openSUSE 10.2 is the first release I've seen that's worthy of succeeding SUSE 9.3 as the centerpiece of my testing network. Although there are some serious kinks that still need to be worked out with some of the components, and it's quite obvious that the release as a whole would have benefited tremendously from another month or two of developer time, the operating system is quite stable while also providing several leading-edge technologies.

My Christmas present for Mom was to migrate her old systems into VMware Player so that she could still work with her research papers and programs from the 1980s, but using her everyday (modern) system, with the legacy stuff running in a virtual machine.

Ray Noorda's recent passing reminds us that he changed the very nature of the computing industry in several important ways, and that his vision for the future is still being played out.

Samba 3.0.23c includes many important new features, including new support for BUILTIN/Users and BUILTIN/Administrators groups, a gateway service that makes UNIX daemons appear as Windows services, feature that maps UNIX log files into Windows-style event logs.

Microsoft's Posix subsystem for Windows lets Unix apps think they're using regular UNIX, when they're actually using Windows instead.

If you're willing to get your hands dirty, it's possible to whittle the Windows XP setup files down to the barest essential components needed for just the Recovery Console, which collectively requires less than 10 MB of space. Using this technique, you can put one or more Recovery Console image onto a bootable rescue CD, without having to cart around the whole installation disc image.

Even with all its faults--and there are many, starting with a general industry lack of support--DOS is still the preferred operating environment for building a rescue CD to help bring up a crippled system.

When I was planning the infrastructure for my revitalized lab, I intended to have VMware play a central role in my network and application testing. While that objective was eventually met, it didn't turn out like I had planned, and the path was extremely circuitous, involving multiple changes in strategic direction. Now with the recent release of VMware ESX 3.0 and VMware Server 1.0, I'm having to revisit the decisions all over again.

Yesterday the server-class VMware Server 1.0 was formally released with the official price of $0. This news follows Tuesday's announcement by Microsoft that the desktop-class Virtual PC 2004 now has a price tag of $0, too, and that the server-class Virtual Server 2005 will also be free when used with Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition.

Optimizing PC memory isn't as easy as "just add more," and in fact there are plenty of times when adding more RAM is downright pointless. This article will cover some monitoring tools and techniques that will help you figure out what's really going on with your machine and when you do need to add more RAM.

Surprisingly, hardware monitoring on Windows is much more complicated than it is on Linux. For one thing, there's no single extensible sensor engine like lm_sensors on Linux. Instead, there are a handful of monolithic engines for Windows that each have significant limitations. Worse is that the most extensible engine was abandoned a couple of years ago, while some of the more modern packages are lacking the basic functionality needed for hands-off management and reporting.

Hardware monitoring on Linux is actually pretty straightforward, but like most other things, even the simplest stuff can be complicated. Basically there are three "layers" of software involved, all of which are based around the lm_sensors software package.

Network policies can be extremely useful to even the smallest of networks, and are easily worth the relatively small amount of effort required to put them into operation. Furthermore, you can deploy Windows policies across any shared filesystem that a networked Windows system can read.

With Windows Services for Unix version 2.0, Microsoft has filled in some holes and improved the operational quality of the software. However, new problems have been introduced, and not all of the old problems have been eliminated. In addition, some of the new features are dependent upon the product being deployed on Windows 2000 servers, which is not an option for everyone who wants this functionality.

A lack of device drivers for networking, video, audio and storage cards is keeping me and many other users from running Linux on a daily basis. Apart from device drivers, the biggest problem for all of the UNIX platforms out there today is that they're just too damned hard to configure. Finally, as long as folks like me still have to dual-boot to load another OS so that we can use an application we need to get real work done, then it just isn't going to become our primary OS for everyday use.

If 1997 was a banner year for the networking industry, bringing a hoard of new technologies and products, then 1998 was the morning after, with most of us trying to make 1997's technology work. Rather than giving us whole new technologies, vendors spent 1998 trying to fix the half-baked technologies that were introduced in 1997. Sometimes it worked, with some products and technologies permanently altering the landscape, while others just proved that some technologies weren't really such great ideas after all.

In short, this system is highly configurable but at this point it is hobbled somewhat by its nonconfigurable elements. A typical corporate user needs built-in Ethernet support more than some of the multimedia services that come with the Tecra 8000. However, I expect that this situation will change as Toshiba improves upon their build-to-order capabilities.

NetWare 5 signifies a major redefinition for Novell the company, signifying its egress from the general NOS market, and the beginnings of its transformation into a company whose business is based entirely upon directory services.

Linux teaches us many things about user-driven software, but primarily it shows us what can happen when development efforts are freed from corporate agendas. Without a vendor making crucial decisions, the technology is allowed to grow according to the wants and needs of the user community. But Linux also teaches us the difficulties incurred with user-driven software, like the need for commercial products and support, the two biggest holes in the Linux story today.

I'm tired of trying to make all my systems speak NFS when they all do such a poor job of it. Likewise, I'm sick of trying to synchronize my NDS-, NIS- and NT-based authentication services when each of the NOSes demand on being the primary source, refusing to even boot without a local copy of the data. So much for cross-platform networking!

Simply put, as a NOS, NT Server is nowhere near NetWare (and as a platform for running network services, it's nowhere near UNIX). Yet, I find I'm forced into using it simply because that's where the third-party market is. The argument for-or-against has nothing to do with technical merits, but instead it has everything to do with product availability and developer support, an area in which Microsoft totally dominates.

As the computing paradigm shifts towards one of network-centric services, all of the related technologies - including word processors - will also get shifted at the same time. Since the next logical step for word processing technology is to the commodity phase, this means that for all practical purposes word processors will become 'free.'

If there were four different and incompatible versions of HTTP, the Web would have never been adopted as rapidly as it has. The same is true of all the successful standards, from SMTP to DNS. Without a similar multi-vendor standard for network file- and print-services, it seems unlikely that a widely-supported protocol will ever emerge.

Although a station wagon offers adequate value across the board, it doesn't offer excellent value in any one particular area. It simply is not possible to combine the power of a sports car with the ruggedness of a Jeep or the capacity of a van. For a one- or two-car family that needs a general-purpose vehicle, a station wagon can be a great choice. But for people who want specific functionality, it's a foolish one.

Let's face it: for the past few years Novell has been in danger of becoming completely irrelevant. File and print services are available from every operating system vendor on the planet, and are increasingly becoming available in snap-on hardware form as well. With a Lantronix print server and a Digital disk server, who needs a dedicated fileserver?