February 2013 | Linux Blog

White Paper - Why Linux Virtualization is Ready for Prime Time

"Frost & Sullivan: Why Linux Virtualization is Ready for Prime Time"

In this paper, Frost & Sullivan examine historical concerns about Linux virtualization, and assess why, when, and how enterprises can safely virtualize their critical Linux workloads.

Virtualization technologies have gained a strong footing in enterprise data centers in recent years. According to Frost & Sullivan research, 65 percent of all U.S. businesses have incorporated virtualization into their data centers. For many of those, the commitment to virtualization is serious -- 20 percent have virtualized more than three-quarters of their servers--a number that is expected to double in the next two years.

Download your free copy of "Frost & Sullivan: Why Linux Virtualization is Ready for Prime Time" - here

White Paper - 8 Elements of Complete Vulnerability Management

"8 Elements of Complete Vulnerability Management"

Threats to the security of your network will never completely go away, but the ability to prepare for, recognize and quickly remediate these threats should be a part of day-to-day company operations.

This white paper gives you eight essentials for managing vulnerabilities in a network including internal and external assessments, how frequently you should run scans for threats and the importance of broadening testing beyond basic network services and operating systems.

Download your free copy of "8 Elements of Complete Vulnerability Management" - here

Convert Between any Document Format - Unoconv

unoconv converts between any document format that OpenOffice understands. It uses OpenOffice's UNO bindings for non-interactive conversion of documents.

Supported document formats include Open Document Format (.odt), MS Word (.doc), MS Office Open/MS OOXML (.xml), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML, XHTML, RTF, Docbook (.xml), and more.

unoconv Features:
* Converts between different document formats that OpenOffice understands
* OpenOffice can export to about 100 different document formats
* Can be used for batch processing
* Combines with asciidoc and docbook2odf/xhtml2odt to create PDF or Word (.doc) files
* Can apply custom style templates during conversion (to enforce corporate identity)
* Autostarts OpenOffice for processing if necessary
* Can be used in a client/server environment to process documents centrally
* Can influence OpenOffice filters during import and export
* Supports OpenOffice on Linux, Windows and MacOSX

Tool to move the web browser profile to RAM - Profile-sync-daemon

Profile-sync-daemon (psd) is a diminutive pseudo-daemon designed to manage your browser's profile in tmpfs and to periodically sync it back to your physical disc (HDD/SSD). This is accomplished via a symlinking step and an innovative use of rsync to maintain back-up and synchronization between the two. One of the major design goals of psd is a completely transparent user experience.

Running this daemon is beneficial for two reasons:

Reduced wear to physical discs
Speed

Since the profile(s), browser cache*, etc. are relocated into tmpfs (RAM disk), the corresponding onslaught of I/O associated with using the browser is also redirected from the physical disc to RAM, thus reducing wear to the physical disc and also greatly improving browser speed and responsiveness. For example, the access time of RAM is on the order of nanoseconds while the access time of physical discs is on the order of milliseconds. This is a difference of six orders of magnitude or 1,000,000 times faster.

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS using mod_rewrite - Apache

mod_rewrite module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching.

mod_rewrite module operates on the full URLs (including the path-info part) both in per-server context (httpd.conf) and per-directory context (.htaccess) and can even generate query-string parts on result. The rewritten result can lead to internal sub-processing, external request redirection or even to an internal proxy throughput

Open up your apache configuration file (httpd.conf) or the virtual host file and insert the following lines to redirect the http request to https

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

you can also insert the same above lines to your .htaccess file to redirect the content of that particular directory to https.

Open Source Photography Workflow Application - Darktable

Darktable is an open source photography work-flow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoom able lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

It focuses on the work-flow to make it easier for the photographer to quickly handle the thousands of images a day of shooting can produce. It's also one of the very few FOSS projects able to do tethered shooting.

The internal architecture of darktable allows users to easily add modules for all sorts of image processing, from the very simple (crop, exposure, spot removal) to the most advanced (simulation of human night vision).

The user interface is built around efficient caching of image meta-data and mipmaps, all stored in a database. The main focus lies on user interaction, both in terms of a smooth interface design as well as processing speed. High quality output is also one of our goals.

White Paper : Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec: Performance & Efficiency Advantages for Linux

"Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec: Performance & Efficiency Advantages for Linux"

Data centers are faced with daunting challenges in today's business environment.

This ESG Lab review documents hands-on testing and performance test audits of the Linux version of Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec. Topics include performance, ease of management, and storage efficiency.
Offered Free by: Symantec Corporation

Download your free copy of white paper : "Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec: Performance & Efficiency Advantages for Linux" - here

Linux Malware Detection - LMD

Linux Malware Detect (LMD) is a malware scanner for Linux released under the GNU GPLv2 license, that is designed around the threats faced in shared hosted environments. It uses threat data from network edge intrusion detection systems to extract malware that is actively being used in attacks and generates signatures for detection. In addition, threat data is also derived from user submissions with the LMD checkout feature and from malware community resources. The signatures that LMD uses are MD5 file hashes and HEX pattern matches, they are also easily exported to any number of detection tools such as ClamAV.

Linux Malware Detect (LMD) Features:
* MD5 file hash detection for quick threat identification
* HEX based pattern matching for identifying threat variants
* statistical analysis component for detection of obfuscated threats (e.g: base64)
* integrated detection of ClamAV to use as scanner engine for improved performance

White Paper - Powering Linux in the Data Center

"Powering Linux® in the Data Center"

A must read paper for IT architects and directors for Linux® servers.

Many IT professionals are drawn by the savings that Linux® brings to the data center but are concerned about the potential uptime and data protection risks that arise from trusting their business-critical applications to “free” or native software.

Native Linux solutions also prove challenging with required manual scripting and lack of automated operations and management. For business-critical data center applications, the complete line of Symantec high availability, data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and storage management offerings deliver UNIX-class performance, scalability, administration, and support on Linux.

Offered Free by: Symantec Corporation
Download your free copy of - "Powering Linux® in the Data Center" - here

Practice Exam - CompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI]

"CompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI]"

The ExamForce CompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI] practice exam provides their unique triple testing mode to instantly set a baseline of your knowledge and focus your study where you need it most.

FreeCompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI] Practice exam

CramMaster CompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI] covers the following CompTIA recommended objective categories:

105 Shells, Scripting and Data Management
106 User Interfaces and Desktops
107 Administrative Tasks
108 Essential System Services
109 Networking Fundamentals
110 Security

Download your free copy of "CompTIA Linux+ LX0-102 [Powered by LPI]" - here

Linux Blog