves XML files, or it can export to EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux/Unix

55. Gimp Replaces: Photoshop
There's no need to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop when Gimp offers the same features for free. It includes a full range of features, from photo re-touching capabilities for amateur photographers to advanced layers and photo manipulation tools for professional graphic designers. For the Windows version, see Gimp-win. Operating System: Windows, Linux

56. Inkscape Replaces: Illustrator, CorelDraw
Much like Illustrator and CorelDraw, Inkscape allows you to create, edit and save vector graphics. It provides a whole host of advanced features in a streamlined, intuitive interface. The website also offers lots of support and documentation, as well as a library of free clip art you can use in your creations. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

Instant Messaging

57. Adium Replaces:AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger
Very similar to Pidgin (see below), this Mac-only software allows users to connect to multiple networks at once, including AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and others. It offers a tabbed interface, and it integrates with your Address Book. Operating System: OS X

58. aMSN Replaces:Windows Live Messenger
Designed to replace MSN Messenger (now known as Windows Live Messenger), aMSN is a skinnable client that works with Microsoft's IM network only. Noteworthy features include offline messaging, voice clips, custom emoticons, group support, multi-language support, webcam support, tabbed windows, display pictures and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

59. Pidgin Replaces:AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger
This very popular open source IM clients connects with up to 16 different chat networks simultaneously. It supports file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom emoticons and typing notifications, and it has a large library of plug-ins that extend its capabilities further. Operating System: Windows, Linux/Unix

Office Productivity

60. AbiWord Replaces: Microsoft Word
Similar to older versions of Word, AbiWord reads and writes most word processing document formats, including OpenOffice and Word formats. The latest version adds a lot of collaboration capabilities, and it integrates tightly with the free AbiCollab.net service which allows users to store and edit documents in the cloud. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, others

61. FreeMind Replaces: MindJet
This open source mind mapper makes it easy to display the links between ideas. It's great for making outlines, brainstorming, making notes and more. Operating System: OS Independent

62. Gnumeric Replaces: Microsoft Excel
Gnumeric describes itself as "free, fast and accurate," and an outside reviewer has praised it as more accurate than its commercial competitors. It opens files from most other popular spreadsheet programs (including Excel and Lotus), and it offers 583 different functions, including 194 you can only find in Gnumeric. Operating System: Windows, Linux

63. KOffice Replaces: Microsoft Office
KDE's office productivity suite includes the KWord word processor, KCells spreadsheet, Showcase presentations, Kivio diagrams and flowcharts, and the Artwork vector drawing program. The interfaces are intuitive but significantly different than Microsoft Office, so they take a little getting used to. Operating System: Windows, Linux

64. LibreOffice Replaces: Microsoft Office
When Oracle took over OpenOffice.org (see below), a group started this fork to continue community development. It offers all the same great features and capabilities of OpenOffice.org, plus a few improvements all its own. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

65. NeoOffice Replaces: Microsoft Office
Also very similar to OpenOffice.org (see below), NeoOffice offers an interface and features tailored for Mac users. The latest update supports Mac's versions, full-screen mode and resume features. Operating System: OS X

66. OpenOffice.org Replaces: Microsoft Office
Now an Apache project, OpenOffice.org includes Microsoft-compatible word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and database software. At twenty years old, it's a mature project with all of the advanced capabilities and stability that home or business users need. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, others

Operating System

67. Linux Mint Replaces: Windows
The fourth most popular home operating system, Linux Mint offers great ease of use for those new to Linux. It's based on Debian and Ubuntu and comes with a library of 30,000 free software applications.

68. Red Hat Replaces: Windows
Probably the best known flavor of Linux, Red Hat comes in desktop and server versions that are suitable for enterprise users. Red Hat's software requires a paid support contract, or you can download the community version for free from Fedora.

69. SUSE Replaces: Windows
Like Red Hat, SUSE is designed for enterprise users and requires a support contract. However, also like Red Hat, a free community version is available through openSUSE.

70. Ubuntu Replaces: Windows
Suitable both for enterprise and home users, this extremely popular Linux distributions comes in desktop, server and cloud versions and now a TV version. It boasts 20 million users and offers fast performance, a stylish interface, ease of use and good security.

Password Manager

71. KeePass Replaces: RoboForm, LastPass
With KeePass, you no longer have to remember lots of different passwords. Instead, you'll only need to keep track of one master password, while KeePass stores your very strong passwords in an encrypted database. Operating System: Windows

PDF Tools

72. PDFCreator Replaces: Adobe Acrobat
Adobe's Acrobat software is expensive, but you don't actually need that software to create PDFs. PDFCreator can write PDF files from any application capable of printing, and it includes features like encryption, digital signatures and more. Operating System: Windows

73. Sumatra PDF Replaces: Adobe Reader
The free Adobe software isn't your only option for reading PDF files. The Sumatra PDF reader offers similar functionality with a lighter footprint for faster performance. Operating System: Windows

POS

74. Floreant POS Replaces: QuickBooks Point of Sale, AccuPOS
For restaurants only, this POS system works with touch screens and handles operations like split checks, kitchen print, drawer pull, tax, discounts and more. Its list of users includes the Denny's chain in New York. Operating System: OS Independent

75. Lemon POS Replaces: QuickBooks Point of Sale, AccuPOS
Best for small or very small businesses, this Linux-based point of sale system offers features like role-based permissions, support for multiple terminals, sales suspension, custom orders and more. It stores all inventory data in a MySQL database and boasts excellent security. Operating System: Linux

Project Management

76. OpenProj Replaces: Microsoft Project
Very similar to Microsoft Project, this popular app lets you assign resources, schedule tasks and handle the other aspects of managing an ongoing project. It also imports and exports Microsoft Project files. However, note that the export to PDF function in the software is shareware, not open source. Operating System: Windows, Linux, Unix, OS X.

77. GanttProject Replaces: Microsoft Project
Similar to OpenProj, GanttProject can also import and export data from Microsoft Project. Other key capabilities include Gantt charts, PERT charts and collaboration features. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

Security

78. ClamAV Replaces: Avast! Linux Edition, VirusScan Enterprise for Linux
The "de facto standard for mail gateway scanning," ClamAV is a set of command line tools for protecting networks from malware. The same software is also available for the Windows desktop through a paid program called Immunet that can be downloaded from the same site. Operating System: Linux

79. ClamWin Replaces: Kaspersky Anti-Virus, McAfee AntiVirus Plus
For an open source version of ClamAV for Windows, try ClamWin. It boasts more than 600,000 users and integrates with Windows Explorer and Outlook. Operating System: Windows

School Management and E-Learning

80. Claroline Replaces: Blackboard, eCollege/Pearson Learning Studio,Articulate, TrainCaster LMS
Used by educational institutions and enterprises in 93 countries, Claroline includes tools for writing online course descriptions, delivering online course content, creating exercises, maintaining wikis, publishing announcements and more. It's won numerous awards, and it's available in 35 different languages. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

81. Moodle Replaces: Blackboard, eCollege/Pearson Learning Studio,Articulate, TrainCaster LMS
More than 73,000 sites have registered their versions of Moodle, and they offer nearly 6 million online classes that reach more than 58 million students. It's a full-featured e-learning platform that aims to give educators "the best tools to manage and promote learning." Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

82. openSIS Replaces: PowerSchool
School budgets are getting tight, and openSIS saves most schools about 75 percent compared to commercial alternatives. It's reliable, scalable, and includes most of the features you would find in software like PowerSchool. In addition to the free community version that's suitable for smaller schools, it also comes in commercially supported school and district editions. Operating System: Windows

83. SchoolTool Replaces: PowerSchool
Designed for schools in the developing world, this student information system offers a Web-based system for tracking attendance, grades, demographics and more. It runs on a Ubuntu Linux server, and can also be deployed in the cloud. Operating System: Linux

Small Business Server

84. ClearOS Replaces: Microsoft Small Business Server
This multi-function server software includes anti-malware, anti-spam, mail server, content filter, stateful firewall, VPN, WAN, file and print sharing, groupware, Web filter and other capabilities. In addition, paid support, pre-configured hardware and other services are available from ClearSDN. Operating System: Linux

85.Zentyal Replaces: Microsoft Small Business Server
Like ClearOS, Zentyal can serve as a gateway, infrastructure manager, unified threat manager, office server and/or unified communication server. Subscriptions, support, training, add-ons and other services are available for a fee. Operating System: Linux

Video Tools

86. Cinelerra Replaces: Adobe Premiere
Describing itself as "the same kind of editing suite that the big boys use," Cinelerra encourages users to "unleash the 50,000 watt flamethrower of content creation in your UNIX box." Note that a community fork of the project can be found atCinelerra.org. Operating System: Linux

87. OpenShot Video Editor Replaces: Adobe Premiere
This video editor is very popular with Linux users and has been frequently featured in various Linux-related magazines. Key features include compositing, overlays, 3D animated titles, unlimited tracks and layers, scrolling credits, rotoscoping support, digital zoom and much more. Operating System: Linux

88. VLC Media Player Replaces: Windows Media Player
This cross-platform player supports most multimedia files as well as DVD, Blu-Ray, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. It's simple, powerful, fast and very popular with open source aficionados. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, others

89. XBMC Media Center Replaces: Windows Media Player
Designed for home theater PCs (HTPCs), this award-wining multimedia player also plays most types of files. It also supports most remote controls, and it automatically creates a personal library of your audio and video files. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

Web Filtering

90. DansGuardian Replaces: McAfee Family Protection NetNanny
Award-winning DansGuardian uses phrase matching, PICS filtering, URL filtering to block objectionable content on your network. Note that this is not software for protecting an individual PC—to use it, you need a server. Operating System: Linux, OS X

Web Site Creation

91. BlueGriffon Replaces: Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web
One of the younger projects on our list, BlueGriffon offers a WYSIWYG Web editor powered by the same Gecko engine that runs Firefox. It offers an intuitive interface for building sites that conform to the latest Web standards. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

92. KompoZer Replaces: Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web
With an interface very similar to what you'll find on Dreamweaver, KompoZer makes it easy for anyone to create Web pages, even if you don't have a lot of technical knowledge. Key features include a WYSIWYG editor, integrated file management via FTP, HTML mode, tabbed editing, forms support and more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

10 Open Source Shopping Carts to Run Your Ecommerce Business

2012-01-21T13:21:00.000+02:00

CIO — More and more companies have turned to the Web to transact business. And, of course, if you are going to sell on the Web, the right shopping cart can mean the difference between red and black ink. When shopping for your own ecommerce shopping cart software the most important aspect to consider is how well the cart software meets your business objectives. An ecommerce shopping cart has to be customizable to fit your business needs and branding, be flexible enough to scale as your business grows, be secure and support industry standards and provide solid integrate with payment gateways.
Open source shopping cart software is an attractive option. Storeowners might look to open source ecommerce software because it will typically deliver the features and tools to manage a product catalog on a website without the hefty licensing fees that come with proprietary or off-the-shelf packages.
Open source shopping cart software also provides access to communities of users including developers, storeowners and enthusiasts who freely offer community-based support and add-ons to enhance the open source software package.

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Storeowners who decide to use open source shopping cart software can always pay for additional support and service through qualified third parties if they find the community-based support is not enough.

Top 10 Free and Open Source Ecommerce Solutions

Here are ten options if you plan to invest in open source shopping cart software for your ecommerce business.
1. Agora Shopping Cart: Lots of Features and Back-End Management Options
AgoraCart is a customizable and secure open source ecommerce shopping cart that you can install on an existing website. With AgoraCart, you can expect the typical features such as customizable templates for setting-up your store, support for different product categories, options for different tax rates in addition to back-end store management tools. On the upscale side of ecommerce, AgoraCart is PA-DSS Complaint (PCI-DSS) and supports more than 10 payment gateways.
The free community edition (5.2.x) is supported only though online community forums. AgoraCart version 6.x Gold is available for $49.95 and offers storeowners additional license, features and support options.
2. Broadleaf Commerce: An Open Source Enterprise Ecommerce Platform
The Broadleaf Commerce solution is an open source alternative for enterprise ecommerce companies. It offers an enterprise-level platform that (built on Java integration technologies) and can be customized to specific business needs.
With Broadleaf Commerce, retailers can manage customer accounts, upsell, create promotions and manage email marketing. The platform supports social integration, catalog browsing, search engine optimization (SEO) and integrates with Google Analytics and any existing business database and fulfillment system. The newest release (Broadleaf Commerce Version 1.5) offers enhanced administration and promotion capability over previous versions.

The Broadleaf Commerce community provides an online forum for discussion and contributions, articles, development guides, and project API documentation. Broadleaf Commerce uses the Apache license.
3. Commerce.CGI: A Free Perl Shopping Cart
Commerce.CGI's claim to fame is being the first free Perl shopping cart on the web. First released in 1998, it is a fully featured shopping cart for Unix-based servers, although it can run on Windows NT with minor code adjustment. Commerce.CGI can be an add-on to an existing web site or installed and configured to manage a new product website.

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Commerce.CGI offers the standard shopping cart features you would expect -- it's template-driven and provides tools to configure email management, product search and payment methods. It supports sales tax, multiple shipping options, discount calculations and other options for customer check out.
Commerce.CGI is free and supported through the Commerce.CGI mailing list or BBS. Paid member features ($49.99) include wish lists, product reviews, coupon support and other customizable shopping cart enhancements. The Commerce.CGI site offers user-contributed modifications that are freely distributed. The current version, V.4.6.1, is available in zip or tar formats.
4. Loaded Commerce: A Highly Customizable Cart
Loaded Commerce is the 6.5 release of the software developed by the CRE Loaded team. Loaded Commerce, based on the popular CRE Loaded program, includes security modifications. The Loaded Commerce Community Edition (CE) is a shopping cart designed for the small office, home office (SOHO) storeowner who wants to add transaction capabilities to an existing website.
This ecommerce solution offers a number of features for product, customer, order and content management. It is highly customizable so you can change your site design choosing from hundreds of templates, edit customer information, orders, invoices and more.
The CE is the free edition of the ecommerce shopping cart software and supported by the Loaded Commerce community. A customer account is required to download Loaded Commerce.
5. Magento: Hosted or Deployed Solutions for Small to Enterprise Businesses
Magento offers an enterprise-class ecommerce platform, supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners and third-party developers. Acquired by eBay in 2011, Magento is part of eBay's X.commerce business unit.
Magento ecommerce gives merchants scalability and features for presentation, content and functionality. The platform offers marketing tools, search engine optimization, product catalog management and browsing, one-page checkout and a number of standard tools such as those used to manage shipping, tax and customer service.
The latest stable release of Magento Community Edition (version 1.6.1.0) was released on October 19, 2011. This free version is available under the open source OSL 3.0 license. Merchants looking for a more mission-critical ecommerce platform can upgrade the Enterprise Edition.

6. OpenCart: Manage Multiple Stores with One Admin Interface
The OpenCart shopping cart helps storeowners to quickly and easily install, select a template, add products and start taking online orders. The built-in template system lets you switch between different templates or migrate your site's current design into OpenCart.
Other cart features include a multi-store capability to manage multiple stores from one admin interface, tax zones, shipping methods, back-end store administration, and support for a number of payment gateways and languages.

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OpenCart is free open source software published under the GNU GPL License and both free community and commercial support is offered. OpenCart server requirements include Web Server (preferably Apache), PHP (at least 5.2), MySQL, Curl and Fsock.
7. osCommerce Online Merchant: Provides Front and Back-End Tools For Store Owners
The osCommerce Online Merchant ecommerce solution is a free offering that comes with features and tools to help storeowners manage the front-end catalog and back-end administration.
Released under the GNU General Public License, osCommerce Online Merchant v2.3.1 provides a basic template layout structure to customize the catalog front-end. The Administration Tool lets merchants configure the online store, insert products for sale, manage customers and process orders.
There is a large community of more than 256,000 storeowners, developers, service providers and enthusiasts contributing to the help, support and development of osCommerce. Other support options include mailing lists and the osCommerce Newsletter for storeowners. Server requirements include PHP v4+ (PHP v5+ recommended) and MySQL v3+ (MySQL v5+ recommended).
8. PrestaShop Features Multiple Languages and Localization Options
PrestaShop is a customizable, PCI-DSS compliant, ecommerce solution that will handle everything from Web store set-up to managing customers and orders. Storeowners can create and manage the front-end catalog and marketing, customize orders and change shipping options and localization to suit their business. PrestaShop is available in three languages (English, French and Spanish) with an additional 41 translations available.
PrestaShop v.1.4.6.2 (stable) is the current version published under the Open Software License (OSL) v3.0. Server requirements include Linux, UNIX, or Windows, Web Server (Apache 1.3 or later, IIS 6 or later), PHP 5.0 or later and MySQL 5 or later.
9. Zen Cart Requires Only Basic Skills to Install and Configure
Zen Cart is a free and open source shopping cart designed by a group of shop owners, programmers, designers and consultants.
Zen Cart offers a number of options to customize the cart using a template system to select a design and configure product categories, sales discounts, and shipping and payment options. The cart incorporates a WYSIWYG page editor for modifying non-database pages, and nearly every piece of information about your products is customized and managed within the Zen Cart Admin area.

Zen Cart provides community contributed additions for your shop and documentation and the community forum for support is available on the Zen Cart website.
10. Zeuscart Offers Web 2.0 Features
ZeusCart is a web-based PHP/My SQL shopping cart that boasts a rich user interface and a highly usable shopping cart that meets the demands of Web 2.0.

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The cart is primarily for small and medium storeowners and offers inventory management, attribute-driven product catalog, category management, a built-in CMS and SEO-friendly URLs. Standard features such as discounts, taxation, shipping options, integration with multiple payment gateways and email templates are also included.
ZeusCart 3.0, licensed under GPL 2, can be installed on any server where a PHP interpreter, MySQL database server and a web server is present.

5 Best Free Android UPnP Clients

2012-01-21T13:14:00.002+02:00

UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It is a set of computer network protocols which enables devices on a home network to be aware of each other and access selected services. This collection of protocols with the appropriate software offers a very easy method of sharing media on your network as it features automatic discovery and supports zero-configuration.
There are many devices that run UPnP audio visual servers. For example, a wide range of software exists for the Linux, Windows, and OS X operating systems that turn computers into media servers. Many NAS devices also have built-in UPnP media servers. We even see UPnP turning up in routers, audiophile hard disk players, and HD media players.
In this article, we feature the best free UPnP clients that are available for the Android platform. These clients enable users to stream multimedia from a UPnP enabled media server, or control a UPnP enabled media renderer from their Android phone or tablet.

There are a few UPnP clients which would have worthy of inclusion in this article but their free version has too many limitations. In the case of AndroMote, the playlist is limited to a mere 4 items.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 free Android UPnP clients. Hopefully, there will be something here that will meet the requirements of anyone looking to stream media to their Android device.
Now, let's explore the 5 UPnP clients at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews. We give our highest recommendation to 2Player Network Music Player and UPnPlay.

UPnP Clients
2Player	Full-featured network music player
UPnPlay	Simple UPnP media player and controller
BubbleUPnP	Feature-laden UPnP/DLNA control point and an UPnP media renderer
Skifta	Billed as a different way of controlling your collection of music, videos, and photos
HomeDia	Stream multimedia files

Improve Linux System Efficiency with Control Groups

2012-01-21T13:08:00.000+02:00

Control groups, or cgroups, is a kernel feature designed to aggregate tasks to allow for hierarchical resource management and allocation. While control groups have been in the Linux kernel for a few years, their implementation in CentOS appears for the first time in the recently released version 6. Here’s how you can take advantage of control groups to improve your systems’ efficiency.
In cgroups terminology, every system resource – CPU, memory, disk input/output, bandwidth – is called a subsystem or resource controller. We’ll use subsystem, but if you think “resource controller,” you’ll have the right idea – they literally control the system’s resources.
Each subsystem has parameters. For example, the CPU subsystem has a parameter called rt_runtime_us that’s responsible for allocating CPU microseconds. System resources within cgroups are defined by these subsystem parameters.
One or more subsystems create a hierarchy, which is associated with a virtual mount point. You create one just as you would any other mount point on the filesystem. Mount points are not only logical groupings but are also used to physically store the files with the information for the cgroups and subsystems. So for instance, under the mount point /cgroup/example, the file /cgroup/example/http/cpu.rt_runtime_us contains the information about the CPU subsystem limit called rt_runtime_us for the http group in the example hierarchy.
To start using cgroups, install the RPM package libcgroup from the default CentOS 6 base repository. It provides the executable /etc/init.d/cgconfig for managing cgroups processes. To start the program as a service for the first time, run service cgconfig start. After that, add the command to the system startup and shutdown processes so it starts and stops automatically by running the command chkconfig cgconfig on.
You configure cgroups in two stages. First, configure the groups themselves with their corresponding resource limits by editing the file /etc/cgconfig.conf. As an example, let’s create a hierarchy called example with three subsystems cpu, memory, and blkio, and two cgroups http and mail.

mount {
 cpu = /cgroup/example;
 memory = /cgroup/example;
 blkio = /cgroup/example;
}

group http {
 memory {
  memory.limit_in_bytes = 768M;
      memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes = 1024M;
 }
 cpu {
  cpu.shares = 3;
  cpu.rt_period_us=10000000;
  cpu.rt_runtime_us=6000000;
 }
 blkio {
  blkio.weight = 300;
 }
}

group mail {
 memory {
  memory.limit_in_bytes = 256M;
      memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes = 368M;
 }
 cpu {
  cpu.shares = 1;
  cpu.rt_period_us=10000000;
  cpu.rt_runtime_us=2000000;
 }
 blkio {
  blkio.weight = 900;
 }
}

Alternative Methods for Resource Management in Linux
Cgroups are implemented in the Linux kernel, which makes them the most powerful and proactive measure for enforcing resource constraints. However, there are alternatives, such as:

ulimit, bundled with CentOS, is a powerful and precise utility for fine-tuning user limits on things such as CPU time, memory, number of processes, and even number of open files. It is simpler than cgroups and requires less configuration, which makes it suitable for simpler resource management tasks.
nice, renice, and ionice are also default CentOS utilities for managing scheduling priorities. nice and renice are responsible for CPU, while ionice manages input/output scheduling – that is, hard disk operations. Their effectiveness is limited because they interact only with the kernel scheduler rather than applying real measures as cgroups does.
cpulimit is a simple user-space tool that monitors the system’s CPU load and pauses your batch process when certain thresholds are exceeded. It enforces CPU limits, but it’s unsuitable for systems that run any complex operation or service that degrades when it is paused randomly under high load.
Environmental limits – Some programming languages’ interpreters support enforcing memory and CPU limits. In PHP, for instance, memory limit is a setting to limit the memory a PHP process can take. This can be applied in runtime with ini_set even over pieces of code, thus giving it unmatched precision.
Services’ limits

RLimitCPU

RLimitMEM

Virtualization provides the most complete isolation and resource allocation to virtual environments at the price of additional configuration and resource consumption for the management software. Popular open source virtualization solutions include Xen and OpenVZ.

The mount section controls the hierarchies. By default, there is no example hierarchy, so you have to create it manually on the filesystem by running as root the command mkdir /cgroup/example. In our hierarchy we’ll use only the three subsystems cpu, memory, and blkio. You can choose subsystems you use based on the resource you want to manage from among these three plus cpuacct (used for CPU accounting), cpuset (assigns individual CPUs), devices (controls system devices), freezer (suspends/resumes tasks), net_cls (tags network packets), and ns (namespace).
Also in our example we have two groups: http and mail. You can use the http group to tune the settings for Apache, and the mail group for Postfix, or whatever web and mail servers you prefer. Even though web services are of high priority, you don’t want them to monopolize the server’s resources and cause interruption in mail services. To strike that balance, this configuration gives Apache three times more resources than Postfix. The explanation for the defined limits follows:
Memory

memory.limit_in_bytes, as the name suggests, is the maximum amount of memory to be used in bytes.
memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes is an aggregate limit of memory plus swap usage. For performance considerations it’s important that swap usage also be limited. In our example, for the http group, swap is limited to 256M (1024M minus 768M).

CPU

cpu.shares – CPU shares relative to the shares of the other defined groups.
cpu.rt_period_us is a sample time interval in microseconds.
cpu.rt_runtime_us is a time period during which CPU usage is allowed. It’s in direct relation to cpu.rt_period_us. In our example, Apache is allowed to use the CPU for 6 out of 10 seconds.

Blkio (block input/output controller)

blkio.weight is an aggregate weight for all block devices that determines the priority with which the group will receive access to the disks. It’s a relative number; the lower the number, the higher the priority, meaning the more I/O operations it can process.

These are just a few of the numerous options available for subsystems and cgroups. You can find more information and details on available settings in the official kernel documentation for memory, blkio, and cgroups.
Once you’ve defined the configuration you want, you must put your cgroup configuration into effect by running service cgconfig restart. Confirm the settings are applied by running cgsnapshot -s. The latter dumps the current configuration in silent mode (-s) and suppresses warnings. If a setting or parameter is applied, it will be listed in the output.
Once your cgroups are defined you can configure tasks to use them. To set the group membership of processes in real time, use the command cgclassify. It accepts as arguments the name of the subsystems, groups, and the PIDs of the processes. For example, if an Apache process has PID 2136, you can run the command cgclassify -g cpu,memory,blkio:http 2136 to apply all values for cpu, memory, and blkio subsystems in the http group. It’s optional how many of the defined subsystems you use.
It’s also possible to start services automatically in a certain group. For example, you can add to Apache’s startup configuration file /etc/sysconfig/httpd the directive CGROUP_DAEMON="cpu:/http memory:/http blkio:/http". This instructs the Apache service to start and fork its future processes in the http group with the limits defined for the cpu, memory, and blkio subsystem parameters in the cgconfig file.
If you want to start Postfix automatically in the mail subgroup, you have to use a different method, because Postfix, like many other services, does not have a startup configuration script in /etc/sysconfig/. Instead, you can use the command cgexec to start it. cgexec allows you to start any process with resource limits manually. You can use this technique to run resource-heavy tasks that might otherwise overload the server.
cgexec -g cpu,memory,blkio:mail /etc/init.d/postfix start
Another option to start Postfix automatically in the mail group is to edit its startup file, /etc/init.d/postfix, and add it to the start function.
To verify that a process is running in the correct group, look at the file /proc/PID/cgroup, where PID is the PID of the process you are interested it. Thus if an Apache process has PID 2139, check the file /proc/2139/cgroup; it should contain:

19:blkio,memory,cpu:/

The initial number is the unique hierarchy number. It is incremental, starting and automatically assigned from zero.

Conclusion

Cgroups and the alternative methods for managing resources have been implemented for long enough to be considered stable and reliable. However, they are not always a complete solution for any need. You might have to combine them with other solutions or build on top of them. They also may require some advanced configuration, which can make them hard to use. Nevertheless, with a little trial and error, cgroups can help you improve the efficiency of your systems’ resource usage and avoid downtime due to overusage of a single service.

TomHenderson 10 Indispensable NOC Tools for Linux and BSD

2012-01-21T13:00:00.002+02:00

I run a test lab. Setups are mutable from one project to the next, and life is rarely static. Configurations change, and the hundred or so cores in our NOC might not have the same servers running on them from one day to the next, let alone for a week or a month. We’re used to rapid assessment, troubleshooting, and moving on.
Inside one of my servers is a folder of tools, divided into two groups. The first group sets up systems, while the second group is for administrative, post-installation work. Another directory has images, ISOs, and blobs of this-and-that. Some days we code, we configure, we update… sometimes all in the same hour.
Tools are important to us. Fortunately, a handful of useful tools is guaranteed to be in your favorite Unix-a-like distribution, unless it’s a horribly stripped version of Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc. We add to these standards to suggest the 10 most indispensible NOC tools—the ones you need in the network operations center. Don’t logon without them. (See also our companion article, 10 Indispensable NOC Software Tools for Windows Server Administrators.)
Don’t let civilians near these; they’re administrator tools and you can hurt someone if you’re not careful. Few civilians understand the difference between etc and bin, anyway.

Nagios

It’s not particularly beautiful, and it’s a work in progress, but Nagios is a very useful monitoring kit. In the olden days, it was more painful to use, but today you can download Nagios as a VMware appliance (therefore convertible or runnable on other hypervisors that are compatible with VMware) that’s staggeringly simple to install.
The Nagios system monitors Linux, BSD, and Windows, whether client, server, or appliance. You set triggers on the monitors to send messages (SMS, e-mail, lots of options) when a monitored component (such as disk space) exceeds a threshold you set. A lot of information can be tracked with Nagios, and your first big job is playing with thresholds that suit your organization’s profile. Too tight, and you get volumes of nags per second. Set them too loosely, and it’s not working for you.
You can then use the Nagios reporting and alerts to serve as a baseline NOC management system, where management means reactive response to conditions. Secondarily, Nagios can be used for planning, as it keeps a long history of conditions it finds. Currently it is not able to do things like move around VMs, or yell at your boss for more budget for fatter pipes and bigger routers. But for especially small organizations or branch NOCs, it’s plenty helpful.

Zenoss Core

Like Nagios, Zenoss is a community-supported management plane with a commercially-backed organization behind it. It also has some 150+ plug-ins for what they like to call “deep-monitoring” of server facets. In our experience, it’s a bit heavier-weight than Nagios, but if you don’t mind the kitchen-sink approach, it’s great for facilities monitoring of a heterogeneous NOC infrastructure (yes, Windows and even Solaris are included).
Not to be confused with Xen, Zenoss is a database-driven product. And that’s always been my gripe with Zenoss for lightweight, fast-on-your-feet work: The database (you can use several kinds) needs to be protected, even mirrored, as it’s the heartbeat of what goes on.
The database centricity also means that you can get great reporting. That is nice if you’re in an audited environment, but a hangover if you’re in constant-change mode (meaning non-production sites). Otherwise, it’s about two-thirds of your tool kit.
Zenoss can be easily coded for if you understand how to use its API, along with REST or XML commands to communicate among monitored devices. The community support behind Zenoss is strong, and often helpful if you shoot yourself in the foot. The theory-of-operation is easy to grasp, but takes a while to get up to speed. If you like quick-and-dirty, go someplace else. If you need concrete and steel, stop here.

Puppet-MCollective

We reviewed Puppet-MCollective elsewhere after we saw it in an Ubuntu Server release. The MCollective is a configuration and command-and-control system from PuppetLabs, and is Apache-licensed although included in Ubuntu server editions; commercial support is available.
The Puppet “master” controls its “marionettes” (the “mcollective”) through a series of easily-learned steps. Once prepared, the puppet master can then roll-out VMware (and compatible) Linux instances that also respond to the master, on your own NOC server strata or Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the rate of literally hundreds per minute. Or, if you just need a handful, it can do that, too.
You need to know a bit about how the underlying processes work. A pre-loaded daemon in each instance can serve as a connection-command broker. The commands can be easily filtered, so that you can tell the master to tell all of the web servers in Milwaukee to report about this specific status, or to perform such-and-so command. You can roll out servers to do things like video rendering or DNA segment analysis, then shut them all down and evaporate into the ether, if that’s your desire. It’s very much like having your own intelligent, yet secure, botnet. Use it for good.

CloudPassage

CloudPassage is not unlike Nagios, save that it’s Linux kernel 2.16+ specific. It’s a daemon that connects to the CloudPassage website, for free (other services pending at an actual cost), that checks a configuration for sanity. It’s like your Unix/Linux teacher, grading you on how tightened-up your server is. Did I mention: free?
You have to register. You have to allow your CloudPassage daemons to talk across your security perimeter to CloudPassage. You have to use a compatible version of Linux in the server (or client, for that matter) that you deployed with the CloudPassage daemon. It has to be run initially as root, which will send chills down the spine of security purists, but that’s the only time this need be done.
Then, wait for the CloudPassage daemon to look under the rocks of your configuration files, then diss you for the fool you are. It will find a very long list of chapter-and-verse mistakes you made, probably because you deployed the server with default settings. CloudPassage knows a lot of applications and server settings, and points out to you the error of your ways, citing references right down to the salient CVE bulletins to show just how asleep at the wheel you are.
CloudPassage is worth its weight in gold, considering you can deploy it in compatible instances, even in the myriad of public cloud VMs you just rented. It watches, reports, and rats you out. You’ll love it.

Your SWAT Team

Linking Linux to SMB and Microsoft’s Active Directory is done with SAMBA, which while wonderful, needs a GUI for administrator stress relief. The Samba Web Access Tool (SWAT) is just such a GUI, and it’s included in some versions of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.
Most people who install SWAT can’t get it going. The instructions are a bit vague, but the reason’s actually something outside of the code. The inet.d daemon blocks it and must have its inetd.conf file modified. You have to leave a port open, which is a no-no to security barbarians.
Once you do the conf file mod, then suddenly you’re working with SAMBA in a whole new way, without the evil command-line syntax from hell problem. This means that you can unite SAMBA configurations more simply to match your Windows Active Directory (AD) and vice-versa. Even if you’re a black-belt in SAMBA, the visuals can be worth the installation. It’s free and fairly well documented; we’ve rarely seen it fail or act silly.

Hamachi VPN

LogMeIn makes a tool called Hamachi, which is a dangerous tool for making VPN links. Hamachi solves the problem of working across networks that use Network Address Translation (NAT), which is many of them—including most home networks, as home networks rarely have public-facing static genuine IP addresses.
Because NAT trips up VPN protocols like IPSec, Hamachi takes its place, but it does so by violating some of the “rules.” That said, it can work across boundaries that are otherwise blocked by interstitial IP addressing translation. LogMeIn also has other products for personal remote access via web browsers.
The danger comes from the fact that some networks aren’t supposed to be joined together in a VPN. This might be because of company policy, security, or the problem of naming conventions. The upside to Hamachi is that IPSec is a Layer2 VPN, and can become completely confused by NAT—a problem that Hamachi conveniently solves with essential transparency. But sometimes we didn’t want that to happen. I often do. But I know organizations that would shoot bullets if it was found there.

Htop

The htop app allows you to see all of the processes running in a machine—and so very much more than anything you can do with top or ps. You see dependencies. You see memory used. You can do important things, like identify strange stuff and document or kill it. Oddly named processes have their dependencies revealed, so you can understand what element of what is doing what. It’s almost as nice as the Activity Monitor, a Mac OS utility.
Htop is an interactive tool that’s text-graphical, rather than dependent on any GUI/window manager platform. It does require a compatible version of ncurses but I haven’t found any that aren’t compatible.
Beyond its educational value, htop is a great tool to do emergency diagnosis of problems while knowing what you’re doing—we hope. It’s not actually server or NOC dependent; it works about anywhere in Linuxville. Think of it as dtrace-light; dtrace is the marvelous Oracle/Sun tool that can be compiled into an application to reveal its constituent elemental characteristics from a diagnostics perspective. This tool, htop, can diagnose your server’s ills, or just verify process characteristics. It’s among the great tools that should be in every server tools directory, hidden away from hapless civilians who might play with it.

Xen

Virtually every hypervisor, and much of the virtualization and cloud revolution owes its success to the humble little hypervisor, Xen. You wanted a cheap way of consolidating servers? Xen still works. It’s still free. It’s still moderately ugly. Yet several utilities can be used to manage it, including a few moderately ugly GUI apps.
But Xen is pretty rock-solid, and you can get the commercial versions of Xen as manifested in Citrix XenServer, and its strange cousin, Hyper-V, from Microsoft. While I realize that the “lite” and “community” versions of the three major hypervisor families that are related to Xen (Xen, XenServer, Hyper-V) are often free as in beer, good old Xen is pretty light-weight, and the price is free whether it’s one server, or 24 cores in a hundred servers. Tough to beat the price.
And finally, two more tools that also appear in the 10 NOC Tools for Windows list:

SysRescCD.ISO

SysRescCD.ISO can make you a hero, or a heroine, or a conspirator. Why is it included with Linux and BSD tools? It’s the System Rescue CD for Windows, used to rescue Windows systems where the password has somehow been forgotten or mangled. Download the file and burn it to a CD or, better still, a USB drive.
Make sure you can legally use this file. This tool specifically allows you to replace the administrator/most-privileged user account password. You may need very specific permission to do this; laws on password cracking vary from region to region. Check yours first.
Boot the password-rejected machine with the CD or USB drive. The instructions are inside the ISO download, or you can refer to its website for the docs on how to rescue everything from Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, and interim editions.
You won’t need this tool often, but it’s a help-desk must-have. Inside the NOC, where things are busy and documentation can be forgetful, it’s the only way to crack the administrative password. Keep this secret, and remember that nothing protects a machine if a user – you – have physical access to it.

WireShark

How many times has WireShark pulled me out of the drink? Plenty. Here’s what it does: It listens to promiscuous Ethernet devices (WiFi, too) and assembles packets. You can export them, sort them, pair conversations, and ultimately sniff the wire and air. It’s a sniffing tool that lets you find all of the traffic, which can be overwhelming, so that you can minimize the captured packet volume to something manageable.
There are plenty of tricks to WireShark and other packet-trace tools. Most Layer 2/3 switches allow you to mirror ports, so that you can capture traffic on segments that you’re not logically connected to. (Although the wisdom of port reflection is up to the astute user. Meaning: Be careful.)
With WireShark, you can diagnose and verify the fix for numerous server maladies, ranging from understanding server traffic overloads to decoding packet and segment-related error messages at the protocol (rather than stupid operating system) level. Then you can do things like whip DHCP servers back into shape, find rogues, malware phone-homes, and a myriad other problems. To use it well, expect to go back to the book from your class on network protocols, the one you slept through; but you’ll have great fun.
Remember that your organization may be guided by extreme privacy principles, and the data you see may be not for your eyes. Use of a tool like this implies that you know the rules, what you’re doing, and you will use it for good and not for evil.
What other tools do you consider must-have? Tell us about them in the comments, so we can add to the community’s body of knowledge.

7 Best Free Linux Time Tracking Software

2012-01-21T12:53:00.002+02:00

Time tracking software is a type of computer software that records time spent on tasks. This category of software can enable users to run billing reports, and prepare invoices for clients.
The deployment of this software offers a new level of productivity to organisations, as it provides management with information on what time is spent by employees on different activities such as projects and tasks. This can help to measure productivity over time. This software is commonly used by professionals that charge clients by the hour such as accountants, solicitors, and freelancers. The generation of automatic invoices with minimal or no data entry removes the inconvenience of billing and invoicing clients, and improves efficiency.
There is a fairly limited selection of free Linux time tracking tools available. This article identifies our favourite tools. We have not included Charm in the list below. Whilst this project shows considerable promise, it is in a very early stage of development.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 7 impressive free Linux time tracking applications. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to keep track of time spent on tasks.
Now, let's explore the 7 time tracking applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

Time Tracking
Project Hamster	Time tracking applet for the GNOME desktop environment
Kimai	Web based software that tracks work time, and classifies it
Task Coach	Designed to deal with composite tasks
Rachota	Designed for personal timetracking of projects
dotProject	Web-based, multi-user, multi-language project management application
Kontact	PIM and groupware suite which includes a time tracker component
TimeSlotTracker	Java based time tracking tool

6 Phrases You Should Never Say Again

2012-01-18T14:21:00.000+02:00

Love catchy business speak? Before your next meeting or presentation, make sure you aren't guilty of one of these useless (& annoying) verbal tics.

Years ago, I worked for a manager that was the poster child of buzzwords. He loved slipping “cones of precision” and “silos” and “drill down” and… well, let’s just stop there.

(Oh, he also bought one of the first Palm Pilots, so roomfuls of people often sat waiting while he laboriously entered timelines and schedules into his calendar. Yep, he was one of those.)

One of my colleagues maintained a running list of this manager’s buzzwords. If this colleague heard a new one, he pulled a small notepad out of his shirt pocket and wrote it down. Whenever he whipped out his pad two things happened: 1) the manager looked smug and proud because he thought he had just said something so insightful the supervisor wanted to capture for it for posterity, and 2) the rest of us tried not to laugh because we knew what was really going on.

Guess how productive those meetings were.

Unfortunately, we all have a little of that manager in us. We use the same words too often, or without noticing use irritating speech patterns, or simply fall in love with certain expressions. (I’m definitely guilty; I once carried on a passionate and all-too-public affair with “that’s neither here nor there.”) When we do, whatever we hoped to say gets lost.

See if you’re guilty of any of these:

1. The Double Name: Using a person’s name twice-- especially your own-- in the same sentence as a way to justify unusual or unacceptable behavior.

Typical usage: “What can I say? That’s just Joe being Joe.” (Or even worse, “What can I say? That’s just me being me.”)

Whenever you say a person’s name twice as a way to describe them you’re actually making an excuse for behavior you would never tolerate from someone else.

And everyone knows it.

2. The Fake Agreement: Pretending to agree while expressing the opposite point of view.

Typical usage: “I can definitely see what you’re saying, but I just don’t think we should take on that project.”

In fact, you don’t really see what I’m saying because otherwise you would agree with what I’m saying. Beginning a sentence with, “I hear you…” is like a condescending pat on the head.

Don’t try to couch a different opinion inside a warm and fuzzy Fake Agreement. If you disagree, just say so professionally.

3. The Unsupported Closure: Ending a discussion or making a decision without backup or solid justification.

Typical usage: “At the end of the day, we’re here to sell products.”

Really? I had no idea we’re supposed to sell products!

Unsupported Closure is a go-to move for people who want something a certain way and don’t feel like, or can’t, explain why. Whenever you feel an, “At the end of the day…” coming on, take a deep breath and start over, otherwise you’ll spout inane platitudes instead of objective reasons that may actually help your employees get behind your decision.

Quick note: A Fake Agreement combines nicely with an Unjustified Closure: “I hear what you’re saying, but at the end of the day revenue concerns must come first.” Win-win!

4. The False Uncertainty: Pretending you’re not sure when, in fact, you are.

Typical usage: “You know, when I think about it I’m not so sure shutting down that facility isn’t the best option after all.”

Oh yes, you’re sure; you’re just trying to create buy-in or a sense of inclusion by pretending you still have an open mind… or you’re planting seeds for something you know you will eventually do.

Never say you aren’t sure unless you are truly willing to consider other viewpoints.

5. The First Person Theoretical: Pretending to be another person in order to explore different points of view.

Typical usage: “Let’s say I’m the average customer. I walk in your store. I want to buy a shirt...and so on."

You can get away with this occasionally, but more than once a year is really irritating.

Think about it. Let’s say I’m the average reader and I know someone who uses the First Person Theoretical to pretend they’re putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. And let’s say I’m thinking it’s really irritating. In fact, let’s say I’m thinking we can just move on.

6. The Favorite Word: Using a word so often that word is all anyone hears.

Typical usage: Simply pick a word and hammer it to death.

I had a boss who never met a sentence he couldn’t find a way to shoehorn “in other words,” “in general,” and “regarding” into. Often he could cram all three into the same sentence, sometimes multiple times. I kept track one time and counted thirty-seven “in other words” in a four-minute span.

Hey, I’m not proud. I’m also not worried about him reading this since he’s probably off somewhere clubbing baby seals.

When you fall in love with a word or expression, other people not only tire of it but they hear nothing else. Whatever you hoped to get across gets lost as people think, “Oh jeez, for once could he leave out the ‘that’s neither here nor there’”?

Ask someone if you overuse a word or phrase. At first they’ll look uncomfortable and try to avoid answering. Insist.

Eventually they’ll tell you, and I promise you’ll never use that word again.

The Case for a Four-Day Work Week

2012-01-18T14:17:00.002+02:00

You can cut your work week by a day while boosting company morale exponentially. Here are 6 good reasons to try it.

After living within the confines of a four-day work week during the past four months at Slingshot SEO, my first reaction to questions about this unbelievable perk is “Why not?” Small business owners, CEOs and executives from all over the country ask me on a weekly basis if it really works. My answer is a resounding YES!

Obviously, if you have a large customer service component to your business or if you must be open for retail hours, it takes a bit of ingenuity and some scheduling prowess to adjust to this type of schedule. Perhaps after reading this blog post you will want to try a pilot version of the famous Slingshot SEO four-day work week in your business. If you do, I would love to hear how it goes or answer a question or two.

First, though, let me explain the “why” behind this concept, beginning with a very important aspect of the “people” portion of any business – the “company culture.” Believe it or not, many aspects of our culture are directly related to this special perk. Here are a few of the reasons for that statement and perhaps a few questions you should ask yourself as a business owner:

How much more innovative and exciting would your business be if every single team member spent one full day each week devoted to research? What insights, new ideas and energy would be pumped into your business?
Such a perk is an amazing draw in the age of recruiting the best in talent to your team. Like a hit song, your HR department needs a “hook” to snag the cream of the crop. It will make an incredible difference.
Tied into No. 2, your employee retention rate literally soars. Who would ever want to give up three days at home, only commuting four days a week--and the cerebral exercise of weekly research?
Even though the team is working 10-hour days, the sense of urgency brings a high level of energy, and, in my opinion, focused collaboration. It is a joy to watch and to be sucked up into.
The extra time for research makes for a well-informed team and the realization they have something unique. (Plus, meeting a repairman on a Friday or planning numerous three-day getaways is never taken for granted ...)
In our case, Thursday nights after work become an even bigger chance for team socialization and fun. This also seems to be vital to retention rates. A recent study indicated the No. 1 reason for a person not to change jobs is based upon having a close friend at the same company. Sort of makes sense, right?

Add these six reasons along with three or four you likely came up with while reading this blog and you should come to the conclusion that the extra focus, energy, teamwork and dedication resulting from a four-day work week will drive your productivity skyward! Not a bad outcome for a simple idea.

10 Greatest Android Games for 2011

2012-01-18T07:31:00.000+02:00

It's 2012 already and the impact Android had on the overall mobile eco system in the year 2011 was nothing short of spectacular. Nearly 700,000 Android activations are happening everyday(which doesn't include Amazon, Nook tablets apparently) and Android Market is teeming with some 400,000 applications. I have never been a good PC gamer of sorts, but I'm really enjoying many Android games. Here are my favorite 10 Android games for 2011.

If you think Angry Birds is the most addictive game for Android, think again. Where's My Water by Disney is astonishingly simple and incredibly addictive game for Android that works on devices of all shapes and sizes. To put things in perspective, I have never ever played a game in my Android so passionately. Where's My Water is a lot fun. Period. And there is this Where's My Water free version to experience this little gem first hand.

Install Where's My Water from Android Market

Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD is unequivocally my favorite Android racing game to date. It's a lot of fun and visualizations are brilliant. The only downside is that, this game is pretty heavy(some 700MB download) and might not work properly in lower end Android devices. Well, that is quite understandable too given the kind of visual effects this pretty game has got. And it works darn good in my Android 2.3.3 powered, dual core, Galaxy S2.

Install Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD from Android Market

If you are a regular here, you probably know how much I like this game, long before it even debuted on Android platform. World of Goo is creative little game for young and adults alike. World of Goo for Android was released only recently and it became an instant hit. It is rated 4.9 in Android Market, which alone speaks volumes about the quality of this cute little game for Android. World of Good Demo available.

Install World of Goo from Android Market

Great Little War Game(GLWG) is a 3D turn-based strategy game for Android with a unique comical style animations and characters. Very addictive and sometimes a little bit frustrating too since its not really an easy game to play and win. Highly recommended.

Install Great Little War Game from Android Market

Yet another masterpiece from Disney. Like Where's My Water, Puffle Launch is an entirely new game and you won't be able to find anything even closely similar to this in the Android Market, which is quite a rare phenomenon. This is my second most favorite game from Disney and I play it almost every day. No free demo version available though.

Install Puffle Launch from Android market

Reckless Getaway is one of a kind. Even though not as eyecandy as Asphalt 6 racing game, Reckless Getaway is just as fun to play, especially the chapter where you get the truck to play. Reckless Getaway is not a racing game per se. It is more about tackling incoming vehicles and cop cars. Controls are very accurate and the game never hangs or lags at all.

Install Reckless Getaway from Android Market

Unlike the other games featured here, Heavy Gunner 3D is not a highly rated game in the Android Market. But I found this game worth every penny. One thing that really stands out is its dark sound score. I feel a bit exhausted every time I play this game, not because of any inadequacies of the game but because of the fact that this is a pretty engaging game that demands your full attention. Totally worth it.

Install Heavy Gunner 3D from Android Market

Flick Golf is perhaps the most addictive Golf game I have played in my Android. It is not very sophisticated n' all, but a neatly implemented, lightweight game. This is definitely going to kill a lot of time for you. Game itself is non-free and no demo version is available.

Install Flick Golf from Android Market

Don't get fooled by the apparent simplicity of Train Conductor 2: USA game for Android. This is a solid game with an excellent game play that will test your multitasking capabilities to the core. Must have. Free demo version called Train Conductor 2 Lite also available.

Install Train Conductor 2: USA from Android Market

Dead Space is a newcomer to Android Market and it is already creating ripples. I have just started playing it and I have to say this looks like one of the most polished games I have ever played on Android. Very resource hungry and battery hog, but that is expected from a heavy game like this. If nothing else, animations and effects alone are a treat to watch. But before buying, read a lot of reviews and make sure that Dead Space works properly in your device.

Install Dead Space from Android Market

If you thought Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD was the only good game by Gameloft, then you are wrong. 9mm HD is their best game to date in my opinion. As with every other Gameloft game, 9mmHD is also pretty resource hungry and it also requires more than 1GB of download initially. But with all that graphics and effects, 9mmHD totally worth that price.

Install 9mmHD from Android Market

Note: I have deliberately excluded many Android games to avoid repetition, since we had already featured many of them in a previous article(which were also pretty lightweight). If you would like to check them out, here is it: 15 best games for Android. Thanks for reading.

Secret and Hidden Codes for Android

2012-01-17T23:33:00.000+02:00

Nothing unethical here. All these codes are perfectly ok and legit. If you like tweaking and playing with your Android, this little piece of information is just for you. With these codes, you can have better control of your Android device. I tried these codes on my Samsung Galaxy tab and they worked there. I’m pretty sure they will work on any Android phone. if you like these codes, please share this article on Twitter, Google plus, or Facebook so that others can benefit from these codes as well.
Disclaimer: Though I’ve tested these codes myself, I don’t take any responsibility if a code gives any problems. This article is for experienced Android users and not for noobs.

*#*#4636#*#*

It can give some really interesting data about the battery and phone. it will take you to a menu with 4 options: phone information, battery information, battery history, and usage statistics.

*#*#7780#*#*

This is the factory reset code. It will remove the settings of Google account from your phone (this is very helpful if you ever have to hand your phone over to someone for a few days). Plus it will reset the data and settings of system and downloaded apps. You can try this code safely because once you enter it, your phone will ask for confirmation. You can then opt out of it. Even if you do reset the settings, it will not erase the memory card files.

*2767*3855#

Think twice before you try this one because it will not ask for confirmation. Once the code has been entered, the only way to stop is by taking out the battery. Since I couldn’t take the battery out of the tablet, I didn’t try this one. So you are on your own here. This one formats the internal storage and resets all settings.

*#*#34971539#*#*

This code will give phone camera information. Its menu options would be: update camera firmware, get firmware version, and get update count. Don’t try the first one because then your phone camera will not work and you will have to take it to the service center.

*#*#7594#*#*

It gives you power over the power button. The power on/off button of the phone turns the phone off only when you long press it. With this code, you can change that, and your phone will get switched off with just a single small press of this button. This will save your time that can be spent instead on downloading cool apps.

*#*#273283*255*663282*#*#*

With this code, a file copy screen will open up. Here you can backup your sound, video, and image files.

*#*#197328640#*#*

With this code, you will enter service mode. Here you can change settings and run tests.

*#*#8255#*#*

With this, you can see the Gtalk service monitor.
Try them on your Android phone and let me know how they worked out. Keep reading for more!

Adopt Zero Trust to help secure the extended enterprise

2012-01-17T23:08:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time, security and risk professionals defined borders that limited and restricted users as well as a visible set of threats, such as worms and viruses.

Today, an organization's functional network extends well outside of its controllable borders. As organizations add new connection options and new devices like smartphones and tablets to the network, the potential attack surface expands well past the virus-infected laptop. Business partners, contractors and user-owned devices make locking down a network even harder. Known as the "extended enterprise," this new network is dynamic and organic. It constantly shifts with the movement of users, the rise of new technologies, the inclusion of new partners and supply chains, and the advent of new attacks.

In an extended enterprise where the IT infrastructure changes frequently and assets (both external and those that you control) come together dynamically to deliver an enterprise function, one thing remains predictable: enterprise data and the value it represents. Attackers rarely strike networks or users just for fun; they attack to steal data. As a result, an effective data protection strategy needs to take on a data-centric view rather than an infrastructure and device-level view. Let’s look at how to protect data in the extended enterprise using a new type of defense paradigm: the Zero Trust Model.

To prepare a network for any device, anywhere, at any time, Forrester recommends organizations use Zero Trust principles to create a methodology for data protection. The Zero Trust Model of information security simplifies how information security is conceptualized by assuming there are no longer "trusted" interfaces, applications, traffic, networks or users. It takes the old model — "trust but verify" — and inverts it, since recent breaches have proven when an organization trusts, it doesn't verify.

By applying these principles to the extended enterprise, companies can begin to create a robust plan for pervasively securing their data, and consequently their users and networks. There are three simple ideas behind the Zero Trust Model:

Ensure all resources are accessed securely — regardless of location.
Clearly, there are many different types of users who need data access from an innumerable number of venues. Place is no longer important because of an ever-increasing mobile workforce. Whether they're inside or outside of the primary network, it is critical to ensure users will access data securely. To do this, security professionals must rely on more encrypted tunnels and real-time traffic inspection via network intrusion prevention systems (IPSes) or layer 7 firewalls.
Adopt the principle of least privilege, and strictly enforce access control.
When a company considers a user "trusted," it typically allows the user nearly free rein on the network. By adopting a Zero Trust posture and applying granular data access control, a company limits the ability of unauthorized users to steal or reveal data they don't need access to for their job function. In the future, expect security vendors to more closely intertwine NAC, identity and access management (IAM), and entitlement as they seek to create new and simpler methods of access control.
Inspect and log all traffic.
Data provided in the Verizon 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report shows that "good evidence of the breach usually exists in the victim's log files waiting to be used." However, most companies don't know they're in a breach state until a third party notifies them. To achieve the type of situational awareness necessary in the modern threat environment, security and risk professionals must inspect and log all traffic, both internal and external. This should be done through a combination of threat mitigation controls such as firewalls and network IPSes, security information management (SIM) products, and network analysis and visibility (NAV) tools. This combined approach will provide an organization with significant insight into the network traffic and the inherent potential threats that may be embedded in that traffic.

By adopting a posture of Zero Trust and coupling that with good data protection strategies, companies can go a long way toward mitigating the ever-changing threats against our data that enterprises constantly face. More specifically, Forrester recommends organizations:

1. Conduct a data discovery and classification project.
Data leaks and breaches often happen because users (both business and IT) have widely disseminated toxic data – i.e. data that an enterprise is compelled to protect by legislation or by contract – and security has lost track of its location. Before an enterprise can protect its data, it must conduct an inventory. At the very least, it must inventory all its toxic data.

Data classification is the second fundamental step in creating a data-centric security organization. A data classification scheme must be simple and manageable, with a limit of three or four tiers. For example, "classified, internal and public" is a simple classification scheme. Anything more complex and you run the risk of users ignoring it, or you fail to understand where to concentrate the deployment of specific security controls like data leak prevention (DLP) or encryption.

2. Embrace encryption.
Encrypting or tokenizing data covers a multitude of sins. These technologies effectively “kill” data, making it useless to attackers. Cybercriminals can't monetize tokenized or encrypted data. In addition, breached data that a security professional has tokenized or encrypted may not be subject to state or industry breach laws or regulations. For example, some states offer Safe Harbor if the breached data is encrypted. Many would agree, and there is theoretical evidence to back it up, that in the absence of the keys, encrypted data is not actually data at all.

3. Deploy NAV tools to watch data flows and user behaviors.
The modern security professional must have situational awareness over the entire network in order to protect data from theft or misuse. Currently, most mature organizations have deployed firewalls, IPS and SIM technologies to protect the perimeter, but the internal network remains wide open. One way to get situational awareness over the internal network is to deploy NAV tools to proactively monitor the network for threats or malicious behavior.

4. Begin designing a zero-trust network.
Many of today’s security challenges are network design issues. Our current networking design paradigms were created in an era before today’s sophisticated security threats, while many network designers are infrastructure specialists with little security experience or awareness. In the future, enterprises must embed security into the fabric of the network itself using the principles found in the Zero Trust Model.

تداعي الجسد

2012-01-17T11:26:00.001+02:00

قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ مَثَلُ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ فِي تَوَادِّهِمْ وَتَرَاحُمِهِمْ وَتَعَاطُفِهِمْ مَثَلُ الْجَسَدِ إِذَا اشْتَكَى مِنْهُ عُضْوٌ تَدَاعَى لَهُ سَائِرُ الْجَسَدِ بِالسَّهَرِ وَالْحُمَّى... رواه البخاري ومسلم وغيرهما.

الحقيقة العلمية:

لقد كشفت الأبحاث العلمية المكثفة والمتوالية حقائق مذهلة عن تفاعل الجسم البشري عند مواجهة المخاطر كالإصابة بجرح أو مرض وتم اكتشاف الخطوط الدفاعية والاستجابات الوظيفية التي تحدث بالجسم حال إصابة عضو من أعضائه بالمرض أو بالجروح.

وتلك الاستجابات تتناسب مع درجة معاناة العضو تناسبا طرديا؛ فبقدر ما تكون شدة إصابة العضو يكون توجيه طاقات الجسم ووظائفه لمنع استفحال المرض ولتحقيق الشفاء التام، ففي حالة إصابة عضو مثلا تدعو مراكز في المخ الغدة النخامية لإفراز هرموني يدعو باقي الغدد الصماء لتفرز مواد تحفز وتدعو جميع أعضاء الجسم لتوجيه وظائفها لنجدة العضو المشتكي.

والجسد تتداعى أعضاؤه بمعنى تتوجه بطاقتها لخدمة العضو المشتكي، فالقلب مثلا يسرع بالنبضات لسرعة تدوير الدم في الوقت الذي تنقبض الأوعية الدموية بالأجزاء الخاملة من الجسم وتتسع الأوعية الدموية المحيطة بالعضو المصاب لكي تحمل له ما يحتاجه من طاقة وأوكسجين وأجسام مضادة وهرمونات وأحماض أمينية بناءة، وهو يتداعى بمعنى يتهدم وينهار فيبدأ بهدم مخزون الدهن لكي يعطي من نفسه لمصلحة العضو المصاب ما يحتاجه إلى أن تتم السيطرة على المرض ويتم التئام الأنسجة ثم بعد ذلك يعود الجسم لبناء نفسه، والإشارات المنبعثة من الجرح تمثل شكوى واستغاثات حقيقية تدعو إلى استنفار عام، فتنطلق نبضات عصبية من مكان الإصابة إلى الدماغ حيث مراكز الحس والتحكم غير الإرادي وتنبعث مواد كيماوية مع أول قطرة دم تنزف أو نسيج يتهتك، وتستجيب كافة أعضاء الجسم كل على حسب تخصصه، والمحصلة هي توجيه طاقة الجسم البشري ووظائف أعضائه لخدمة ذلك العضو المصاب.

وجه الإعجاز:

منطوق الحديث هو ما يحدث طبيا فعلا، فأجزاء الجسد تدعو بعضها بعضا وبجميع معاني التداعي في اللغة العربية. حيث يخبر النبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم بما يجب أن يكون عليه حال الأمة الإسلامية من تواد وتعاطف وتراحم بضرب المثل بالجسد الواحد عندما يشتكي عضو من أعضائه، فبين أنه يتداعى كله من أجل ذلك العضو، ولا تجد أدق من كلمة تداعي لوصف ما يحدث في الجسم حيال شكوى أحد الأعضاء، وجاء الوصف في جملة شرطية قصيرة فعل الشرط فيها اشتكى وجوابه تداعى، فكان الإعجاز علميا ولغويا وبلاغيا في آن واحد؛ فقد أخبر بحقيقة ما يحدث داخل الجسم البشري حيث لم يكن لعين أن تلحظه مستخدما كلمات جامعات تصف حقيقة ما يحدث بجميع المعاني الواردة في اللغة وبأسلوب التشبيه الذي يجسد المعنى في الذهن، ومن العجيب أن يستخدم الأطباء اسما للجهاز العصبي الذي يتفاعل في حال تعرض الجسم للخطر والمرض وصفوا به حقيقة ما يفعله هذا النظام والجهاز فكانت ترجمته الحرفية: المتواد المتعاطف والمتراحم وهو عين ما سماه النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم في الحديث فسبحان الله الذي أرسل رسـوله بالهدى ودين الحق ليظهره على الدين كله وأيده بالآيات البينة وجوامع الكلمات.

تقوم الخلايا الأكولة بالاستجابة لنداء المنطقة المصابة وتهاجم الدخيل الغازي وتلتهمه وتبيده ثم تلفظه.

المصدر: موقع الهيئة العالمية للإعجاز العلمى فى القرآن والسنة

Protecting Against SQL Injection Attacks with Oracle Database Firewall

2012-01-15T15:12:00.000+02:00

Exploits that take advantage of SQL Injection (SQLi) vulnerabilities in software are among the most dangerous and prevalent attacks on the Internet today.
In a SQLi attack, hackers typically take advantage of security flaws in web application software to pass malicious commands to a database back-end. A SQLi vulnerability can potentially enable an attacker to take control of an entire database, exposing confidential information and leaving businesses and users at risk.
Protecting against SQLi attacks takes a multi-pronged effort. Auditing and remediation of exploitable software vulnerabilities is key, but enterprises can also employ additional layers of defenses.
Among the ways that enterprises can protect themselves against SQLi attacks is by way of the Oracle Database Firewall, which was updated with a new release today. The firewall helps protect against SQLi exploits by identifying and blocking unauthorized database transactions on the network.
"We have extended the scope of the databases that we support in terms of being able to understand their networking protocols and their SQL dialect," Vipin Samar, Vice President, Database Security at Oracle, told InternetNews.com. "The firewall looks at the traffic that is going to the database, and then based on customer set policies they can log, audit, monitor, and block the offending SQL statements."
The Oracle Database Firewall is typically installed on dedicated server hardware running Oracle Enterprise Linux. The technology behind the firewall was acquired by Oracle in 2010 and released under the Oracle name in February 2011.
Previously, the Oracle Database Firewall included support for Oracle Database 11g, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), and Sybase SQL Anywhere. Support is now being extended to include the MySQL database which is also part of the Oracle product portfolio. Oracle acquired MySQL as part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010.
Samar noted that there is a difference between the default defensive capabilities of Oracle Database and MySQL.
"There are not many preventive mechanisms on the MySQL database itself like the way we have it on the Oracle database," Samar said. "On the Oracle database, we have support for encryption, more access control and more auditing, so there are multiple layers of defense."
The database firewall helps to mitigate the risk of some but not all possible attack vectors, which is why having multiple layers of security is important.
"If someone set up MySQL on a screwed up box and an attacker gets to that screwed up box you have an issue," Roxana Bradescu, Senior Director, Security Product Management at Oracle, told InternetNews.com.
The Oracle Database Firewall is concerned only with the database SQL traffic. The way the system works is by way of SQL grammar analysis techniques that help to indentify potentially malicious traffic.
"The grammar analysis analyzes all of the SQL statements in a fixed time," Bradescu explained.
From a deployment perspective, the new version of the Oracle Database Firewall also provides a new proxy deployment mode. Samar explained that there are multiple ways that the database firewall can be connected on a network. One is by way of hooking into a server port, making a copy of the traffic to forward to the firewall. In that deployment mode, the firewall is not inline with the traffic and performs more of a monitoring function. Another deployment mode is by placing the database firewall inline behind a router and in front of the database on the network. The inline mode requires network configuration changes to make sure that traffic is routed through the proper box.
The new proxy mode is intended to further simplify the deployment of the database firewall.
"So you go to your client and instead of sending traffic directly to the database, it sends it to the database firewall," Samar said. "The firewall then goes and forwards that traffic to the database server."
On the database server itself, an administrator can specify that all traffic must come first through the database firewall and not by way of any other connection. Routing all the traffic through the database firewall also means that the software appliance needs to be able to handle all the traffic.
"Scalability is such a key issue, so the scalability is there with the ability to deal with the volume of traffic," Samar said.

A Beginner’s Guide to Editing Text Files With Vi

2012-01-15T14:31:00.000+02:00

Vi is a powerful text editor included with most Linux systems, even embedded ones. Sometimes you’ll have to edit a text file on a system that doesn’t include a friendlier text editor, so knowing Vi is essential.
Unlike Nano, an easy-to-use terminal text editor, Vi doesn’t hold your hand and provide a list of keyboard shortcuts on the screen. It’s a modal text editor, and it has both an insert and command mode.

Getting Started

Vi is a terminal application, so you’ll have to start it from a terminal window. Use the vi /path/to/file command to open an existing file with Vi. The vi /path/to/file command also works if the file doesn’t exist yet; Vi will create a new file and write it to the specified location when you save.

Remember to use sudo if you want to edit a system file. So, for example, you’d type sudo vi /etc/fstab if you wanted to edit your fstab file. Use the su command instead if you’re using a non-Ubuntu version of Linux that doesn’t use sudo.

Command Mode

This is what you’ll see when you open a file in vi. It looks like you can just start typing, but you can’t. Vi is a modal text editor, and it opens in command mode. Trying to type at this screen will result in unexpected behavior.

While in command mode, you can move the cursor around with the arrow keys. Press the x key to delete the character under the cursor. There are a variety of other delete commands — for example, typing dd (press the d key twice) deletes an entire line of text.
You can select, copy, cut and paste text in command mode. Position the cursor at the left or right side of the text you want to copy and press the v key. Move your cursor to select text, and then press y to copy the selected text or x to cut it. Position your cursor at the desired location and press the p key to paste the text you copied or cut.

Insert Mode

Aside from command mode, the other mode you need to know about is insert mode, which allows you to insert text in Vi. Entering insert mode is easy once you know it exists — just press the i key once after you’ve positioned the cursor in command mode. Start typing and Vi will insert the characters you type into the file rather than trying to interpret them as commands.

Once you’re done in insert mode, press the escape key to return to command mode.

Saving and Quitting

You can save and quit vi from command mode. First, ensure you’re in command mode by pressing the escape key (pressing the escape key again does nothing if you’re already in command mode.)
Type :wq and press enter to write the file to disk and quit vi. You can also split this command up — for example, type :w and press enter to write the file to disk without quitting or type :q to quit vi without saving the file.

Vi won’t let you quit if you’ve modified the file since you last saved, but you can type :q! and press enter to ignore this warning.

Check out Nano if you’re looking for an easier-to-use terminal text editor. Most Linux distributions come with Nano installed, but embedded systems and other stripped-down environments often only include Vi.

Understanding Linux File System Quotas - Installation and Setup

2012-01-15T14:17:00.002+02:00

When you are running your own web hosting, it is important to monitor how much space is being used by each user. This is not a simple task to be done manually since one of the users or group could fill up the whole hard disk, preventing others from availing any space. Therefore, it is important to allow each user or group their own hard disk space called quota and locking them out from using more than what is allotted.

The system administrator sets a limit or a disk quota to restrict certain aspects of the file system usage on a Linux operating system. In multi-user environments, disk quotas are very useful since a large number of users have access to the file system. They may be logging into the system directly or using their disk space remotely. They may also be accessing their files through NFS or through Samba. If several users host their websites on your web space, you need to implement the quota system.

How to Install Quota

For installing a quota system, for example, in your Debian or RedHAT Linux system, you will need two tools called ‘quota’ and ‘quotatool’. At the time of installation of these tools, you will be asked if you wish to send daily reminders to users who are going over their quotas.

Now, the administrator also needs to know the users that are going over their quota. The system will send an email to this effect, therefore the email address of the administrator has to be inputted next.

In case the user does not know what to do if the system gives him a warning message, the next entry is the contact number of the administrator. This will be displayed to the user along with the warning message. With this, the quota system installation is completed.

At this time, a user and a group have to be created and proper permissions given. For creating, you have to assume root status, and type the following commands:

# touch /aquota.user /aquota.group
# chmod 600 /aquota.*

Next, these have to be mounted in the proper place on the root file system. For this, an entry has to be made in the ‘fstab’ file in the directory /etc. In the ‘fstab’ file, the root entry has to be modified with:

noatime,nodiratime,usrjquota=aquota.user,grpjquota=aquota.group,jqfmt=vfsv0

After this, the computer has to be rebooted, or the file system remounted with the command:

# mount -o remount /

The system is now able to work with disk quotas. However, you have to allow the system to build/rebuild its table of current disk usage. For this, you must first run quotacheck.

This will examine all the quota-enabled file systems, and build a table of the current disk usage for each one. The operating system’s copy of the disk usage is then updated. In addition, this creates the disk quota files for the entire file system. If the quota already existed, they are updated. The command looks like:

# quotacheck -avugm

Some explanation is necessary here. The (-a) tells the command that all locally mounted quota-enabled file systems are to be checked. The (-v) is to display the status information as the check proceeds. The (-u) is to enable checking the user disk quota information. The (-g) is to enable checking the group disk quota information. Finally, the (-m) tells the command not to try to remount file system read-only.

After checking and building the disk-quota files is over, the disk-quotas have to be turned on. This is done by the command ‘quotaon’ to inform the system that disk-quota should be enabled, such as:

# quotaon -avug

Here, (-a) forces all file systems in /etc/fstab to enable their quotas. The (-v) displays status information for each file system. The (-u) is for enabling the user quota. The (-g) enables the group quota.

Define Quota for Each User/Group

Now that the system is ready with quotas, you can start defining what each user or group gets as his limit. Two types of limits can be defined. One is the soft limit and the other is the hard limit. To set the two limits try editing the size and inode size with:

# edquota -u $USER

This allows you to edit the line:

/dev/sda1 1024 200000 400000 1024 0 0

Here, the soft limit is 200000 (200MB) and the hard limit is 400000 (400MB). You may change it to suit your user (denoted by $USER).

The soft limit has a grace period of 7 days by default. It can be changed to days, hours, minutes, or seconds as desired by:

# edquota -t

This allows you to edit the line below. It has been modified to change the default to 15 minutes:

/dev/sda1 15minutes 7days

For editing group quota use:

# edquota -g $GROUP

Quota Status Report

Now that you have set a quota, it is easy to create a mini report on how much space a user has used. For this use the command:

root@gateway [~]# repquota -a

*** Report for user quotas on device /dev/vzfs

Block grace time: 00:00; Inode grace time: 00:00

Block limits File limits

User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace

----------------------------------------------------------------------

root -- 5578244 0 0 117864 0 0

bin -- 30936 0 0 252 0 0

mail -- 76 0 0 19 0 0

nobody -- 0 0 0 3 0 0

mailnull -- 3356 0 0 157 0 0

smmsp -- 4 0 0 2 0 0

named -- 860 0 0 11 0 0

rpc -- 0 0 0 1 0 0

mailman -- 40396 0 0 2292 0 0

dovecot -- 4 0 0 1 0 0

mysql -- 181912 0 0 857 0 0

firewall -- 92023 153600 153600 21072 0 0

#55 -- 1984 0 0 74 0 0

#200 -- 1104 0 0 63 0 0

#501 -- 6480 0 0 429 0 0

#506 -- 648 0 0 80 0 0

#1000 -- 7724 0 0 878 0 0

#50138 -- 43044 0 0 3948 0 0

Once the user and group quotas are setup, it is simple to manage your storage. Thus, you do not allow users to hog all of the disk space. By using disk quotas, you force your users to be tidier, and users and groups of users will not fill their home directories with junk or old documents that are no longer needed.

Ubuntu 11.10 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

2012-01-15T13:43:00.000+02:00

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 11.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I'm using an Ubuntu 11.10 system here with the hostname server1.example.com and the IP address 192.168.0.100.
I'm running all the steps in this tutorial with root privileges, so make sure you're logged in as root:

sudo su

2 Installing Samba

Connect to your server on the shell and install the Samba packages:

apt-get install libcups2 samba samba-common

Edit the smb.conf file:

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

In the global section, remove the "#" at the beginning of the line security = user so that it looks like this:

[...]
# "security = user" is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server. See
# /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba3-HOWTO/ServerType.html
# in the samba-doc package for details.
   security = user
[...]

This enables Linux system users to log in to the Samba server.
Close the file and restart Samba:

/etc/init.d/smbd restart

3 Adding Samba Shares

Now I will add a share that is accessible by all users.

Create the directory for sharing the files and change the group to the users group:

mkdir -p /home/shares/allusers
chown -R root:users /home/shares/allusers/
chmod -R ug+rwx,o+rx-w /home/shares/allusers/

At the end of the file /etc/samba/smb.conf add the following lines:

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

[...]
[allusers]
  comment = All Users
  path = /home/shares/allusers
  valid users = @users
  force group = users
  create mask = 0660
  directory mask = 0771
  writable = yes

If you want all users to be able to read and write to their home directories via Samba, add the following lines to /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[...]
[homes]
   comment = Home Directories
   browseable = no
   valid users = %S
   writable = yes
   create mask = 0700
   directory mask = 0700

Now we restart Samba:

/etc/init.d/smbd restart

4 Adding And Managing Users

In this example, I will add a user named tom. You can add as many users as you need in the same way, just replace the username tom with the desired username in the commands.

useradd tom -m -G users

Set a password for tom in the Linux system user database. If the user tom should not be able to log in to the Linux system, skip this step.

passwd tom

-> Enter the password for the new user.
Now add the user to the Samba user database:

smbpasswd -a tom

-> Enter the password for the new user.
Now you should be able to log in from your Windows workstation with the file explorer (address is \\192.168.0.100 or \\192.168.0.100\tom for tom's home directory) using the username tom and the chosen password and store files on the Linux server either in tom's home directory or in the public shared directory.

5 Links

Samba: http://www.samba.org/
Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Top 10 free open source tools for network admins

2012-01-14T01:42:00.000+02:00

From troubleshooting DNS queries and misbehaving network applications to keeping your configurations and passwords organized, these free open source tools have you covered

Routing issues, slow network applications, DNS resolution problems -- a network administrator has to deal with a host of network nuisances on a daily basis. How do you survive when you're constantly under the gun to fix the problems? Like any other professional, you need a solid set of tools.
Not surprisingly, plenty of options exist in the open source camp. Excellent open source software tools are available to help you keep a close watch over your network, as well as meet many other needs of the busy network manager. From monitoring, troubleshooting, and security analysis tools to utilities for keeping track of IP allocations, passwords, and router configurations, here are my top 10 picks of the most essential open source tools for our network admin toolbox -- all free for the downloading.
[ Also on InfoWorld: "The six immutable laws for troubleshooting IT" | "Everything you need to know about building solid, reliable networks" | "10 tips for boosting network performance" | "Killer open source monitoring tools ]

This is by no means an exhaustive list of open source networking utilities available, and I've merely touched on their capabilities. Are there other free open source tools that you use regularly but we didn't list here? Leave a comment and let us know!
Top free open source tools for network admins: DigDNS problems plague us all, and they're easily overlooked when troubleshooting, so you need a reliable tool that provides detailed information about how users' DNS queries are being resolved. Why not use the tool made by the Internet Systems Consortium, the same group that produces the BIND DNS server software running the majority of DNS servers worldwide? That tool is Dig.
At the heart of it, Dig is a command-line utility that performs DNS queries. That alone is helpful, but Dig can also tell you most everything about the queries and replies -- you'll sometimes need that extra information to determine why you're getting a strange reply from a DNS server. The default output of Dig provides you with all the data you'll require for troubleshooting: reply/error codes from the server, flags used in the query, a reiteration of your query, the answer to your query, how long the query took, which server it received the reply from, and how much data it received in the reply. Dig can be quite useful when you're trying to diagnose slow network applications, by determining how long it takes a computer to get DNS resolution for the application server's domain name.
Dig can ask for a typical name query, replying with an IP address when you give it a domain name. You can also do a reverse lookup: By using the -x switch and giving it an IP address, Dig it will return the corresponding domain name for that IP address. The -t switch lets you specify the type of query you're making, so you can ask for mail server records (MX), name server records (NS), text records (TXT), and more.
If you are sporadically getting incorrect replies to your DNS queries, it's possible that one of your DNS servers has a different set of DNS records than the others. With Dig, you can run the same query against each of your DNS servers to find out which one is providing the erroneous replies. Just give Dig the DNS server's address with the @ symbol in front:
dig @4.2.2.2 www.yourdomain.com
Are you troubleshooting DNS problems with servers that use transaction signatures? Dig lets you specify a TSIG key to use for your queries. Dig also lets you tailor IPv6-only queries to help you troubleshoot IPv6-specific problems.
Dig is a part of the client utilities of the BIND project. It is not generally installed by default, but is readily available on all Unix, Linux, and BSD variants, including Mac OS X. A Windows version is available too.

Top free open source tools for network admins: NmapCarrie Moss used it in "The Matrix Reloaded." Crackers, hackers, and network admins alike rely on it, and every networking consultant better have Nmap installed on his or her computer. Nmap is available for nearly every platform imaginable and is amazingly useful as a network and security analysis tool.
Nmap is a lightweight security scanner that's heavy on utility. Nmap can perform tasks as simple as a ping sweep to see which IP addresses are active and responding, as well as carry off complex scripts to scan your systems for known vulnerabilities. Another fun feature of Nmap is the ability to analyze the reply packets it receives from a host to determine which OS the host is running.
Nmap is most commonly used to see which services or ports are open or available on a host. It supports both TCP and UDP scanning. You can give it a single host to scan or a CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) block or an entire list of hosts and networks from a file. A dizzying range of options allows you to specify which types of packets to send out and to see which hosts are susceptible to various remote attacks. Additionally, Nmap provides several options to bypass firewalls and other network filters that would otherwise block your scans.

Nmap also includes the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which combines custom scripts with existing Nmap functionality to perform more specific discovery and attack analyses than Nmap does by itself. Fyodor and David Fifield gave an excellent talk and demonstration on the NSE at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last year. In the demonstration, Fyodor showed the results of Nmap scans against Microsoft company computers that used some of the NSE's MS RPC discovery scripts. The scripts used rpcinfo to gather info such as share names and usernames from the Windows computers. There are 177 NSE scripts available from Nmap.org as of this writing, and because they are user contributed, the list of NSE scripts is expanding at an amazing pace.
If you're a longtime user of Nmap but haven't kept up with Nmap news and releases, you'll want to check out the Zenmap GUI's new network topology feature, which lets you create an interactive network map based on information gathered by Nmap. The map begins with localhost at the center and displays all discovered hosts in concentric rings around it, the rings indicating the number of hops away the hosts are. From there you can shift the focus to another host or get more info by clicking a host's icon in the map. The shape of the icon refers to the type of device, and the size indicates the number of open ports.
All this makes Nmap perfect for checking on IP address usage, scanning for security vulnerabilities, and ensuring your firewalls and routers are operating properly.

Top free open source tools for network admins: KeePassOh the passwords! How many passwords do we have for all the various servers, switches, routers, and other network gear we have to manage? And when we have to change a password, we must be sure to notify all of the other people who have access to that equipment. A good password management system can save valuable time and spare you a lot of hassle.
Enter KeePass, an encrypted database program to store all of your usernames, passwords, access URLs, and more. You can restrict access to the KeePass database with a password, a key file, or both. The password database is encrypted with either AES or the Twofish encryption algorithm, and not as one contiguous file but in 256-bit chunks -- decrypting a single piece of data nets a cracker little or no useful data. Plus KeePass encrypts all the data in its database, not just the passwords, so your usernames, URLs, and other notes are safe as well.
You can create groups for password records to help organize the info if you have a lot of passwords to track. Groups can have subgroups, subgroups can have subgroups, and so on. A search function helps you quickly find the password record you need.

How do you share the KeePass database with coworkers who are running Mac OS X or some other version of Unix? No problem. KeePass is ported to Windows, Mac OS X, various Linuxes, and popular mobile phone platforms, including iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Because the KeePass database is stored in a single file, it's easy to distribute among your NOC team. Did I mention that KeePass is portable, needing no installation on Windows or Mac OS X? You can carry it with you on a USB stick or download it to a computer without leaving any unwanted registry entries or library files.
Already using another password manager? KeePass can import your existing password database in formats from a variety of programs such as Password Keeper, CodeWalletPro, and Password Agent. Other file formats are supported through KeePass plug-ins.
Top free open source tools for network admins: IPplanWe network admins must keep track of which IP addresses we have, which are in use, and which are available to be allocated to the systems administrators who always want yet another IP address for their servers. Are you tracking your IP addresses in an Excel spreadsheet? Well, stop! Get the benefits of using a real database with IPplan.

IPplan is not a generic spreadsheet or database application. It is tailored to tracking IP addresses, so it understands and enforces CIDR blocks. Each address record has support for contact info, hardware, DNS name, location, description, MAC address, NAT address tracking, and a generic "additional information" field. You can also upload a file to attach to the IP address record.
IP address records are organized into subnets (CIDR blocks), which are assigned to customers or autonomous systems. Subnets are further organized into network areas or ranges (supernets) within the customer hierarchy. Because IPplan is designed for use by ISPs, it works well for organizing enterprise addresses for companies with multiple locations and complex networks that use multiple AS (Autonomous System) numbers. If you decide to rework the subnets on your network, no problem. IPplan handles changes easily via its split and merge subnet functions, allowing you to split and merge subnets without losing any data.
You can import your existing IP allocation data via a CSV file upload. Alternatively, you can use an XML file created by Nmap to import addresses, or you can define the subnets yourself and have IPplan automatically fill in the DNS names for you. IPplan can import the DNS info via a zone transfer from your DNS servers.
You can set up multiple logins, so the entire network admin team has access to the IPplan database. You could even give the system administrators access to IPplan and require them to request IP addresses from you via the Web GUI.
IPplan is more than just an IP address tracking database. As you can see, you can also use IPplan to manage your DNS records, and IPplan implements "triggers" that allow you to run custom scripts based on actions taken in the Web interface.

Top free open source tools for network admins: Tcpdump and WiresharkWhen things get really hairy and you can't figure out what's going wrong on your network, it's time to pull out Tcpdump. This utility lets you capture the network traffic on a network card and view the packets and frames in real time.
If you're wondering why a browser can't find the Web server, you can fire up Tcpdump and see what's happening. Is the computer sending out DNS queries? Is it receiving a valid reply from the correct DNS server? By viewing the query and reply packets with Tcpdump, you can determine if the DNS server is replying with NXDomain for what should be a perfectly valid domain name or if the user changed the DNS server settings because he thinks that Google's DNS servers "must be faster" than your company's own servers. Or maybe the DNS queries and replies are fine, but the remote Web server is not responding. Then you would see the HTTP request packet leave the computer, but no replies from the Web server.

Tcpdump is a great tool by itself, but pair it with Wireshark, and you have an unbeatable system for troubleshooting network application issues. You can save your Tcpdump packet captures to files and open them in Wireshark for easier analysis. Wireshark gives you a GUI to examine Tcpdump captures and sort the data for more thorough analysis. You can compare time stamps on individual packets to see how long it's taking for a reply to be returned after a request has been made. And if you've synced the system clocks on client and server computers, you can see how long it takes for packets to travel between the two.
If you have a slow internal Web application, you can use Tcpdump and Wireshark to locate the bottleneck. If you see a long delay in the DNS lookup requests and replies but the actual HTTP requests and replies are fast, then you know the trouble lies with the DNS system or the network links to the DNS servers. If the DNS process is working normally, then you'll want to examine how long it takes for client requests to reach the server and how long it takes for the server to reply back. Wherever your network problem lies, Tcpdump and Wireshark can help you put your finger on it.
Books have been written about Tcpdump and Wireshark. Read them and learn all about these two utilities. You'll certainly improve your network troubleshooting game.

Top free open source tools for network admins: RANCIDWe've all had that horrible sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we've copied and pasted a new config into a router or switch and it stops responding. Did I remember to back up my old config before I uploaded the new one? How late will I be staying up tonight to fix this mess?
RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is a versioning system for your switch and router configs. It uses either CVS or Subversion to store each new version of your configuration files. As it gathers and stores the configs for each of your devices, it runs a diff against the previous version to see what, if any, changes have been made. When it detects a change, it sends out an email with the details of that change to an address of your choosing. With RANCID, you'll know whenever a change has been made by your NOC team.
Because RANCID runs via a crontab entry, you can control how often it logs in and checks your configurations. If you are a stable shop and rarely make changes, you might have RANCID check once a day. If you are a more dynamic NOC and make changes frequently, you can set RANCID to check hourly or as often as is appropriate for your company.
One of the neat features of RANCID is that it includes a looking-glass server. You can take a quick peek at all the routes in your organization and search for any elements that are out of sorts when you suspect a routing problem on your network.
RANCID supports gear from most of the big networking vendors, including Cisco, HP ProCurve, Juniper, Foundry, and several others. It is known to work on Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Top free open source tools for network admins: OpenNMS and CactiOpenNMS has a place in every enterprise. It's a highly scalable network monitoring system that is completely open source software. A single server can monitor hundreds of thousands of network interfaces and produce nice graphs for metrics such as bandwidth usage, CPU, memory, and more.
You can set thresholds that indicate when a device is busy or down and receive a notification via email, SMS, IM, and so on. Of course you can have separate logins for each of your NOC team, and you can set up an on-call schedule so that notifications go only to on-duty team members. OpenNMS also has an escalation handler, so if the level-one NOC techs don't take care of an issue right away, an engineer or manager can be notified to oversee issue resolution.

The Cacti graphing solution makes a good complement to OpenNMS. Although OpenNMS has the same graphing capabilities, Cacti's more intuitive Web UI allows nontechnical staff to build and manage collections of graphs that are interesting to them. For example, you could configure Cacti to graph data from your (SNMP-capable) HVAC controllers, and your facility maintenance team members could log in to Cacti and build custom views that display only the data they need to see. If one is watching fan rotation speed and another is tracking electrical power draw, they wouldn't have to view each other's data.
You can organize Cacti's graphs into trees, similar to the old Microsoft file system viewers used to display files in a directory structure. And with individual logins for each staff member, everyone gets their own view settings saved under their login.
Top free open source tools for network admins: My TraceRouteMy TraceRoute (MTR) is not quite as useful as it once was. MTR relies on ICMP packets to judge network latency -- and ICMP are the first packets modern routers will drop in favor of more important data traffic when they get too busy. However, I still find MTR a great tool for troubleshooting network links that traverse multiple routers. Specify a destination, and MTR shows you a list of routers that your traffic passes through on the way (as well as the destination itself) and the results of a continuous ping to those routers.

MTR updates the statistics of the pings as it runs, so you can see which routers are slow to respond or which are dropping a significant number of ping requests. The results include the percentage of lost packets, the response times from each router (average, best, and worst), and the standard deviations for those times. How many times have you heard a user complaining "the Internet is slow," only to discover that the problem is a particular website or provider upstream from your office? MTR is a great way to see whether there really is a problem and to get a quick idea of where the problem resides.
One of MTR's more commonly used command-line options is -n, which stops MTR from doing reverse DNS lookups on the IP addresses of the routers it pings. This is handy when you're having DNS problems and don't want to wait for the lookups to timeout. Another useful option is -r, which issues a single summary report after running a certain number of pings (specified by the -c option) to each router. This can be used with scripts to build regular reports to be printed, emailed, or even inserted into a Web page.

Top free open source tools for network admins: PHP WeathermapSometimes you want the 10,000-foot overview of your network traffic. PHP Weathermap provides exactly that. It shows a logical map of your routers and the links between them, using different colors to indicate how busy each link is. PHP Weathermap is a good complement to an application such as Cacti or OpenNMS.
PHP Weathermap does not handle its own data collection, so you'll need to pair it with another application such as Cacti, OpenNMS, MRTG, or RRDtool. PHP Weathermap has a plug-in that helps it integrate into Cacti, with some options available in the Cacti preference panels.
You will need to edit the map config files to adjust the appearance of your maps. You can do this by hand, though PHP Weathermap offers a GUI editor that runs within a Web browser. You can use the editor to create your nodes (routers and switches) and links, as well as produce a functioning map.
When you're ready for manual tweaking, you can add custom background images to the map and insert custom icons for your routers. You can also add subnodes, which allow you to display more information within the router's icon, such as CPU or memory usage. You can also insert parallel links or bonded links between routers.
Through further tweaking of config files, you can fine-tune the placement of router icons and the map's legend. If you have a more complicated map with plenty of router icons, you can create curved link lines between your router icons to help keep the map readable and less cluttered or cramped.

Top free open source tools for network admins: NtopNeed an sFlow or NetFlow collector to get a thorough look at your data traffic flows? Ntop will take NetFlow or sFlow data from popular switches and routers and display it in a Web GUI, complete with clickable links that take you to details about particular hosts or protocols or to actual conversations and flows.
There are interesting features to Ntop's output, such as identifying workstation users by their email addresses and (passively) detecting the operating systems of network hosts through packet analysis. Ntop will break down traffic volume on a per-protocol basis, helpful for comparing the traffic your network actually has to what you think it should have.
Ntop can give you a list of IP protocols, sortable by protocol type, as well as lists of traffic sources and destinations. Ntop also creates a matrix table of IP traffic, so you can see who is talking to whom and how much data is being passed between the two. Of course, data is not as useful if you cannot sort it. Ntop allows you to sort on both the traffic source and the destination.

Platforms supported include Windows and all major Unix types, such as Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and Mac OS X. Although resource usage will vary by network size and the configuration options that you choose, Ntop should be very light on modern workstation and laptop hardware. Ntop's Web UI accepts multiple HTTP usernames and passwords, so each member of your NOC team can have individual access, and you can force Ntop to work with HTTPS.
Ntop supports a wide range of network protocol types, IP protocol types, and even network media types. There is support for several VoIP protocols, including Cisco SCCP, Asterisk's IAX protocol, and of course SIP. Ntop can even do protocol decodes on most common IP protocols. If you want the information for later retrieval and analysis, Ntop can record its network traffic data to RRD-style files on a disk.

Developing for Linux under OS X in XCode

2012-01-14T01:31:00.000+02:00

In this mini-article I will show you how I develop applications for Linux in XCode 4. At the moment I’m using XCode 4.2.1, in OSX Lion, with Ubuntu 10.04 running on a virtual machine.
Although the article is related to XCode, after reading and trying out for yourself, you will notice that you can use whatever IDE you like. Here I’m just showing you how you can code in a OSX-only IDE and deploy in Linux.

Requirements

You will need some tools before we start:

VMWare or similar virtual machine application for Mac

Used to run our Linux system, and that’s where we will compile and run the target application.
You can also use a physical computer instead. However, you will need network connectivity from mac to that computer because the communication between this linux System and our Mac is done by SSH.

OSXFuse

Requirement for the next point

SSHFS

It will be used to mount a remote directory in our Mac, and access it as if it was an external hard disk drive

Once you have all these, we are ready to go, but take some seconds to make sure you can compile the application in your slave Linux system. This will ensure that any problems you may encounter are not related to your slave machine or the code you are trying to compile.

Accessing slave machine using SSH

Now you will need the slave machine’s IP address, typing ifconfig in its Terminal.

As you can see in the image above, in my case I’ll be using 172.16.68.128 as the slave’s IP Address.
Then we make sure we can access it from your Mac typing the next command in Mac Terminal:

ssh username@ip

If we are asked for the password, then we got a valid SSH connection and we can move on…

Adding an alias for the Linux Slave IP

Because IPs can change sometimes, even inside Local Area Network, I added an alias for this IP, so that I could use it in scripts instead of the IP address itself. When it changes, I only have to modify one single file. You can do the same, by editing the hosts file, so grab the Mac Terminal and type as you see:

sudo vim /etc/hosts

Add a new line in the end, pressing I to enter insert mode:

172.16.68.128 vmcode

Now press ESC to exit “INSERT mode” and type :wq (yes, including the colon). If you have any problems using vim to edit this file, you can try nano instead – just replace “vim” with “nano” in the first command of this section. Now, you can use the virtual hostname “vmcode” instead of the real IP (which will be a lot easier to remember).

Setup script files

Now we need to setup two script files. I called them mountDir and sshbuild. The first one will mount the remote directory in our Mac and the latter is used to remotely compile the application.
Firstly pick a directory for these scripts, where you need to place the sshfs-static-leopard file, because it will be needed for the mountDir script.

Mounting Directory Script

Using your favorite text editor, create a new file called “mountDir” (no extension), and paste the following code:

#!/bin/bash
echo password | ./sshfs-static-leopard username@vmcode:codedir ~/path/to/mount/dir -o password_stdin

I’m explaining some of the variables in the command, that you should change to fit your needs:

username and password are the credentials for the user in the slave Linux machine
codedir is the directory in slave machine you want to mount in Mac
~/path/to/mount/dir is the path to the Mac’s directory where you want to mount the slave’s directory

If you are using a real box instead of a VM, I recommend you configure ssh public keys instead of storing your password in plain text. You SHOULD NOT use the same password as of your Mac User

This was pointed by reader Daid, and I explained him I used it in plain text because I’m connecting to this VM, used only for compiling purposes and not accessible from outside, so I’m not that worried about it.

Building remotely

The SSH command accepts a second argument, that is the command you want to execute right after the remote login. Save and create another file called “sshbuild” with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
ssh username@vmcode 'cd codedir; make'

Note that username and codedir must match the ones you used before.

Setting up XCode

Before we move to XCode, you first need to mount the directory: open the Terminal, cd to your scripts dir, and run sh mountDir. Now you should see the contents of remote dir in your Mac’s ~/path/to/mount/dir.

Any change you make to these files will be reproduced in the remote slave system (our VM), because SSHFS will be syncing in real-time.

Start XCode, then click File > New > New Workspace… and chose a location for the workspace file (I used the same as the scripts). You should see a window with three different spaces, they should have texts in the middle, from left ro right, saying “No Files”, “No Editor” and “No Selection”. Open a Finder window in the location ~/path/to/mount/ and then drag the subfolder that has a name starting with “OSXFUSE” to the “No Files” space in XCode.

A popup will show up. Firstly, XCode will prompt you about your build tool. You should type the complete path to the sshbuild script, starting on root, on the “Build Tool” field.

After clicking “Next”, you will be presented something like the image below, you should select the second option, which is “Create folder references for any added folders”.

Basically you are adding a reference to that directory, so instead of working in a local copy, you will edit the remote files directly. Now that you have all the directories in the slave’s codedir in the left panel of XCode, you can now open, edit and save any of your files using XCode. Now hit Command+B to run the build tool, and if everything goes well, you should see a message box saying Build Successful.

Running the Application

As you are developing for Linux, you should preferably debug under Linux. However, I often use an Application called X11, taht can be found in your Applications/Utilities folder. Type this command under X11 console window and the application should run in your Mac as if it was on Linux, even if it needs to open windows:

ssh +x username@vmcode
cd codedir./application

Conclusion

Here I shown you how I develop applications for Linux using the resourceful XCode and all it’s features, without quitting Mac OSX. I hope you found it useful and it helps you by increasing your productivity. Leave a reply, share your thoughts and suggestions and happy coding

Weekend Project: Get to Know Btrfs

2012-01-14T01:23:00.002+02:00

The Butter/Better/B-tree Filesystem, Btrfs, is supposedly destined to become the default Linux filesystem. What makes it special, and what's wrong with good old tried-and-true Ext2/3/4?

Too Many Filesystems

Linux supports a gigantic number of filesystems: removable media, network, cluster, cloud, journaling, virtual machine, compressed, embedded, hardware inter-connect, pseudo-filesystems that live only in memory, Mac and Windows filesystems, and many more.
You are doubtless familiar with the general-purpose Ext2/3/4, JFS, XFS, and Reiser filesystems that we use on our desktop PCs and servers. With all of these filesystems cluttering up the landscape, what is the point of yet another one? (There is even YAFFS: Yet Another Flash File System.)
The point is meeting new needs and workloads, and building functionality into the filesystem rather than relying on a herd of external utilities. Btrfs is rather like a blend of features from ReiserFS and ZFS, Sun's advanced copy-on-write/volume manager/RAID/snapshot/etc. filesystem.
Many Linux users yearn for a native port of ZFS, but its GPL-incompatible license (the Sun CDDL) ensures that Sun's implementation (now Oracle's) can't be included in the Linux kernel.
Even so, you can't keep a good hacker down, and so there are two ports for Linux. One is ZFS on FUSE, which runs ZFS in user-space. It's included in a lot of distros so it's an easy installation. The other one is ZFS on Linux. This is a build of ZFS as a kernel module for users to install, and so you get kernel support without a GPL violation because it is not distributed with the kernel.
It's great having those options to try out ZFS, and I applaud the maintainers of these ZFS projects. Still, it looks like Btrfs is going to take the place that ZFS could have owned were it not for its incompatible license. Oracle is the primary sponsor of Btrfs, and plans to make it the default filesystem in Oracle Unbreakable Linux sometime in 2012. Btrfs isn't just an Oracle project, but has a lot of community support from the Linux kernel team and many Linux distributions. Odds are it's included in your favorite distro. (Run cat /proc/filesystems to see what filesystems your Linux supports.)

Btrfs Features

So what does this amazing super-duper filesystem do? How about a handy bullet-pointed list to answer this question?

RAID 0, 1, 10
COW
Incremental backup
Online defrag
gzip and LZO compression
Space-efficient packing of small files
Dynamic inode allocation
Checksums on data and metadata
Shrink and grow storage volumes
Extents
Snapshots
16 EiB maximum file size

Planned features include RAID 5 and 6, deduplication, and a ready-for-primetime filesystem checker, btrfsck. You can try out btrfsck now because it is included in btrfsprogs. (Which of course Debian/Ubuntu/Mint etc. changes to btrfs-tools, and Fedora calls it btrfs-progs.) But it is not ready for production systems yet.
Putting the finishing touches on btrfsck is the last big step before Oracle makes it the default filesystem in their next Unbreakable Linux release. Fedora 16 Linux was supposed to default to Btrfs, but now they're aiming for Fedora 17 in May 2012.
I'm a big fan of RAID 10, which is RAID 1+0, mirroring and striping. It is expensive of disks because only 50% of your total disk capacity goes to storage. But it is simple, robust, and fast. Half your disks can fail without losing your data. I got burned out on RAID 5 and 6 years ago; perhaps I had bad RAID mojo, but I experienced a lot of failures, and they are slow. It seemed the systems under my care were more adept at propagating parity errors than operating correctly. So for me, RAID 5 and 6 can sit on the back burner indefinitely as long as I have RAID 10.
16 EiB is exbibytes, a measurement close to the more commonly used exabyte. An exbibyte is 1,024 pebibytes. In comparison Ext4 maxes out at volumes with a maximum size of one exbibyte and file sizes up 16 tebibytes. However you say it, it is a lot.
Btrfs doesn't contain any database-specific optimizations, and is not a clustering filesystem. It is designed to handle very large storage volumes, protect data, simplify large storage management, and read and write fast.

COW, Volumes, Snapshots

A COW – copy on write – filesystem is extra-careful with writing your data. When you make a change to a file, the old data are not overwritten. Instead, the filesystem allocates new blocks for the new data, and only the changed data are given a new allocation. The downside is this creates fragmentation. So Btrfs supports online defragmentation with the

btrfs filesystem defragment

command.
COW filesystems lend themselves to easy, efficient snapshots, and Btrfs supports both snapshots and rollbacks. The easy safe way to try Btrfs is to create a new partition for testing. Gparted supports Btrfs, as you can see in figure 1.

Figure 1: Gparted formatting a 50GB partition as btrfs

Next, mount this partition. In this example the mountpoint is /btrfs-volume:
# mount -t btrfs /dev/sda8 /btrfs-volume
Now we can create a subvolume in this partition. Subvolumes are cool. They are like independent filesystems inside the parent filesystem, with their own mountpoints and options. Create one this way:

Figure 2

# btrfs subvolume create btrfs-volume/test
And that's all there is to it. You'll see this as an ordinary directory in your file manager (figure 2). You don't need to worry about allocating space like you do with normal disk partitions, because subvolumes automatically snag whatever space they need from the parent volume as you add data to them. So you can go ahead and copy some files into the test subvolume. You'll need root permissions, or you can futz with the file permissions in the usual way and change them to an unprivileged user.
Now let's create a snapshot:


# btrfs subvolume snapshot btrfs-volume/test btrfs-volume/test-snapshot-1
Create a snapshot of 'btrfs-volume/test' in 'btrfs-volume/test-snapshot-1'

Snapshots are very efficient because multiple snapshots share the same original files and copy only the changes. You can list all the snapshots in the same volume; you need to name one of them and then all of them are displayed:


# btrfs subvolume list btrfs-volume/test
ID 256 top level 5 path test
ID 257 top level 5 path test-snapshot-1

This also shows that Btrfs sees snapshots and subvolumes as the same things. Your snapshots can be copied elsewhere as backups, or mounted independently to different mountpoints. Want to roll back to an earlier snapshot? First set the snapshot as the default. You need the snapshot ID, and then the path:
# btrfs subvolume set-default 257 btrfs-volume/
Then unmount the subvolume, and then remount:


# umount btrfs-volume
# mount -t btrfs /dev/sda8  btrfs-volume

Is that not cool? After creating subvolumes you don't need to mount the parent volume.

Prognosis

Btrfs is still rough around the edges, and the documentation and administration tools are incomplete. If you've used ZFS then Btrfs feels like a clunky copy, because administering ZFS is faster and easier. ZFS has a several-year head start on Btrfs, though. I expect Btrfs will improve rapidly as it becomes more widely used.

Keep Configs Under Control With Etckeeper

2012-01-12T15:09:00.000+02:00

If Unix-like systems were being designed today, they probably would have been planned with some sort of revision control for configuration files. But the system of keeping plain-text configuration files under /etc was designed in a simpler time. Times have changed, and we need a little assistance in keeping up. If you're managing a set of Linux servers for a small business, a tool like etckeeper can help a great deal.

What's etckeeper?

Etckeeper is a set of tools that lets you keep your /etc directory (and all the configuration files under it) in a revision control systems. You can use it with Git, Mercurial, Darcs or Bazaar. Note that you'll need to know the basics of whatever system you choose to use because etckeeper doesn't have special utilities for restoring older versions of files.
You could easily set up /etc with revision control without etckeeper. However, the advantage of etckeeper is that it's designed specifically for tracking /etc, including the file permissions and metadata that the revision control systems do not track.
Etckeeper should be packaged for most major distributions, so all you need to do is download apt-get install etckeeper or yum install etckeeper. If you don't have a revision control system installed, you'll also need to grab Git, Bazaar, Mercurial or another package revision control package of choice. (I was actually surprised to see that the package for etckeeper doesn't include one of these as a requirement.)

Setting Up etckeeper

Note, if you've installed etckeeper on Ubuntu (rather than Debian) it's been configured to use Bazaar instead of Git. You can install Bazaar if you would like, but I already use Git with other projects, so I decided to stay with it for etckeeper as well.
To change this, head to the /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf file and change VCS="bzr" to VCS="git".
Be sure to look around and see if there are other options you want to change. You can add additional options to git (or whatever version control system you like), and change etckeeper's behavior. For example, by default it will commit changes once a day automatically. If this is undesirable, you can add AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1.
If you don't want to automatically commit the files before running an installation, add AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=1. Otherwise, etckeeper works with the package manager to commit files prior to installation. Etckeeper also commits files immediately after install, so you'll have all the new configuration files (if any) checked in as well.
Once etckeeper is installed, run etckeeper init to start the repository.

Working With Etckeeper

Etckeeper is a really light utility for managing configuration files. I default to using Git because I don't feel like learning the Bazaar commands necessary to manage my configuration files.
The etckeeper documentation recommends cloning a repository and working from the clone rather than working directly in /etc. You can also use this to back up your configuration to a new server or to set up a new server with a copy of your existing configuration.
Remember, Git doesn't keep the file permissions. This is where etckeeper comes in very handy: It tracks the metadata and can "fix" the permissions when you run etckeeper init again. This probably seems a bit counter-intuitive, since you might think of init as something you're going to use only when you start a repo -- but you also use it when you're going to be checking out files stored in Git (or whatever).
Hence, if you revert to an older version of a configuration file (for example) you must run etckeeper init again.

If you make any manual changes to a configuration, you'll want to use git commit -m "comment" (where "comment" explains the changes) to add the change immediately.

Larger Sites

I wouldn't recommend etckeeper for large businesses. If you're managing hundreds of servers, then you're going to want something like Puppet or Chef. That gets a bit more complicated, but you also have the option of doing much more with Puppet (or any other IT automation tools) than you can do with Etckeeper.
In the next column, we'll overview Puppet and look at using Puppet for some common administration tasks across multiple servers.

Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot for Data Center Software Deployment

2012-01-12T14:59:00.002+02:00

Open Source software is created in a number of different ways, but the most common is simply when a developer has an "itch." Rackspace's Cloud Monitoring Team had such an itch when it came to having the right tools for the continuous deployment of software to their data centers and that's how the new Dreadnot tool was born.

With Dreadnot, Rackspace engineers are able to push code into production faster than ever. Paul Querna, engineer on the Rackspace Cloud Monitoring team explained to InternetNews.com that their product lives over multiple regions and they wanted whole region coordination to be able to turn a whole region off, upgrade it, test and then do the next region five minutes later.
"A lot of tooling that exists is the low level of going to one server and running a command," Querna said. "Dreadnot is about building the higher level orchestration to help you deal with a distributed system like the cloud."
Querna added that Dreadnot is about reducing the process of deployment down to pressing a button on a webpage instead of it being a lot of manual work. He added that his team had originally started using Deployinator to solve their deployment needs but they ended up customizing it a lot so they built their own tool, Dreadnot.
Querna's team works on Rackspace's Cloud Monitoring capabilities and the core of the technology is an API driven monitoring system. The system has a REST API that lets administrators specify conditions when they want to be alerted to a system event. Dreadnot is used by Rackspace to deploy the cloud monitoring system itself.
"The monitoring system can never go down, so our deployments can not cause down time," Querna said. "That's what drove us to solve the problem really well with Dreadnot."
The way that Rackspace is able to achieve the zero downtime is a combination of architecture decisions and redundant systems.
"Monitoring systems come down to an event flow and we process those events in parallel at separate data centers," Querna said. "Each data center on its own decides whether or not we should send an email or a Web hook and, at the last step, we do the de-duplication."
As such, Querna noted that even if an entire data center is shut down all of the event processing happens at the alternate data center. There is a lot of parallel processing in the Rackspace data center model. The other key component that makes the always-on data center deployment model possible is the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database. Querna noted that helps with the multi-region, multi-data center support, as well.
The Dreadnot tool is used as a complement with the open source Chef configuration management tool.
"When a developer spins up everything on their local machine they run a Chef client and it installs everything," Querna said. "On the production side, Dreadnot handles the regions and does some monitoring stuff and then it essentially runs a Chef client on all the servers. It's the trigger to tell Chef to upgrade things on a server. "

Open source

Rackspace is no stranger to the open source world, being one of the founders of the OpenStack cloud platforms among other efforts. The decision to open source Dreadnot came from an understanding that it has broader applicability than just Rackspace's cloud monitoring service.
The project currently is available on Github under an Apache open source license. Querna doesn't expect the project to ever foster a giant community like OpenStack, but it is a project that has already generated some outside interest.
"We would like to have contributions," Querna said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

((( بـدأت أخـرج مع امـرأة غـيـر زوجـتـي )))

2012-01-10T18:10:00.001+02:00

القصة قصيرة لكن رائعة وهادفة جداً وأتمنى أن تعجبك

بعد 21 سنة من زواجي، وجدت بريقاً جديداً من الحب.

قبل فترة بدأت أخرج مع امرأة غير زوجتي، وكانت فكرة زوجتي
حيث بادرتني بقولها: 'أعلم جيداً كم تحبها ' ...

المرأة التي أرادت زوجتي أن أخرج معها وأقضي وقتاً معها كانت أمي التي ترملت منذ 19 سنة.

ولكن مشاغل العمل وحياتي اليومية ومسؤوليات 3 أطفال جعلتني لا أزورها إلا نادراً.

في يوم اتصلت بها ودعوتها إلى العشاء سألتني: 'هل أنت بخير؟' لأنها غير معتادة على مكالمات متأخرة نوعاً ما وتقلق.

فقلت لها: 'نعم أنا ممتاز ولكني أريد أن أقضي وقت معك يا أمي'. قالت: 'نحن فقط؟!' فكرت قليلاً ثم قالت: 'أحب ذلك كثيراً'.

في يوم الخميس وبعد العمل، مررت عليها وأخذتها، كنت مضطرب قليلاً، وعندما وصلت وجدتها هي أيضاً قلقة.

كانت تنتظر عند الباب مرتدية ملابس جميلة ويبدو أنه آخر فستان قد اشتراه أبي قبل وفاته. ابتسمت أمي كملاك وقالت: 'قلت للجميع أنني سأخرج اليوم مع إبني، والجميع فرح، ولا يستطيعون انتظار الأخبار التي سأقصها عليهم بعد عودتي'

ذهبنا إلى مطعم غير عادي ولكنه جميل وهادئ تمسكت أمي بذراعي وكأنها السيدة الأولى ،

بعد أن جلسنا بدأت اقرأ قائمة الطعام حيث أنها لا تستطيع قراءة إلا الأحرف الكبيرة .
وبينما كنت أقرأ كانت تنظر إلي بابتسامة عريضة على شفتاها المجعدتان وقاطعتني قائلة:
'كنت أنا من أقرأ لك وأنت صغير'

أجبتها: 'حان الآن موعد تسديد شيء من ديني بهذا الشيء .. ارتاحي أنت يا أماه'.

تحدثنا كثيراً أثناء العشاء لم يكن هناك أي شيء غير عادي، ولكن قصص قديمة و قصص جديدة لدرجة أننا نسينا الوقت إلى ما بعد منتصف الليل

وعندما رجعنا ووصلنا إلى باب بيتها قالت : 'أوافق أن نخرج سوياً مرة أخرى، ولكن على حسابي'. فقبلت يدها وودعتها'

بعد أيام قليلة توفيت أمي بنوبة قلبية. حدث ذلك بسرعة كبيرة لم أستطع عمل أي شيء لها.

وبعد عدة أيام وصلني عبر البريد ورقة من المطعم الذي تعشينا به أنا وهي مع ملاحظة مكتوبة بخطها:

'دفعت الفاتورة مقدماً. كنت أعلم أنني لن أكون موجودة، المهم دفعت العشاء لشخصين لك ولزوجتك. لأنك لن تقدر ما معنى تلك الليلة بالنسبة لي ... أحبك يا ولدي'.

في هذه اللحظة فهمت وقدرت معنى كلمة 'حب' أو 'أحبك'

وما معنى أن نجعل الطرف الآخر يشعر بحبنا ومحبتنا هذه.

لا شيء أهم من الوالدين وبخاصة الأم ... إمنحهم الوقت الذي يستحقون

أتمنى أن أكون سبباً في تغيير بعض من قرأها طريقة تعامله مع أحد والديه أو كلاهما

Forgot the root password of your linux box ?

2012-01-09T16:47:00.002+02:00

So you forgot your root password of your linux box?, well its not the end of the world if you do have physical / KVM over IP access to your box, you can start it on single user mode and reset it. Don’t know how?… then read on.

In all honesty, this fix really depends on which boot loader your box is running. Normally on modern Linux distros the loader will be GRUB.

In this case, how to get into single user mode using Grub boot Loader?

Restart your box, and when the GRUB splash screen appears follow these steps:

Select/highlight the kernel you wish to boot using the up/down arrow keys.
Press the e key to edit the entry.
Select/highlight the line starting with the word kernel.
Press the e key to edit the line.
Append the letter S to the end of the line.
Press ENTER to accept the changes.
Press the b key to boot the kernel with the modified command line.

This will take you into single user mode and should provide a bash shell to execute commands.
From this point on you probably can use the passwd command to change the root password.
In you are using the LILO boot loader, when you see the LILO screen press CTRL+X, you will see boot propmt

boot:

Here after boot: type

linux single

This will boot the system in single user mode. When you reach the # prompt, type:

passwd root

Once you reset the password you can then type init 3 or init 5. init 3 will start multi user boot without X and init 5 will start multi user mode with X/

If LILO is not set to wait at the boot menu, you can halt the boot process by pressing any key in the split second before lilo tries to boot the kernel.
By the way, in case you want to change the lilo timeout value, you can do it from:
/etc/lilo.conf ( 0 means no wait )
once changed type:

lilo -v

26 helpful open source network management tools

2012-01-04T22:37:00.000+02:00

Over the last decade or so, open source development has skyrocketed, and network management software has ridden that wave. Many frustrated IT administrators have turned to free tools to monitor, configure and map their networked devices. Here are 26 examples of open source network management software tools to help you do your job.

Big Brother BTF
Big Brother was created in the mid-1990s to monitor networked systems. Since its introduction, its author made a commercial version, now called Big Brother Professional Edition and acquired by Quest Software in 2001. The open source version is still available for students and non-commercial users.

Big Sister
The author of Big Sister says he was impressed by Big Brother but wanted to change it in a number of ways. In his Readme file, he says he wanted to improve the performance, reduce the number of alarms when something goes down, and make other enhancements.

Cacti
Cacti is a graphing tool that can be used to show network data over time, such as CPU load or bandwidth utilization. It is a front end to RRDtool, an open source database tool for storing data that changes over time.

GroundWork Monitor
GroundWork is a platform for monitoring networks, applications and clouds. The software is available as an open-source Community Edition, but the company pushes its Flex version with a per-device, per-year charge – or even its Quickstart version, which has more limited support but only costs $49 per year for 50 devices.

Hyperic HQ
Hyperic HQ is intended for monitoring custom web applications and monitoring their performance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. There is a paid Enterprise version that improves on the alerting function and is better able to create baselines.

JFFNMS
The Just For Fun Network Management System isn't really. From the description: "Despite the name, the program is a serious NMS that can help you look after your routers, switches, servers and other network equipment." It is written in PHP and monitors via SNMP.

MRTG
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher is a well-known, simple tool for monitoring traffic moving through SNMP-enabled network devices and, well, graphing it.

Munin
The site for Munin tells us that Munin was a raven in Norse mythology who would fly around and tell the god Odin what was going on. In a network management context, the site says Munin monitors networked resources, answering questions like, "What just happened to kill our performance?"

Nagios Core
Nagios Core is software for monitoring IT infrastructure and viewing current status, historical logs, and basic reports. Nagios and other companies have built commercial capabilities onto the open source core.

NetDisco
NetDisco autodiscovers networked devices via NSMP and creates pictures of your network. The site says it would most often be used to locate devices, create an inventory and report on IP address and switch port usage.

Net-SNMP
Net-SNMP is a suite of applications that uses SNMP versions 1 through 3, over both IPv4 and IPv6. It can get information from SNMP-enabled devices, receive SNMP notifications, and other functions.

NetworkAuthority Inventory
Starting out as open source project ZipTie five years ago, NetworkAuthority Inventory continuously discovers and tracks networked devices. It can back up and restore device configurations, and compare configurations between devices. It is free for internal business purposes.

Ntop
Ntop shows the top consumers of a network's resources, sorting by protocol or other criteria. It works with NetFlow and sFlow.

Observium
Observium is an autodiscovering network monitoring tool. According to the site, "Its design goals include collecting as much historical data about devices as possible, being completely autodiscovered with little or no manual intervention, and having a very intuitive interface."

OneOrZero AIMS
OneOrZero AIMS is a management tool that includes a help desk, knowledge base, time manager and reporting system.

OpenNMS
Started in 1999, OpenNMS provides event management, service monitoring and performance measurement. The software has no licensing cost; you pay for consulting, training and support.

OpenQRM
OpenQRM is management software geared toward data centers with lots of virtual machines. It supports several virtualization technologies, from KVM to VMware to Xen. It even configures Nagios with its information.

Opsi
Opsi (Open PC Server Integration) is a client management system for Windows clients. The system itself runs on Linux servers. It will install operating systems, applications and patches. It can keep hardware and software inventories and manage licenses.

OTRS
OTRS (Open Technology Real Services) provides help desk and IT service management. OTRS Group offers consulting, support, customization and hosting services. An OnDemand version delivers the help desk function as software-as-a-service.

Pandora FMS
Pandora FMS monitors systems and applications, detecting problems like memory leaks, website defacements or network interface failures.

RANCID
RANCID sounds like a negative name, until you learn that it stands for Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ. What that means is it monitors a router's or other device's configuration and maintains a history of any changes. And also, despite the name, RANCID supports many vendors' devices, including Juniper routers, HP switches, Redback NASs, and many others.

TclMon
TclMon is network monitoring software written in platform-independent Tcl. A server gathers information from network devices, and a client provides the data visualization. It automatically maintains a list of hardware and software configurations and maintains the network topology.

Wireshark
Originally called Ethereal, Wireshark is billed as "the world's foremost network protocol analyzer" and a lot of IT folks agree. It captures network traffic, performs deep packet inspection on it, and allows full analysis offline.

Xymon
Formerly called Hobbit, Xymon monitors servers, applications and networks, offering information about the health of all of those networked components via web pages. Its site says it was inspired by Big Brother, and like Big Sister, it attempts to address perceived shortcomings of Big Brother BTF, such as performance. Xymon is also intended to be easier to deploy and is free.

Zabbix
Zabbix is intended as an enterprise-class distributed monitoring system. Features include real-time monitoring, autodiscovery and mapping, and scalability.

Zenoss Core
Zenoss Core does availability monitoring, performance monitoring and event management. A commercial version is also available from Zenoss Inc.

25 free open source projects IT pros will love

2012-01-04T22:23:00.000+02:00

Although it’s popular these days to pooh-pooh the advertising-supported, for-profit SourceForge in favor of GitHub, the SourceForge folks want to remind you that the forge still hosts more than 300,000 projects and serves up a good 4 million downloads a day. We asked SourceForge’s new community manager and longtime open source coder, Rich Bowen, to sniff out a few of the cool, lesser-known projects he thinks IT folks will love. What follows are his picks, along with a few of our own.

LEAF

LEAF is a customizable embedded Linux network appliance for use in a variety of ways. It was originally intended as an Internet gateway but can also be used as a router, firewall, and wireless access point.

Freeplane

This is an application for an organizational technique called mind mapping. Occupying the middle ground between an editor and a diagramming tool, Freeplane allows the user to add content quickly and produce structured content that can be manipulated as easily as a diagram. It is useful for knowledge management and project management.

FOG

FOG is a free open-source cloning/imaging suite that is intended to be a substitute for Ghost. It can be used to create images of Windows XP, Vista and 7 PCs using PXE and PartImage. Features include memory and disk test, disk wipe, antivirus scan and task scheduling.

Advanced Onion Router

Advanced Onion Router is a Windows client intended as an alternative for the Tor+Vidalia+Privoxy bundle. It is able to force a program and its plugins to use the Tor proxy regardless of its configured proxy. Tor is a project for maintaining anonymity on the Internet.

Eraser

Eraser is a secure data removal tool for Windows. It removes sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns and it also erases residue from deleted files including MFT-resident files (for NTFS volumes) and directory indices (for FAT). Also allows you to schedule your data removal in advance.

Dmg2iso

Dmg2iso is a small tool for converting Apple Macintosh .dmg images to .iso images. The application is universal for Mac OS X version 10.4 and above.

TurboCASH Accounting

TurboCASH is an entry-level accounting package for Windows. It is suitable for single users and small companies. It accommodates developer scripts, local plugins and multi language translation.

Snoopy

Snoopy is a PHP class that simulates a web browser. It automates tasks such as retrieving webpage content and posting forms, for example.

Iometer

Iometer is an I/O performance analysis tool originally developed by Intel in the late 1990s. When Intel discontinued work on Iometer, the company gave it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). It measures I/O performance for single and clustered systems.

Create Synchronicity

Create Synchronicity is a backup application that synchronizes files and folders. It can schedule backups, too. It’s multilingual and lightweight at only 180 KB.

Burn

Create data discs with advanced data settings. When you create video and audio discs, Burn will convert formats as needed. Copy disks, create DVD-Video discs… just about any CD/DVD burn function you need, Burn can do.

Hugin

Hugin is a software package for the creation and processing of panoramic images.

Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy Server

The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) Server project is a platform-independent SMTP Proxy server which implements auto-whitelists, Bayesian, Greylisting and multiple filter methods. It includes an enormous feature list and integrates with ClamAV.

Blat

Blat is Windows command line SMTP mailer. Use it to automatically e-mail logs, the contents of HTML forms, or whatever else you need to send.

UltraDefrag

UltraDefrag is a disk defragmenter for Windows that can even defrag locked system files by running during the boot process. It processes single files or folders from the Explorer context menu and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

FREE!ship

FREE!ship is a surface modeling program for designing ships, yachts and boats. Subdivision surfaces are used to give the designer the freedom to design any desired hull shape.

Classic Shell

Classic Shell adds some of the classic XP features that are missing in Windows 7 and Vista, like the classic start menu and the toolbar for Explorer.

SNARE

SNARE (System iNtrusion Analysis and Reporting Environment) is a series of log-collection agents to help you analyze audit log data. Agents are available for Linux, Windows, Solaris, IIS, Lotus Notes, Irix, AIX, ISA/IIS and more.

ZBar

Take a picture of a barcode and use Zbar to read it on your computer. Supports EAN/UPC, Code 128, Code 39, Interleaved 2 of 5 and QR Code. Includes libraries and applications for decoding captured barcode images and uses a video device (such as a webcam) as a barcode scanner. (There’s also an iPhone app version.)

Icinga

Icinga is an open source IT infrastructure monitoring system based on Nagios. Icinga will be fully compatible with its predecessor, retaining all the existing Nagios features while adding new features requested by the user community.

WinDirStat

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows. It shows disk, file and directory sizes in a treelist and graphically in a treemap, much like KDirStat or SequoiaView.

WinMerge

WinMerge is a Windows tool for visual difference display and merging, for both files and directories. It supports Unicode and Windows Shell. It includes a flexible syntax coloring editor, Regexp filtering, side-by-side line differences and highlights differences.

FreeCAD

FreeCAD is a platform-independent 3D CAD/CAE program, based on OpenCascade, QT and Python. It includes key features like macro recording, workbenches, the ability to run as a server and to support dynamically loadable application extensions.

Audacity

A multi-track audio editor and recorder for Linux, BSD, Mac OS, and Windows. Supports WAV, AIFF, Ogg, and MP3 formats. Features include envelope editing, mixing, built-in effects and plug-ins, all with unlimited undo.

Pingus

This list couldn’t be all work and no play. Pingus X-Fi2 is an open source clone of the addictive puzzle game Lemmings. The player takes command in the game of a bunch of small animals and has to guide them through levels. Since the animals walk on their own, the player can only influence them by giving them commands, like build a bridge, dig a hole or redirect all animals in the other direction. Pingus offers its own unique twists, like the worldmap or secret levels.

Five open source technologies for 2012

2012-01-04T22:09:00.000+02:00

Next year, if all goes according to plan, Red Hat will become the first open source software company to generate more than US$1 billion a year in revenue. It will be a watershed moment for the open source community, who have long seen their approach of community-based development as a viable, even superior, alternative to traditional notions of how software should be written.
"I think we're seeing a fundamental shift in where innovation happens, going from the labs of a few software companies to these massive open source efforts," said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat.
Certainly, open source has left the proprietary software world in turmoil over the past few years, as Linux, the Apache Web server, Perl, Apache, Hadoop, OpenOffice, GIMP and dozens of other programs put the pinch on their commercial counterparts. But what are tomorrow's open source heavy hitters? Here are five projects to watch closely in 2012. They may form the basis for new businesses and new industries. Or they may just capture the minds of developers and administrators with some easier, or at least less expensive, way of getting the job done.

--Nginx
For the better part of the last decade, the choice for Web server software has been pretty stable. Apache has been used on the majority of Web servers while Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) is used across many of the rest. Over the past few years, however, use of a third entrant, Nginx (pronounced "engine-x"), has been on the rise, thanks to the software's ability to easily handle high-volume traffic.
Nginx is already run on 50 million different Internet domains, or about 10 percent of the entire Internet, the developers of the software estimate. It is particularly widely used on highly trafficked Web sites, such as Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, Hulu, Dropbox, and WordPress. Not surprisingly, the software's creator, Igor Sysoev, designed Nginx in 2004 specifically to handle a large numbers of concurrent users -- up to 10,000 connections per server. "It is a very lean architecture," said Andrew Alexeev, a co-founder of a company that offers a commercial version of the software, called Nginx.
The upcoming year promises to be a good one for Nginx. Last year, Nginx got $3 million in backing from a number of venture capital firms, including one supported by Dell CEO Michael Dell. It partnered with Jet-Stream to provide Nginx for that software vendor's CDN (content delivery network) package. It also is working with Amazon to streamline Nginx for the AWS (Amazon Web Service) cloud service.
Beyond Nginx's use in large Web operations, Alexeev sees wider use for Nginx in the emerging cloud computing and shared services market. "This is where we can add the most benefit," Alexeev said. The next major release of the software, due next year, will be more pliable for shared hosting environments. It will be better able to handle DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks), and come with additional security features, he said.

--OpenStack
The OpenStack project arrived relatively late to the cloud computing party, but it comes with one particularly indispensable feature: scalability.
"We're not talking about [using OpenStack to run a] cloud of 100 servers or even 1,000 servers, but tens of thousands of servers. Other options out there aren't really considering that scale," said Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack Project Policy Board.
Since its launch in July 2010, OpenStack quickly gained a great deal of support from IT firms interested in the cloud computing space, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Dell. OpenStack devotees like to call their work the fastest growing open source project, with involvement from over 144 companies and 2,100 participants. Dell launched a package, called the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, which combines OpenStack with the company's own servers and software. HP launched a beta public cloud service with the technology as well.

The core computational components of OpenStack were developed at NASA Ames Research Center, for an internal cloud to store large amounts of space imagery. Originally, the NASA administrators tried using the Eucalyptus software project platform, but found challenges in scaling the software to the required levels, according to Chris Kemp, who oversaw the development of the OpenStack cloud controller when he was CIO of NASA Ames.
To aid in wider adoption, OpenStack is being outfitted with a number of new features that should make it more palatable for enterprises, said John Engates, chief technology officer for managed hosting provider Rackspace. One project, called Keystone, will allow organizations to integrate OpenStack with their identity management systems, those based on Microsoft Active Directory or other LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) implementations. Also, developers are working on a front-end portal for the software as well. Rackspace, which first partnered with NASA to package OpenStack for general usage, is also spinning off the project as a fully independent stand-alone entity, in hopes that it will be an attractive option for more cloud providers.
"2011 was the year for building the base of the product, but I think 2012 is where we really start to use that base for a lot of private and public clouds," Engates said.

--Stig
The past year has seen the dramatic growth in the use of nonrelational databases, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB and countless others. But at the NoSQL Now conference, held last September, much of the buzz surrounded a still unreleased data store called Stig. With any luck, we will see Stig in 2012.
Stig is designed for the unique workloads of social networking sites, its maintainers claim. It was created at the social networking site Tagged by software engineer Jason Lucas, who calls the technology a distributed graph database. It is designed to support heavily interactive and social Web applications. The data store's architecture allows for inferential searching, allowing users and applications to look for connections between disparate pieces of information. Because it was written, in part, in the Haskell functional programming language, it can easily divide up its workload across multiple servers.
Stig is still a bit of a mystery, as it hasn't been actually released yet. But observers are predicting it could fit a niche in the social networks and other applications that keep a wide range of data. The needs of social networking services are inherently different from other types of jobs, and would benefit from a database attuned to its needs, Lucas explained. "You can't be a relevant service in this space without being able to scale to a planetary size," he said.
Stig is currently operating on one server at Tagged, though the company expects to expand its use to the point where it will be the sole database for the company. Originally, the developers were planning to source code by December, but moved back the release to sometime in 2012.
"What I did see looked very interesting," said Dan McCreary, a semantic solutions architect for the Kelly-McCreary & Associates consulting firm. He praised the database's functional language architecture, which should ease the deployment of the database across multiple servers.
--Linux Mint
Despite years of advocacy on the part of open source adherents, Linux has never had a strong presence on the desktop. But usually there is always one user-friendly Linux distribution to use, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. In recent years, Canonical's Ubuntu has fulfilled this role, though the increasingly popular Linux Mint may trump Ubuntu by being even easier to use.

Software engineer Clement Lefebvre first crafted Linux Mint after a gig of reviewing other Linux distributions for various online forums. From this work, Lefebvre developed ideas about what features should be in the ideal distribution. Just as Canonical appropriated the Debian Linux distribution for its own massively popular Ubuntu, Lefebvre used Ubuntu as the base for Linux Mint. Today, the Linux Mint project is funded by donations, advertising revenue from its Web site, and income derived from user searches, the last through a controversial partnership with DuckDuckGo.
Linux Mint is designed specifically for people who just want a desktop OS, and who don't wish to learn more about how Linux works (i.e. non-Linux hobbyists). This approach makes installing and running the software easy and maintenance pretty much a nonissue. Even more than Ubuntu, Mint emphasizes easy usability, at the expense of not using new features until they have proven themselves trustworthy.
For instance, Mint eschews the somewhat controversial Unity desktop interface, which Canonical adopted to more easily port Ubuntu to mobile platforms. Instead, Mint sticks with the more widely known, and more mature, Gnome interface.
Such rigorous adherence to usability may be helping Linux Mint, much to the detriment of Ubuntu, in fact. The Linux Mint project claims its OS is now the fourth most widely used desktop OS in the world, after Windows, Apple Mac and Ubuntu. Over the past year, Mint has even usurped Ubuntu as the distribution that generates the most page views on the DistroWatch Linux news site, a metric generally thought to reflect the popularity of Linux distributions. No doubt 2012 will see only more growth for the OS.

--Gluster
Could Red Hat revolutionize the world of storage software in much the same way it revolutionized the market for Unix-based OSes? In October, Red Hat purchased Gluster, which, with its GlusterFS file system, makes open source software that clusters commodity SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives and NAS (network attached storage) systems into massively scalable pools of storage. Red Hat plans to apply the method it used to dominate the market for Linux OSes for the storage space as well.
According to Red Hat's Whitehurst, the storage software market generates $4 billion in revenue annually, though that's not why the company was interested in the technology. Instead, Red Hat was interested in finding a storage technology that would make cloud migrations easier. "We look for places where open source would be particularly powerful as a way to innovate, and we look for areas in the stack where we think we can monetize," he said. "There are not other solutions like that out there."
The software has some momentum, at least in terms of administrators downloading and testing the software. Over the past year, GlusterFS downloads increased by 300 percent. In November, the software was downloaded over 37,000 times.