Everything you need to know about connecting to your server securely using SSH and public/private keys. This makes it so it is nearly impossible for someone to steal your password.

With the installer usually the first part of an application that a user sees, why is software installation such a notoriously buggy procedure? This month, in The cranky user column, Peter chronicles the ups and downs of installation, from the golden era of the floppy disk to the rise of the standard installer. He also offers some user-centered advice on building installers that work the way users want them to.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. He covers everything from logging to networking, and from the command-line to help systems -- even compiling packages from available source code.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. In this final part, we download and compile a software package, discuss the pros and cons of automated package management, and get to know the RPM system.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. In this part, we take stock of what is on the system, and plan and implement regular backups with an eye to recovery as well as security.

Working unconnected is unthinkable in today's world. Linux on the network unleashes its full potential. However, Linux networking looks very different on its face. You'll need to learn some new terminologies and new tools.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. In this part, we explore Linux's hierarchical directory structure, and investigate mounting and devices.

If a system has no users, is it really a system? Learn about the Linux approach to users.

Linux makes extensive use of logging. Nothing is hidden from you. Becoming comfortable and familiar with logs will allow you to monitor the health of your system and track activities.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. In this part, we install and take a tour of Webmin, a browser-based administration tool for Linux and other platforms that provides a graphical interface to many administrative and operational tasks.

Linux provides great power and flexibility through the console. If it has been a while since you've spent much time at the command prompt, take a little time to reacquaint yourself with this environment by reviewing common commands you'll use all the time.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. We begin our transition by examining some of the differences and similarities between Linux and Windows, and learn to stop rebooting all the time.

Recognized as a high-performance, reliable, and serviceable enterprise platform, the 64-bit POWER(TM) architecture offers new choices to UNIX and Linux application developers. Anyone with a background in either AIX or Linux on other platforms can benefit from the strength of the open source community combined with the POWER of world-class IBM hardware.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

This article discusses various ways data gets into your program, emphasizing how to deal appropriately with them; you might not even know about them all! It first discusses how to design your program to limit the ways data can get into your program, and how your design influences what is an input. It then discusses various input channels and what to do about them, including environment variables, files, file descriptors, the command line, the graphical user interface (GUI), network data, and miscellaneous inputs.

This article shows how to validate input -- one of the first lines of defense in any secure program.

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

This article documents the test results and analysis of the Linux kernel and other core OS components, including everything from libraries and device drivers to file systems and networking, all under some fairly adverse conditions, and over lengthy durations. The IBM Linux Technology Center has just finished this comprehensive testing over a period of more than three months and shares the results of their LTP (Linux Test Project) testing with developerWorks readers.

The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that, to the operating system, makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. When enabled, the technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, in parallel within each processor, which can yield significant performance improvement. We set out to quantify just how much improvement you can expect to see.

With the widespread proliferation of Web services, quality of service (QoS) will become a significant factor in distinguishing the success of service providers. QoS determines the service usability and utility, both of which influence the popularity of the service. In this article, we look at the various Web service QoS requirements, bottlenecks affecting performance of Web services, approaches of providing service quality, transactional services, and a simple method of measuring response time of your Web services using the service proxy.

The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it. But how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year.

Mytop is MySQL monitoring software written to look very similar to the UNIX console tool top. Mytop allows you to see everything happening in a MySQL server from key efficiencies of queries to number of slow queries that have run. It is a tool anyone that administers a MySQL server or develops for a MySQL server will need to have installed on their system.

Learn how to create a text ad in phpAdsNew that has the ability to look different on different pages. This tutorial covers a lot of interesting aspects of phpAdsNew so anyone just getting started with phpAdsNew or even people who have been using it for years will learn something new.