Issue #182 / Jan 2016

We don't really know what sells a magazine on the newsstand. Big publishing companies have whole teams of marketing analysts studying trends and performing Big Data maneuvers on the sales data. Our ragtag group can only treat it as something of an art form: We throw an issue together, and sometime later, we find out if we guessed right when choosing what to put in it.

Fedora 23 Workstation and Ubuntu 15.10 Desktop

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools

Off-the-rack monitoring tools often offer too many functions or fail to offer precisely what you need, but shell scripts let you create individual monitoring routines.

Briefly tested: Trowser 1.3, wxMEdit 2.9.9, BinaryCrypt 2.0, GSmartControl 0.8.7, Pam_ihosts 1.1, Rush 1.7.

After you jump onto the container bandwagon, you will find yourself looking for high-performance solutions for managing the Docker landscape. Several vendors offer special operating system images with built-in container management tools. Red Hat uses Atomic with Google's Kubernetes management tool.

Cryptographic hash functions help you protect your passwords, but hashing is only secure if properly understood.

The Lynis testing tool looks for potential security problems and even suggests possibly remedies.

We'll tell you about some powerful new ad tracking techniques and how you can stop them.

Sometimes even sys admin Charly doesn't have a backup at hand; or, maybe it's ruined because the removed disk had corrupt data. Here, he offers some advice on how to handle the situation.