When considering the issue of best practice as it applies to the administration of Unix servers, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself. They begin with “What is best practice?

What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Which of the following best describes your vision of where Unix will be in five years? It will be an essential operating environment with continued widespread deployment 52% It will be important in ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

As Intel’s server chips become more powerful and Microsoft addresses lingering doubts about how far its operating system can scale reliably, enterprise customers face an increasingly tough choice over ...

If you’re a Unix admin, it helps to know how password aging is managed and how you can determine when a password was last changed or force a change in the near future. The key to understanding how ...

When attackers take advantage of an exploit, one of their first goals is to gain superuser (root or administrator) access to the compromised system. If the compromised process is already running with ...

COMMENTARY--Whoever said the first casualty of war is truth would be surprised to find that apothegm quoted in a dispute between systems vendors. But it is an apt description of current events. The ...

One particular frustration with the UNIX shell is the inability to easily schedule multiple, concurrent tasks that fully utilize CPU cores presented on modern systems. The example of focus in this ...