In distributed networks, one of the most important tasks is to maintain the user and group information. For centralized management, many customers use Network Information Service (NIS). This article provides an overview of NIS and the steps to install and configure NIS as a server and client.

“Despite some respondents’ concerns industry-wide support is indeed available to those wishing to migrate from UNIX to Linux. For enterprise level support companies can contact a Linux vendor, such as Novell, or engage a third-party support provider.”

Nearly two thirds of Irish IT specialists agree that cost is the main driving factor for eventual migration from UNIX to Linux. via IrishDev.com/News

At one point in time and not too very long ago, I fancied myself a decent system administrator with a decent resume and work history. When I finished a series of writing tasks working on technology subjects that included system administration, I thought the time had come for me to work in a shop with Linux and MS. I put my resume up on Dice and Monster and waited for the phone to ring. When it didn’t ring, I went up to see the hits. I saw six on Monster and eight on Dice. Only one company saved my data.

SoX is a power-packed command-line tool for various types of audio processing. It’s very useful as an audio format converter, and it can be used for resampling audio files, converting between endianness, audio encoding and modifying other attributes of common audio file formats. Its main power, however, is its effect plugins. It can apply various effects to audio in the same way a digital audio workstation does. You can add echoes, filter frequencies, reduce or increase volume, remove noise and do various other advanced digital signal processing on sound samples.

A recent conference on open source in education at Seneca College generated interesting thoughts, published in Frank Hecker?s blog. (Hecker works for Mozilla.) This piece isn?t really about technology, but about how open source practices impact career and educational opportunities. A good read for big thinkers.

“This is not about offering better support”

Yahoo turned to Oracle’s Linux support offering after some bad experiences with Red Hat, said Tim Heath, a Yahoo senior database engineer. via LinuxInsider

In the wake of recent flareups over the inclusion of BSD licensed code in GPL licensed programs, a little extra vigilance can go a long way. Recently, Fedora package managers manually reviewing code licenses in a new version of Joop Stakenborg?s popular XLog program ? used by amateur radio enthusiasts around the globe to record their contacts ? discovered a change in the licensing of one of the included files which impacted the licensing of the program as a whole.

Zonbu has started shipping a laptop version of its Linux-based computing appliance for home users. The Zonbu Notebook or “Zonbook 1″ is based on a power-efficient Via processor, runs Gentoo Linux and 20 open source applications, and sells for $280 with a managed service plan.

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The SIBsim4 project is based on sim4, which is a
program designed to align an expressed DNA
sequence with a genomic sequence, allowing for
introns. SIBsim4 is an extensive rewrite of the
sim4 program to improve execution speed and
provide more informative output.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixes excessive run-time in some cases of partially repeated sequences. All users are encouraged to update.

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VideoLAN Client (VLC) is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X,
BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play most audio
and video codecs (MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, WMV, Vorbis,
AC3, AAC, etc.), has support for VCD, SVCD, and
DVD (with menus), and can read or dump streams
from a network source (HTTP, UDP, DVB, MMS, etc.).
It can also act as a server and send streams
through the network, with optional support for
audio and video transcoding.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version is aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities in the ActiveX plugin and the FLAC library that affect VLC media player 0.8.6c and lower. Improvements include better video output compatibility on Mac OS X, and Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.