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Content about Unix

October 4, 2002
Unix Power Tools

The mark of a craftsman is his familiarity with his tools, the speed with which he can use them to solve simple problems, and his cleverness in using them to solve more complicated challenges. The latest edition of Unix Power Tools explores the standard Unix tools in greater depth than ever, and with better coverage of Linux, FreeBSD, and even the Darwin environment of Mac OS X. It's also been improved by the addition of sections on Perl and Python, programming languages that can often solve Unix problems more adeptly than any specific utility. This detail-filled book distinguishes itself from other guides for Unix gurus with its organizational structure (it's a series of articles that can be absorbed sequentially or individually) and carefully designed and executed index. Like its esteemed predecessors, this book is one you will keep handy.

October 1, 2002
MacOS X for Unix Geeks

Topics covered: How to get around in Darwin, the UNIX implementation built into Mac OS X. Sections deal with basic maneuvering at the command line, LDAP services, C programming, and graphical user interfaces under Aqua. There's a short section on building the kernel itself, but it's limited in scope.

August 1, 2001
Save Your Site from Spambots

The problem: too much spam. Unsolicited advertising email continues to account for untold business losses each year. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, in 1998 AOL reported that of the approximately 30 million email messages its servers handled each day, between 5 and 30 percent were spam. Assuming that this rate is true for other email providers as well, spam takes a significant economic toll on business, not merely in terms of Internet resources, but in lost employee productivity as well.

June 15, 2000
Building a High-Volume Newsletter Server

We've come a long way from the early days of the Internet, when many "mailing lists" were simply multiuser aliases maintained by the postmaster of a UNIX server. In those days, it was common for such "list" aliases to have a "-L" suffix, so sys admins and users could easily tell the difference between user accounts and multiuser lists. Subscription was a matter of emailing the sys admin and asking to be added to the alias. All mail sent to the list alias was simply resent, or "exploded," to all the users on the alias.

June 15, 2000
Mailman Made Easy

Mailman is the free software contender to mail-server products such as Lyris, which feature GUI-driven administration, user-level access to preferences, and built-in archives, digests, and the like. Based on the popular Python programming language, Mailman is intended to be used on UNIX systems, and can be installed alongside Majordomo on the same server, without conflicts. It has a few notable weaknesses, like that it can't easily be made aware of virtual hosts (although with a good dose of Apache configuration and some virtusertable tweaks it could probably be made to work.) I won't discuss that in this article, however, so let's not dawdle.