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Projects
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Creative Commons OpenSource Linux Individual-i GeoURL Linux Speakeasy Speed Test
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Fenxi - Performance analysis made easy

Changing libgnomecups For Multiple Evolution Users

Re-Sync With Compiz Fusion

Capable packages

Happy National Sys Admin Appreciation Day!

NIS on Windows Server 2008

ESX iSCSI Basic Configuration from the CLI

Tape Rants and Raves: LTO4 Rules

IP Filter in OpenSolaris

iSCSI Security with CHAP

Plastic Ocean

apparently you aren't dead until you start to stink

Charlie Goes to Candy Mountain

iSCSI Security with CHAP

Seattle Scalability Conference, Pt II

Singing Tesla Coil.

Magic Tricks Tutorial Videos

Announcing the Hyperic VMware Appliance

SysAdmin Magazine: RIP

The megafreeze development model is broken

Geektalk

Recent JVM benchmarks

Overclocking tool for the Mac Pro

ADO.NET Entity Framework (Microsoft's new ORM) given a non-confidence vote by beta testers

Ruby interpreter flaws make the case for JRuby

The Stalled Server Room

AdvFS - Tru64 filesystem ported to Linux

OpenSolaris 2005.05 repository update to b91 - follow these instructions carefully

SXCE can ZFS install as of b90

Vertebra: EngineYard's Next Generation Cloud Computing Platform

Skype 4.0 beta overhauls video chat

Mozilla org receives traditional IE cake

Toyota Prius to go entirely Electric

Bill Gates steps down permanently for philanthropic activities

Men write code from Mars, Women write more helpful code from Venus

SproutCore - a GUI event driven model javascript web development platform, rails based by the looks of it.

Finding ARPANET

DRBD LVM Xen = Bug. A rather nasty one at that.

Intel unveils Ct as an extension for C/C to encourage threaded programming for multiple cores

VMWare ThinApp - Run any Windows app on any version of Windows

JDBC adapter for HBase

JRuby-Rack <-- a JRuby port of Rack

Rack <-- a lighter cousin to Merb, fully threaded and no Mutex.

Datamapper.org <-- ActiveRecord like, with no need to do migrations, it just kind of handles that by itself internally automagically.

Solaris Cluster Express (SCX) 6/08 released.

a-i-studio.com/cmd

CMDLogParserDemo

Changing solaris' default password hashing

Texas based service provider explosion affects 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

Jruby on Rails on Tomcat deployed as as WAR file

Rubinius

Milkfish.org SIP Router

42 more of the best Linux games

42 of the best Linux games

XenWindowsGplPv drivers

Use Google's cached ajax libraries

Arduino microcontroller with OS/X

The metasploit page describing the full impact of the poor RNG.

Holger Bert's blog post on the openssl RNG fiasco

Cayac - Cherokee MySQL PHP5 phpMyAdmin

ZFS very slow under an xVM kernel

VMWare's review-board.org

Google DocType

Dynamically editing libvirt xml configs while a VM is running to redefine reboot flags.

Chronoton - the time travelling robot who's best friend is a talking pie game

Endace DAG

Your pizza is done

Rietveld - Google's code review tool

Opensource multitouch displays

RTL8139 drivers supporting QEMU tcp segmentation offloading (XP's default driver does not) - doubles networking speed of Xen HVM networking without using the GPLPV drivers

Corporate map.

Ono - an efficient way to locate nearby peers

Solaris CIFS integrated AD with ZFS acls

Samba Winbind and ZFS acl working together

Why's unholy Ruby to Python .pyc compiler

Zentific poll daemon 1.0 beta

Solaris SAM-QFS NFS and OS/X

OpenSolaris 2008.05 final ISO image

Twitter abandoning Ruby on Rails

HP makes memory from a once-theoretical circuit

AVS seamless with ZFS

OpenVZ live migration demo

Setting Up an OpenSolaris NAS Box: Father-Son Bonding - The Video

Linux kernel Xen self-ballooning patch

HyperVM

FuildVM

Coolstack - Yet another group of solaris packages

SFE - Spec Files Extra - or, solaris's ports system

ksplice - live linux kernel patching

ZFS-102-A.pkg - binary package build of newer ZFS for Mac

ZFS for Mac Project page

Changing boot flags for a solaris domU guest

RAM based SSDs

Augeas - a configuration API

callflow - SIP callflow diagram generator

sdedit - quick sequence diagram editor

Milax - The OpenSolaris Small Live CD

Sun close-sourcing MySQL

Intel hardware virtulization breaks kvm - if you're going to run HVM on Intel, you want Xen 3.2 for the improved software emulation of instructions broken in Intel's hardware virtualization

Big Nerd Ranch on Windows/Linux/Leopard single signon

Sun touts big plans for OpenSolars as first release nears

Heroku - EC2 based Rails hosting.

RIP John Achibald Wheeler

Meadowcourt's compiled WindowsXenPV driver, v0.8.8, as built from win-pvdrivers.hg repo

What's new in Solaris 10 U5

The Thing About Git

Network Solutions hijacks all customer's unused subdomains

ZFS Evil Tuning Guide

ZFS speed bump: set zfs_nocacheflush = 1

We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here

Free NIC drivers for Solaris

Hubble - a PlanetLab realtime Internet "blackhole" monitor

Citrix price jumps on rumors of potential IBM/Cisco bidding ware

Segway RMP

TechCrunch labs on their AppEngine deployment

pash - because powershell was too cool to let microsoft keep to itself

Skeptologists

Google AppEngine

Brazil migrates 430 thousand boting machines to Linux

How xVM can be made to suspend/restore instead of shutdown/restart guests on reboot of the underlying xVM host.

The Machine Emulator - TME can emulate a sparc4 with OBP

SFE - spec-files-extra

OSCON2008 schedule

Google releases new GCC linker

Automatic generation of peephole superoptimizers

Zentific

Zentifi

Disabling nagle under Solaris

Xen.org Trademark Policy for Review

SXCE b85 has problems booting under Xen 3.2

OpenSolaris xVM sysadmin doc

VNRP == opensolaris quagga rbridges crossbow xVM

RBAC vs sudo HOWTO

problems reprobing iscsi devices with solaris 10

IPMP for Solaris Zones

All OpenSolaris flag days

Liveupgrade for idiots

Sigma DP-1 review

ratemynetworkdiagram

LSI MegaRAID SAS/Dell PERC5 driver for Solaris

dm-band block IO bandwidth controller

Sun open sources SAM-QFS

Dojo.storage - Google Gears workalike?

PerlCritic

PerlTidy

Tux droid

ooma.com - free phone service after you buy their device

Hacking defibrilators shockingly easy

Microsoft working with Eclipse.

Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data

Solaris and Solaris Cluster on HP ProLiant Servers

Apple Introduces new MacBook and MacBook Pro models

Sun leaks 6-core Xeon, Nehalem details

Xen and Solaris - a journal of sorts

How to save the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks

Xvm: a summary of creation of various Xen domU

OpenSolaris b82 comes with CoolStack

Disk Encryption Cracked?

Dilber PHB on Virtualization Consultants

Dilbert PHB on Virtualizing

Burger Haiku Contest

Sun xVM Ops Center GA v1.0 tomorrow

KernelTrap on the 2.6.23 Xen merge

Infiniband explained.

IETF XMPP/SIMPLE Interworking Draft

PSYCed - IRC/XMPP server that gateways transparently between both

Wikipedia OTR

OTR - Off The Record, Homepage. IM Encryption.

SIPE - Pidgin plugin for SIP/SIMPLE with Microsoft LCS compatibility hacks

Price Waterhouse Cooper's Global Cable Map

Solaris Windows iSCSI speedup disabling NAGLE

qooxdoo.org

ConVirt

OpenSolaris Storage Developer Wish List

Nexenta Builder - build your own Nexenta based distribution

Microsoft to acquire SideKick maker Danger

Linux Kernel 2.6.23-2.6.24 vmsplice local root exploit

The evolution of Tech Company logos

Hypertable

Mindstorms NXT Rubiks Cube Solver

Cut four undersea cables, shame on you, cut a fifth, also shame on you

Koha - OpenSource Integrated Library System

Oracle's VM patch for Xen to allow 32bit/64bit domU save/restore/migrate with a 64bit hypervisor and a 32bit dom0.

2 girls, 1 cup: The show

SIPE - SIP Exchange protocol - or, how to get Pidgin to talk to Microsoft Live Communication Server

Little notes on ZFS storage

Amazon SimpleDB written in Erlang

NexentaXenDom0

Three different cable cuts in the middle east: two off the coast of egypt, one off the coast of dubai.

Xen DR7 and CR4 Registers Multiple Local DoS vulnerabilities

XMLPulse - parse xen dom0/domu stats

Universcale

The rist of the FOSS spinmeister

ThinkingRock GTD

Smartphones patented - lawsuits immediately filed

TestDisk - when you've botched a simple->dynamic disk conversion and need that NTFS filesystem back, give this a try. Also, if you partition a disk mistakenly, this can find your filesystems and reconstruct a partition table painlessly.

H-Sphere cross-platform hosting control-panel

Mystery infestation strikes Linux/Apache web sites

Fenxi - A java based OpenSource Performance Analysis Engine. Fenxi (mandarin for analyze) is the successor to the Sun-internal tool called Xanadu.

Gizmo backdoor dialing

GNU/Solaris - When the fun begins

KDE goes cross platform with Windows and Mac/OSX support.

Microsoft prints get-out-of-jail card for Vista Home

Tsung - an erlang based multi-protocol distributed load testing tool

Microsoft relents, ban on vista virtualization is lifted

Architecture for Lustre ZFS

Lustre ZFS

Hyperic podcast talking smack with Luke KAnies of Puppet

Commodore SX64 vs MacBook Air

The Mysql storage engines, and when they are appropriate.

MADOCA - Message And Database Oriented Control Architecture

SMP Xen HVM Windows guests need timer_mode=1

Remember, Oracle owns innodb

Sun buys MySQL for $1billion

Wearscience.com

DreamHost billing issues

James Randi is coming to Tampa

Information Of Those Who Appealed Watch List Compromised

ITConversations

CNN Secondlife Blogs

Google MapReduce stats

Tata Nano - $2500 world's cheapest car

Dilbert on Agile Programming

Banks banned in Second Life

shimmer

Ubuntu embraces OpenVZ

Sears goes spyware

Savingtheinternetwithhate.com

Avocent KVM over IP

Zed Shaw: Rails is a Ghetto

Air Travel with Spare Batteries? Check the changes to what is permitted starting tomorrow.

TBO Crime Tracker

Tampa crime grid maps

TechShop Orlando

OpenNetAdmin

Open Configuration and Management Layer

FiveRuns RM-Manage - rails project monitoring

VLDB - Very Large Data Base Endowment Inc - nonprofit

Elastix - a more friendly Trixbox fork

The C days of Y2k

Toshiba micro nuclear reactor

Ball pit couch

A Glimpse and a Hook - a take on resumes

Xirrus - LISA used 7 arrays to provide WiFi

ipcluster

Imagine Peace

dopd - an easier way to keep drbd primary/secondaries in sync

OpenSIM - run your own SecondLife grid.

$4million in hardware lost in London data center heist

iscsi block device script for /etc/xen/scripts

Quaqua - Aqua look and feel widgets for jvm

Java6 for os/x: Soylatte

Chimps beat humans in memory tests.

WinFUSE

Level 3 needs technicians with FIREBALLS

10 steps to close down an open society

Slurm tutorial PDF

Longer flights to avoid air traffic control charges

News release from Six Apart about LJ sale to SUP

SUP bought LJ from Six Apart

Optimus keyboard is finally available

PlasticFS - an LD_PRELOAD to make applications think they're on a case-insensitive filesystem, and other neat hackery

pkgGen and logGen and Packagemaker - repackage os/x packages to deploy

Jumpbox.com - virtual appliances

TelegraphCQ - barkeley database research - adaptive dataflow capture, combine, analyze

UK loses CD of private info on 25million citizens

Solaris Automatic Migration opensourced

AVS ZFS Demo <-- replicated ZFS pool

Xen Virtualization book not yet published for sell on Amazon

Phoenix BIOS releasing its own hypervisor

Andrew Warfield's other publications

Parallax - managing storage for a million virtual machines, from the Xen guys at Cambridge

Kepler project - GRID scientific workflow engine

Google Distributed Systems

Google Code Map/Reduce mini lectures

What 24 would have been like in 1994.

WaterRoof - Mac OS/X Firewall Manager

Fedora Func

10 reasons why Oracle databases run best on VMWare

Google Caja - allow scripts in a 3rd party context

Miro 1.0 launched

Xen Windows PV drivers - opensource mercurial repository

QuickSilver - opensourced 11/06/07

vmcasting.org - someone else "gets it"

Vista True Info

ASUS EEEPC701 starts to appear

RedHat virt-factory

oh, THAT spacecraft! oops!"

Perian - Opensource quicktime codecs

KVM-lite == kvm-quemu lguest

RedHat cobbler

RSnapshot - an rsync based dirvish like tool

Flyback - a google code project equivalent to Apple's Time Machine, for Linux

Buglabs.net

Apple tablet PC is real, says Asus.

Yahoo Zookeeper

producten.hema.nl - wait for this one to load

Google rolls out the Open Handset Alliance

Cost analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

HDF5

Git - a Google Talk by Randal Schwartz

Asus EEE PC 701

JQuery's AJAXSLT plugin

Google's AJAXSLT

indeed.com - MIT search engine for jobs crawled from monster, dice, etc.

Genius files

Genius - a mac flashcard app

The Day The Routers Died

Tomshardware's RAID Migration Adventure

Theo de Raadt on Virtualization, and the sate of OpenBSD Xen

Prius Limo

Tamparuby youtube video

Bitlbee - IRC gateway all of your other IM traffic

Off The Record - encrypted IM overlay

SATA drive -> NES cartridge style

SVN time lapse view

Google Gears in Motion

Amazon's one-click patents struck down

Morgan Stanley sells entire New York Times stake

The future of malware

GTDTools

GTD - Getting Things Done

PS3 supercomputer

Dolphin SCI

Massive installation management tools

smbldap-tool addons

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt

GULP: a unified logging architecture for authentication data

Sun xVM

Crazy Patents

zypper - suse's apt analog?

EC2 outage loses customer data

FutureOfWebApps conference underway

Microsoft releasing the Source Code for the .NET libraries

LiveView.sf.net - Java based graphical forensics tool that creates VMware virtula machines out of raw disk images or physical disk.

Thinstation.sf.net

Windows 2003 Server Emergency Management Services (EMS) - Special Administration Console (SAC)

Catalyst - the Perl web framework analog to Rails

Fusion io - the power of 1000 harddrives in the palm of your hand

Thingamy

Proggyfonts.com - fixed width font downloads

Verizon FIOS moving to IPTV

Heavy Reading

Math bug in Excel 2007

Glue

CoworkingOrlando

likemind.us

BlogOrlando starts Friday

BarCamp Orlando is this weekend

ESX3i Dell demo

How to us CHDK to give your Canon digial camera RAW support

Opcon/xps batch system

PBS batch system

LSF batch system

SGE batch system

UIKit Hello World

Cygnal - When Red5 just won't cut it for an RTMP server

Creepy pooch

IBM's CoScripter - automating web-based processes

AjaxWindows.com - Another Michael Robertson company

p0f passive fingerprinting IDS

Talking storage systems with Sun's ZFS team

Dr Nick's Magic Models

SproutCore - a MVC scaffolding for actual Application development

Skype protocol obfuscation layer

Microsoft Silverlight and the Mono team at Novell join up to create the Moonlight project

Bitlbee - bridge IM client networks to an IRC channel.

EJBCA - The J2EE Certificate Authority

OSC CAtool

Festo's latest pneumatic tech

Mcell 3.5" drive has 1GB of DDR RAM 2.5" drive == 110MB/s transfer rates

TENORIO-ON Product Demo

OpenSolaris Xen domU with a linux dom0

Tentakel: distributd command execution

Ganeti: Opensource virtual server management software for Xen

Seemless dynamic image resizing

Mono and XPCOM scripting VirtualBox

The bacon mat

podbrix young woz and jobs playset

Woz gets a speeding ticket for 104mph in a Prius

Sam Ruby's long bets

Project Starfire

The real computer monster

Google Starts Shared Storage Service

The $200 billion ripoff

OS/X TPM driver

Storm Worm DDoSes scanning machines

wiki.openmanagement.org

Defendant wins access to the Intoxilyzer 5000EN Breathalyzer source code

BarCampESM

IronKey

The Funded - VC ratings

Horrible Microsoft Vista song

How to replace graffiti 2 with the original graffiti on a Palm

customizegoogle.com - a firefox plugin for customizing google

Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

"The OpenSSI project is a comprehensive clustering solution offering a full, highly available SSI environment for Linux."

"Goals for OpenSSI Clusters include availability, scalability and manageability, built from standard servers. Technology pieces include: membership, single root and single init, cluster filesystems and DLM, single process space and process migration, load leveling, single and shared IPC space, device space and networking space, and single management space."

Simply put, with OpenSSI, a group of physical machines "look like" a very large and powerful single machine.

Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

The syndication module in bloxsom is causing me some grief. Rather than fight with it at the moment, I've removed the entire right-hand column from my layout. I've also removed the Full Category Index at the bottom of every page. The static content should be much smaller now.

If you still find you're having problems, you can insert "/blog/" after blenke.com, but before the path you're looking for. This uses the dynamic page generation mode of bloxsom, which while slower, is much better about rendering things directly. By default, all pages (save those generated by the search function) are statically rendered, and should load immediately now.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Requirements:

  • Integration with the Prius bluetooth handsfree.
  • Addressbook sync with the Prius via obexpush (via Multisync, etc)
  • Act as a wireless access point using bluetooth DUN uplink via Verizon 3G
  • Act as a wardriving packet recorder at all times.
  • Play audio via FM transmitter
  • Potentially install the ViewTech unit to permit live DVD, video game (MAME, et al), and/or a live wardriving report ala kismet.

For integration with Vonage over a Verizon 3G phone:

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Ugh, this is so maddening. All I wanted to do was have a home VIA EPIA-M based system that could drive a TV for Myth while simultaneously driving a dual-screen desktop setup. You would think this would be easy (ok, I would think this would be easy).

Ideally, what I was looking for was a way to run two simultaneous X server instances. Display :0 would be the dual-screen nVidia Geforce2 MX/400 PCI card. Display :1 would be the onboard Unichrome VIA chipset driving the TV.

Unforunately, there exists real limitations on Linux Virtual Console support. Unless you're using kernel framebuffers for each video card, you only have the builtin VGA console. Spawning an X server allocates a VC from the VGA console driver, and you can only have one active at a time. Sure, you can spawn a single X server to drive all of the displays simultaneously, but this has a number of drawbacks if you wish to run a inputless PVR/MythTV display.

If you use kernel framebuffers, you run into other problems. The VIA Unichrome support, for example, destroys any hope of getting hardware MPEG or accelerated 3d graffics working. Likewise, the nVidia driver can have issues with the rivafb driver. And don't even think about using vesafb or vesafb-tng and getting both to work.

So I've done a bit more research and found that the linuxconsole project is mentioned quite thoroughly in the XFree Local Multi-User HOWTO. There is a "backstreet ruby" for 2.4 kernels which was backported during the 2.5 dev cycle, and a "ruby" 2.6 kernel patch which applies beyond those things that were integrated into the mainline kernel. The premise is to use the latest development tree ("ruby-2.6") against a 2.6.x kernel (see their CVS repository), and append the "dumbcon=X" option at boot time to allocate extra "dumb consoles" for X servers to use.

The first step was easy, if not CPU intensive: emerge an optimized Gentoo build, following various guides on the EPIA wiki.

The second step was to figure out how to "patch" a recent 2.6 kernel for this Ruby nonsense. Rather than a kernel patch, the project apparently expects you to copy a CVS checkout overtop your kernel build tree. Looking at the Makefile, it appears the CVS tree is a delta against 2.6.12.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/linuxconsole login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/linuxconsole co -P ruby-2.6
rsync -av --exclude=CVS ruby-2.6/ /usr/src/linux/

Now the kernel is building. Time for sleep. More on this soon.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

The v9fs filesytem is an implementation of the Plan 9 network filesystem for Linux. It may soon become part of the 2.6.13 standard kernel tree.

It sounds like LANL is considering v9fs as part of their xcpu cluster job submission and general job management. Interesting.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

The successor to the AVFS project, FUSE has made it back into the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel trees as a userspace harness for rapidly developing filesystems.

  • Wayback is a versioning filesystem for Linux (think CVS or Subversion meets filesystem)
  • Phonebook is a deniable steganographic encryption filesystem (multiple encryption keys, each presenting an entirely different filesystem)
Fri, 24 Jun 2005

Robert Hamburger, of RealUltimatePower.net fame, has published his book: Real Ultimate Power : The Official Ninja Book.

I don't know about you, but I'm PUMPED just thinking about it. Totally sweet.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005

Plan:

  1. Get a Verizon PocketPC phone with unlimited 3G service for $45/month.
  2. Install a SIP VoIP client on it.
  3. Get Bluetooth networking working with Prius CarPuter
  4. Potentially get Bluetooth handsfree working.
Thu, 23 Jun 2005

If you play with packaging systems long enough, you begin to see patterns.

  • Slackware has tarballs.
  • Debian has dpkg, and the wonderful apt dependency resolution tool.
  • Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc have RPM and various dependency resolution tools like YUM, apt for RPM, and others.
  • Gentoo has portage/qpkg.
  • Mac OS/X has the installer, OpenDarwin ports, and Fink
  • Freebsd has ports and packages.
  • Solaris has pkgtool
  • HP-UX has sdux.
  • AIX has LPP

etc, etc.

Moving back toward Unix think, it would be great to add metadata forks directly to files in the tree.

To find what package a file belongs to, you might check the blongs_to metadata fork for example.

To find what packages depend on a file to exist, you might check the requiredby metadata fork (requiredby={package},{package}). Each new package install would tag files it requires with its own package name listed in the resource.

Files might then have a "version" metadata fork. Binaries that have vanilla names (like "/bin/ls") would then have a reliable exposed interface for checking the version of that binary.

Packages themselves would still require a repository, primarily as an anchor for metadata about the package (package dependencies, conflicts, etc). I would argue that the "repository" be a directory structure of text files; each text file would list all of the files in a package (a quick forward index, negating the need to walk the entire filesystem to enumerate the files in a package).

It's just an idea, I'm sure others have thought of it, and it only works if you can tag files with metadata (or provide a userspace metadata overlay that isn't too obnoxious). This would require Yet Another Packaging System though, and I'm not sure the world really needs that.

Thu, 23 Jun 2005

Developed by Coraid, ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) has become a part of the core 2.6 Linux kernel.

There are two pieces to AoE, as there are with iSCSI. The initiator has only one implementation, that is included in recent Linux 2.6 kernels. The target has an implementation in the aoetools project named "vblade", and there is rumored to be another that Alan Cox once cobbled together.

The spec is open, however, so there is nothing stopping other implementations of AoE for other platforms to surface (in fact, I would expect to see at least a Windows implementation from Coraid at some point).

Thu, 23 Jun 2005

iSCSI - RFC3720 - SCSI tunnelled over IP packets.

There are two pieces to iSCSI, the initiator and the target.

An iSCSI initiator is the "client" that sees the drive on the host that mounts it as a filesystem.

An iSCSI target is the "server" that exposes a target drive.

There are now a couple of iSCSI target implementations for Linux:

Likewise, there are a number of iSCSI initator implementations:

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

So I'm told to put together a network FAXing solution for a group of laptops running Windows XP (each with firewalls, that may or may not be at a home office).

What else better to use than Hylafax.

There is at least one great guide on configuring hylafax on a debian box, just look around. This is the easy part, really.

The problem is really with clients.

Option 1: http://winprinthylafax.sourceforge.net/

This option requires a client piece to be loaded that installs a printer driver to present the user with a FAX printer. When the user prints, a simple dialog box pops up asking for the phone number and email address to send the result of the FAX job to. When the FAX is sent, or errors out, the server will send a result email to the provided email address.

Simple. Almost too simple. No coverpages. No multiple FAX numbers. No contact addressbook to save FAX numbers to. Not much of anything. But easy to understand. Also: FREE ($0/seat)

Downside: requires client install.

Option 2: http://www.ifax.com/content/view/36/88/

HylaFSP. This option is like Option #1, but uses Microsoft's "Windows Fax Wizard" instead of the simple dialog box. This is commercial, $36/seat.

Fairly simple. Very user friendly. Actually supports multiple recipients and groups of FAX numbers, though we will need to test to see if it works with Lotus Notes' Addressbook.

Downside: requires client install.

Option 3: http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/new/projects/smbfax/

This is a completely different way of handling the print jobs. There is no client piece to load - the user merely maps a printer to the Samba server and prints their job as Postscript. The server then sends them an email with the URL to click on to access a web page for setting the phone number and coverpage to use when sending the FAX.

SMB Client -> Samba -> smbfax -> SMTP -> cgi-bin -> smbfax -> hylafax

Easy to support (nothing to load on the client), but perhaps detrimental to workflow for the user (they will need to check their email and click on a web link to finish the FAXing process everytime they send something to be FAXed).

Option 4: http://www.boerde.de/~horstf/

This uses a Samba print server like Option 3, with one change: instead of running a web server, there's a small Delphi GUI application that asks for the number to dial. The way this works is a bit different: the FAX server connects back to the client that printed the FAX on TCP port 5555 and the client machine fires off a GUI Application window asking for the number to dial.

This requires a hole to be punched in their XP firewall. In a closed environment, I would love to do this, but with laptops that are coming in over dialup connections.. not a good idea.

For more info on this, see Option 5.

Downside: requires client install. Upside: the client install is generic and simple.

Option 5: http://www.adixein.com/fax/

This is basically option 4 with a different GUI. It does a better job of explaining what is going on with Option 4, however.

Option 6: http://www.uli-eckhardt.de/whfc/

This starts the "thick client" method of talking to a hylafax server. This GUI is free, and provides the user with a bit more information than they really need for faxing things. Also, very simple and messy (raw tiffs and postscript files). Not something I like. The neat bit here is a FAX admin tool for viewing pending FAXes incoming and outgoing.

Option 7: http://www.cypheus.de/frmhomee.htm

Like Option 6, only commercial. Much easier to use. ~$30/seat.

For Mac OS/X workstations, there only seems to be one solution:

For Linux workstations, there are a few solutions:

If you're looking for a FREE Global faxing system, check out tpc.int, a network of hylafax servers all over the planet that will gateway your faxes free of charge (as local calls).

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

First, two GPL'ed Broadcom "vendor" drivers, rather than the vanilla 2.4 kernel's asplodey bits: one for bcm4400, and the other for bcm5700.

Second, VMWare Workstation 5.0.0 build 13124 requires vmware-any-any-update91, and has a different vmware-tools-distrib set of kernel modules for those VMWare images I use for testing our new builds.

Thirdly, QEMU 7.0.0 now supports a VMWare like virtualized CPU kernel module. It looks like Fabrice isn't fully GPLing kqemu, but he deserves to make a living with all of his great work.

Things that need some followup:

  • Opensourcing my "kerncob" harness for building debian standard kernels with all of the handbuild kernel modules and patches we use outside of debian proper.
  • Starting a public apt repository along the lines of backports.org for those of us stuck maintaining large farms of Debian/woody servers.
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

6/14/2005 - Opening day for OpenSolaris.

Were you one of the first 5000 to grab a shirt?

With neato things like ZFS and zones, I'm downloading it now to play with it a bit under VMWare.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005

AdiumX is a wonderful multi-protocol instant messaging client, but it lacks Jabber MUC bookmarks. Someone has a creative AppleScript to create Adium Group Chat Bookmarks outside of the app.

Also a great guide toward scripting other Cocoa apps.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005

J-EAI is an XMPP-based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platform (also known as ESB, the Enterprise Service Bus). It is composed of several components, including an Erlang XMPP server core, connectors that support Open Adaptor and XSLT, and several distribution mechanisms, including publish and subscribe and content-based routing.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005

OpenAdaptor can be loosely classified as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software. It is highly extensible and provides many ready-built interface components for JMS, LDAP, Mail, MQ Series, Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL Server as well as data exchange formats such as XML. New components are regularly added.

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