Certification: Test Your Knowledge of Wireless Technology 
Emmett Dulaney
Think you�re ready to sign up for the CWNA (Certified Wireless Network Administrator) exam or one similar to it? Before you do, test your knowledge of wireless technology � and readiness for such a certification test � with this sample exam of questions on basics of the technology.
Tue, 28 Feb 2006
Marcel's Linux Game of the Month: Childsplay
Marcel Gagné
Childsplay is an engine that handles plugins, each game being a plugin. The games are geared for an age range from 2-7. As such, they are all fairly simple for the readers of this column but somewhat more challenging for your young children.
Fri, 24 Feb 2006
Regular Expressions: Subtleties of good style
Cameron Laird, Kathryn Soraiz
You're experienced enough to recognize immediately how to gloss that slogan � when working in a new programming language, one ought to be respectful of it, alert to novel idioms that were impossible or contrived in the language(s) you used before. Overly literal translations are a mistake; you don't want to do the software equivalent of the apocryphal hotel notice that reads, in English, "You will be unbearable while the lift is repaired." "Regular Expressions" has covered exactly this topic several times already.
Fri, 24 Feb 2006
Book Review: Pro Perl Debugging
Reinhard Voglmaier
Richard Foley and Andy Lester, the authors of Pro Perl Debugging, are well known in the Perl community; they have contributed actively through the many software modules they've developed and the number of articles they've written. Their writing in this book is based on many years of Perl programming experience.
Tue, 21 Feb 2006
Book Review: Math You Can't Use
Peter Salus
That quaint document, the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, clause 8, is the foundation for patent and copyright law (though neither word is employed). Its foundations can be traced (for patents) to the Statute of Monopolies of 1654, wherein Parliament "endowed" inventors to sole rights in their inventions for 14 years, and (for copyright) to the "Statute of Anne" of 1710.
Tue, 21 Feb 2006
Security: Linux Kernel Security in a Nutshell
Kristy Westphal
Recently, I started looking more closely at some of the security add-ons for Linux and was surprised to find so many kernel-related projects out there. I first looked at SELinux from the NSA (http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/), which has been around for many years and has gained notice again since it has been enabled in the Fedora kernel by default. I thought this was a unique project but quickly realized that there were many others! There are plenty of worthy kernel projects out there, and many of them are not new. Now that I have been enlightened, I will share some of what I've learned. In this article, I'll just give an overview of what's out there, but look for future, more detailed articles about their use.
Fri, 17 Feb 2006
Book Review: Intrusion Prevention Fundamentals
Emmett Dulaney
Intrusion Prevention Fundamentals focuses on how Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) technologies can be used to manage the network and keep intruders out. IPS are any monitoring systems that examine all network traffic and then act as forwarding devices for approved traffic (dropping unapproved traffic or forwarding it elsewhere for further/separate action).
Tue, 14 Feb 2006
Book Review: Penetration Testing and Network Defense
Emmett Dulaney
In the world of systems security, administrators must stay current on all the ever changing approaches to securing their systems. Penetration testing is one such recent addition to the field. Simply defined, penetration testing involves ethically hacking a network to find vulnerabilities and subsequently taking action to close them. In other words, you attack your own network and find the weaknesses in it before someone else does.
Tue, 14 Feb 2006
Certification: Examining the CWNA Certification from Planet3 Wireless
Emmett Dulaney
When CompTIA � the organization behind a surplus of certifications ending with a plus sign (A+, Network+, Server+, etc.) � abandons their plans to release a new exam, it is usually a sign of one of two things: either the market is not big enough to support it, or someone else has effectively beaten them to the punch. While I cannot speak for CompTIA, I have to guess that the latter is what happened when it came to wireless networking. While they were busy formulating objectives for what was to be called Wireless+, Planet3 Wireless, Inc. beat them to the punch with the CWNA (Certified Wireless Network Administrator) certification.
Tue, 7 Feb 2006
Book Review: Time Management for System Administrators
Matthew Cheek
From the first chapter, it is clear that Tom Limoncelli is a working systems administrator who has spent years in the trenches.
Tue, 7 Feb 2006
Feature: Double Snorting
Jeffrey L. Taylor
Snort is a GPLed, Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) that runs on Linux and Win32. A NIDS monitors the network, looking for hostile traffic. Basically it scans all traffic on a network interface, not just its own host's, comparing it to rules describing the signatures of known attacks.
Out of the box, Snort warns about almost anything remotely suspicious. If it is listening on an Internet connection, this means a lot of warnings, many of them no threat (e.g., MacOS attacks on an Intel-only site). The real threats are often buried in the deluge of non-critical information. At first, I added custom rules, disabled built-in rules, re-enabled them, swinging back and forth between terseness and completeness with no resolution in sight. Eventually, it occurred to me that I was trying to solve two different problems:
Being alerted to serious threats
Discovering what junk was floating around the Internet
My solution was to run two instances of Snort, one configured for the attacks on the services I actually run, and one with almost all attack rules enabled.
Sun, 30 May 2004
Review: Evaluating SarCheck 6.01 for Linux
Emmett Dulaney
One of the great things about the Linux operating system is that it has a tool for practically everything. Anything you want to know can be ascertained as long as you have the talent to memorize some arcane commands and understand how to pipe them together while selectively cutting and pasting from multiple sets of output. Linux vendors try to make their high-end offerings stand out from other implementations by adding all-in-one administration tools that reduce complex actions to a few point-and-click operations. Those vendors, however, are missing a very important operation � system analysis and recommendations based on usage, load, and related variables. That is where SarCheck comes in.
Tue, 18 Oct 2005
Regular Expressions: Lua Shines
Cameron Laird
Take a look a Lua.
We write that every few years (most recently in May of 2002) because the Lua programming language is underappreciated, and because it continues to advance despite the comparatively small number of people working on and with it.
This spring, though, is a particularly good time to jump to Lua (the Portuguese word for "moon"), because Version 5.0 and The Lua Book are both better than we expected them to be.
Thu, 29 Apr 2004
Book Review: Testing Extreme Programming
Cameron Laird
Read this book. Think of it this way � programmers and administrators partition themselves into two sorts: those who regard testing as second-class work, and those who need ammunition against the first. Testing Extreme Programming does the best I know for opening the eyes of the former and offers plenty of practical value the latter can apply immediately.
Thu, 30 Oct 2003
The Open Road: Installing IMAP on Debian
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier
This month, I will cover using IMAP to get email. A lot of folks really like IMAP because it allows them to see the same set of "folders" from any mail client, which is a really handy feature if you happen to use more than one computer to check your mail.
Tue, 28 Jun 2005
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