Internet intruders have many ingenious ways of escalating privileges and hiding their presence once they get inside your system. The best protection is to keep them out in the cold. In this issue, we focus on keeping your systems secure. We look at single-packet port knocking, tools for stopping dictionary attacks, and take a close look at SELinux.
Other articles in this issue look at Sshutout and Fail2ban, access control lists, the new Mozilla Firefox, Freenet, Liferay, Sandboxing, rsyslog, configuring a virtual web server, building efficient websites with AJAX, Ptrace, Mozilla Lightning, FileZilla, tools for your Linux laptop, Mailx, and community projects, news, and events.
Going Virtual: This month, we take an in-depth look at virtualization. We show you how to get started with Xen, we look inside Innotek’s VirtualBox virtualization tool, and we examine a new breed of rootkits that will exploit the powers of virtualization.
Other articles show you how to create digital photo albums with Album Shaper, let your web applications escape the confines of the browser interface with Mozilla's Prism, graph your portfolio's performance with Perl, and dig into DNS Security Extensions.
Software as a Service: You can find a web service that does almost anything your home computer can do. This month, we study the world of Software as a Service (SaaS) for Linux users.
We introduce you to the openSUSE Build Service and the Prado PHP-development environment. Also, we look at third-party e-commerce payment services and some handy utilities that will help you integrate Google services into your conventional operating environment.
Build Your Own Distro: We look at tools and techniques for creating custom Linux systems, including Linux From Scratch, NimbleX Live CD Generator, Kiwi image system, and the Ubuntu Customization Kit.
You'll also learn more about connecting a MIDI instrument to your Linux sound system, Puppy Linux, backing up your laptop with Box Backup, IPv6, Puppet, isp-switch, Gnash, ImageMagick, DokuWiki, MPlayer, and the Asus Eee PC.
PHP Scripting: The PHP scripting language is one of the most powerful tools in the web developer's toolkit. This month we examine PHP in the Linux world. We tour some PHP development environments and examine a few important resources for PHP developers.
Other articles show you how to manage your schedule with Mozilla's Sunbird, keep documents in sync with Conduit and Unison, create your own udev rules, serve Outlook clients from Linux with Zarafa, root out power hogs with PowerTOP, and keep your calendar and contact data in sync with Funambol.
Kernel Tricks: Developers are constantly looking for new ways to interact with the versatile Linux kernel. This month we study some innovative projects leading deep into kernel space. We'll examine userspace drivers, Cloop, KVM, and LogFS.
Other highlights include an in-depth look at email suites, Adobe Reader vs. Xpdf and Evince, 64 Studio and JAD audio distros, Plone 3.0, the Outguess command-line steganography app, IMAP proxies, the Vim editor, the Hotwire graphical shell, Gobby editing tool, OpenOffice.org extensions, and tools for converting text formats.
