Unix

Oracle is pushing itself into a corner, a fantastic money-making corner, but a corner nonetheless.

Using packages such as mod_chroot for use with Apache, or Jailkit, an open-source project with a handful of utilities, can make configuring a chroot jail much more efficient and even automated in some cases. Here are some important things to remember when setting up a chroot jail.

That fact is, that while many in the Linux community are wondering if UNIX is now owned by a Microsoft-led investment group, we don't know if that's what has happened, and even if it was, it doesn't necessarily mean The End of All Things Penguin.

In this week's column, I answer two readers' questions about working with Unix filenames. One asks how to easily remove all files in a directory except those that match a particular pattern. The other asks how to force the names of files to be all lowercase. The answers may be easier than you think.

The latest release of the Mac Mini will find a good home in both your living room and your office.

It is certainly well known that "hacker tools" can be used for many legitimate purposes. Nmap, the Network Mapper and security scanner is no exception. These days, it is used routinely to identify the operating systems, applications and software versions running on targeted systems.

On Friday, February 13, the official Unix calendar will pass a very geeky milestone. No doomsday scenario here. Just geek cool.

Unix aliases provide an easy way to customize your working environment. Let's look at some especially useful aliases that you might like.

Tired of looking at strings of "28,30d27" characters separating the differences between files you're comparing? Try a side by side diff listing that works the way your brain does.

SSH tunnels aren't the only way to do port forwarding. If you're clever enough, you can write your own program. If you're not quite that clever, you can use someone else's program -- like a very cool Perl script I found on the web.

If you've never used the Perl Sockets module for basic connection testing, you might be surprised at how easily you can craft a very useful script. I find my version of a Perl "listen" script to be as useful as a cable tester!