Here is a most excellent article in which Steven explains, in simple terms, why it makes really good business sense to dump Microsoft and use Linux and OpenOffice.org. It is so obvious, even the M$ Fanboy should be able understand it…

It’s time to give up our Microsoft habit. We used to be able to afford to pay the Microsoft tax. Those days are done.

The hard days ahead are the days when we need to make the most of what we have and that means Linux. If we, and our businesses, are to make it through the great depression of the 21st century, we must start moving to Linux today.

I recommend you read it through, there’s some really simple and compelling arguments in there. And then read the comments.

Tell Someone Else!

Here’s a neat thing I managed to sort out the other day.

If you have read any of the “Untangle, Asterisk and File Server; All-in-One” series of posts before, then you will know that I’ve got a neat little VIA CN700 server for our home that is running all sorts of good stuff.

One of the things I have wanted to do for a while was to create a shared directory on the server so any family member can put stuff in there (like music files etc) but not be able to delete anything so as to prevent accidentally removing thousands of MP3s or irreplaceable digital pictures for example. This facility is apparently called a “drop-box”.

Hmmmm. Now let me think… Linux file permissions are rwx: Read Write eXecute. So, if you have write access, you can delete too. How can I fix this?

After some Googling and reading the Samba documentation it is actually pretty straightforward. Here’s how to make a drop-box on a Linux file server using Samba (CIFS) as the file sharing protocol and access mechanism.

• Create a directory somewhere on your server and give it a sensible name: I called it “shared” and put it under the /home tree.
• Create a Linux group for all users who you want to access the drop-box: I called the group “shared”. Then add your users to that group.
• Using sudo or running as root, change the the directory settings as follows:
  • chmod 770 shared. This prevents access to the directory by anyone other than root, and the owner and group members.
  • chown nobody:shared shared. This changes the directory ownership to a user “nobody” and the group “shared”. It is important that you use a user who is NOT a member of the shared group. Any user will do, but it must be defined in/etc/passwd. I chose “nobody” as it has very minimal permissions and is unlikely to pose any sort of security hazard. On my server, the user nobody is configured thus:

    nobody:x:99:99:Unprivileged User:/dev/null:/bin/false

  • chmod g+s shared/. This sets the directory’s SGID bit so that any new files or directories created in our shared directory will have their group id set to that of the of the shared directory. This ensures all members of the shared group can read the contents.
  • chmod +t shared This sets the “sticky bit” of our shared directory. On Linux, setting the sticky bit, means items inside the directory can be renamed or deleted only by the item’s owner, the directory’s owner, or the superuser; without the sticky bit set, any user with write and execute permissions for the directory can rename or delete contained files, regardless of owner.
  • Here’s a listing of the directory showing how it should look now:

    drwxrws--T 3 nobody shared 62 2008-04-15 21:48 shared

Now we can set-up our share in Samba as follows:

[shared]
comment = Our Shared Data/Media
path = /home/shared/
read only = no
valid users = @shared
browseable = yes
inherit owner = yes

The valid users @shared line tells samba that only members of the “shared” group can access this share. And the line inherit owner = yes is what makes it all work. This tells samba to set the owner of any files created to the owner of the directory we are in. In this case the owner is “nobody”. As the sticky bit is set on this directory, only the user “nobody” or the superuser can remove files as their ownership is instantly changed by Samba when first created from the actual user to the user “nobody”.

After dropping a file into the shared directory over a samba connection the listing looks like this:

-rwxr--r-- 1 nobody shared 1272366 2008-04-17 14:17 14_-_Jubilee.mp3.

See how the file is owned by “nobody:shared” and only has group and other read set.

It might sound like a bit of a palaver, but it doesn’t take very long to set up. This is a very useful way of creating drop-boxes for many kinds of applications.

I hope someone finds this useful, and please leave a comment if you do!

Tell Someone Else!

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. But what with the flu, Microshaft’s ongoing corruption of the ISO and some other stuff cropping up, I just kept finding reasons to put it off. Finally however, after jotting some notes and so forth for a few days I’ve managed to get my act together.

A Pet [Open Source] Project I want to give some airtime to, and get some assistance for, is Linux From Scratch.

History

Going back into the dark ages, I had been “playing” with one Linux distribution or other from the cover of PC magazines for sometime (I think it was a very early Mandrake or Suse product that first grabbed me), and found the whole system quite fascinating. The fact it was all free, and you could “LOOK” into it and see how it all worked together was a real eye opener. I was used to PCs and other computer platforms so it wasn’t all new… I grew up with VT100 terminals, DEC VAX VMS and then DOS so command line interpreters and such were nothing new in themselves but to get a complete OS, that did stuff, was free, and actually encouraged you to examine it, I remember it making me sit up and take notice even then.

One of the very first Open Source communities I came into active contact with was the Linux From Scratch (LFS for short) community. I cannot remember how I stumbled across the project or quite how long ago either, but it was quite a few years certainly. They have a feature which encourages newcomers to register their first LFS build when it is up and running. Checking on their website today, they have 19570 users registered so far. My LFS ID is 216 and the version of “the book” I recorded as having followed was 2.4.x when I registered. Although I certainly built (tried to build) a few before getting brave enough to register Anyway, I’m guessing this would have been around 1999/2000 some time.

LFS is still a project I follow closely and have a very warm opinion of. It has taught me a great deal over the years.

What is it then?

The project - if you can’t guess from the name - is all about building a functional Linux based operating system from scratch. That is, from nothing. You start with a spare partition on your hard disk and, by following the book, you learn what makes up a GNU/Linux operating system, how that operating system works and why bits of it behave the way they do. It is an educational project and it is a brilliant educational project. You gain knowledge of not just Linux itself but, Bash, compiling, device management and much, much more too. And what you also learn is what makes it all tick together… It is quite hard to explain but it’s a bit like the whole being worth more than just a simple sum of the individual parts.

LFS was started by a chap called Gerard Beekmans. The LFS project’s homepage explains the project thus:

What is Linux From Scratch?

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own customized Linux system entirely from source.

Why would I want an LFS system?

Many wonder why they should go through the hassle of building a Linux system from scratch when they could just download an existing Linux distribution. However, there are several benefits of building LFS. Consider the following:

LFS teaches people how a Linux system works internally
Building LFS teaches you about all that makes Linux tick, how things

work together and depend on each other. And most importantly, how to customize it to your own tastes and needs.

Building LFS produces a very compact Linux system
When you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They’re just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It’s not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.

LFS is extremely flexible
Building LFS could be compared to a finished house. LFS will give you the skeleton of a house, but it’s up to you to install plumbing, electrical outlets, kitchen, bath, wallpaper, etc. You have the ability to turn it into whatever type of system you need it to be, customized completely for you.

LFS offers you added security
You will compile the entire system from source, thus allowing you to audit everything, if you wish to do so, and apply all the security patches you want or need to apply. You don’t have to wait for someone else to provide a new binary package that (hopefully) fixes a security hole. Often, you never truly know whether a security hole is fixed or not unless you do it yourself.

Why LFS is a great platform

[When I discuss LFS I also imply the use of BLFS (Beyond Linux From Scratch) which is a fantastic resource for how to build and install the stuff that goes to make up a "useful" and "complete" Operating System.]

As some of the readers here will know, the little server I’ve built for home use is running LFS. It also runs, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Postgresql, is a Mail server, a Samba (Windows Networking) server, is our telephone exchange (running Asterisk) and a few other things too.

One of the main reasons for choosing LFS as the platform for this server is this: as it is built entirely from scratch there is no bloat, or unnecessary applications, the system is about as lean as you can get. The hardware I chose (very deliberately) is not the most powerful in the world; a mere 7Watts power consumption. But the applications running on the server currently seem very happy and there are plenty of system resources spare. This would be very hard to achieve using a mainstream distribution as they have to cater for as generic a host platform as possible and include a huge amount of features and supporting applications that are largely superfluous for a custom-built and tailored system.

Why LFS is not a great platform

LFS is not perfect however. The hurdle that causes most LFS users eventually to fall down and revert to a mainstream distribution is that of long-term maintenance of the LFS system. There is, by default, no concept of a package management system. When you install an application, you download the source code, and build the executable binaries and libraries and install them on your system. If there is a “dependency” issue like a missing library or something, this must be installed first before you can continue. In most respects this isn’t such a bad thing, but if you want to try some new app out it can involve building a great deal of software that you may realise, afterwards you don’t really want. Removing the unwanted can be a PITA.

My Desktop OS is Ubuntu. It works, and is very easy to upgrade and manage.

What happens next then?

In a few recent weeks, there has been a great flood of discussion and debate on the LFS mailing lists. The original thread for this debate, started by a long term LFS editor called Jeremy Huntwork, has sown the seed for a process to review what LFS is all about and how it could be taken forward whilst still maintaining the core principle of being an Educational Project first and foremost.

One area where I feel the project’s new direction and strategy could really benefit is from some “new blood” with few pre-concieved ideas or historical baggage.

If you use Linux, don’t really know what is going under the hood but want to, then please visit the LFS website, download or read on-line the current book and start working your way through it. Join the mailing lists (either directly or go through gmane and your favourite newsreader), and please contribute your views and experiences.

We really want to give LFS a new lease of life and that, IMHO, needs some fresh ideas and thinking too.

Tell Someone Else!

After reading this post several times and thinking about the implications of it. I think the author (sorry, but I couldn’t find your name anywhere) has really stumbled on something here.

The basic premise of the article is to do with Microsoft’s takeover attempt of Yahoo, and how poor Windows is as a scalable platform for building out a very big Internet presence:

There’s no way on God’s earth that Microsoft can switch all of Yahoo’s services to being based on Windows. The IT costs and the time needed to migrate Yahoo’s applications to Windows boggles my mind. It would probably cost more than whatever Microsoft ends up paying for Yahoo.

I thought about this and think that there is even more to support the author’s conclusion than he mentions.

I started to think about all these new “big businesses” out there he(she?) mentions. They are all using Linux and other Open Source software to build out these hugely massive infrastructures. We know about Google and Amazon et al. But there is more… PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, but a business that is taking on the old-world banking industry - especially as a credit card payment processor - build their transaction processing platform on Linux and they have discussed before how they can easily scale their infrastructure by just adding a few $1k blades with Linux on them.

If any of the recent big on-line businesses had tried to build out their infrastructure on Windows, what do you think the outcome would have been?

• Cost. This would have been a non-starter for most. How much in software licenses would a Google need to have spent? Server software, database licenses, middleware, system administration tools etc etc. The mind boggles just how impractical it would be to try and do this with proprietary software. And of course, don’t forget the extra hardware needed to run the bloated code in the first place.
• Flexibility. How easy would it be to go back your proprietary supplier and ask for new features, fixes, patches? And - oh yes - ‘I’d like them tomorrow please’. This just isn’t possible or realistic with the old-world software businesses. Businesses like Google and the others rely on change. They are dynamic businesses. They need to move fast and adapt.
• Reliability. Really. Windows, in whatever guise you like - Vista, SBS, NT - are just not man enough for the job. BSODs galore and crappy single-user file systems mean you need hundreds, or thousands, of individual boxes each running expensive software just to give yourself some sense of reliability. Although of course it isn’t in reality. Windows doesn’t scale and it’s a pain to manage when you have lots of them. It’s a desktop operating system masquerading as something it isn’t.
• Security. Yep. Would you trust your data to a Windows architecture that is so wide open to abuse it has grown a whole industry of parasites that supply further process-cycle-sapping applications that endeavour and “hope” to find intruders and malicious code?

The trend to use Linux is not just with the “new kids” however.

We have seen how, recently, Specsavers the Opticians have replaced everything in their network with Linux. From the tills to the back-office servers and more recently their Active Directory user authentication system for OpenLDAP. Here’s a lovely quote from them about the impact their migration has had:

As well as freedom from vendor lock-in, Specsavers says it is getting “superior performance, reliability and security at a significantly reduced cost in comparison to proprietary solutions”. It says it is now “enjoying a reduced need for maintenance, and increased reliability”.

I was also rather surprised yesterday when I was reading a piece about Oracle.

“WC: Pretty much all of Oracle’s internal production and development systems run on Linux across the whole company. Linux by itself is across the whole company. Also uses a lot of Python. It’s really across the whole co. 10,000 Linux servers that run Oracle on-demand.”

[WC = Wim Coekaerts, VP of Linux engineering, corporate architecture.]

Did you get that? Linux is running pretty much everything in Oracle…

If M$ do buy Yahoo, they will, undoubtedly, open the biggest can-of-worms imaginable. And probably the first nail-in-the-coffin for Windows. Especially in the enterprise.

So, think about it. Next time you need to role out some new business applications, would you go with the Desktop OS that needs excessive maintenance and support to just pretend to be a server, and that might have a limited life expectancy anyway. Or deploy the enterprise scale OS that can be customised for your infrastructure and hardware, which is proven to be extremely secure and is used by many (if not all) of the biggest and most successful companies in the world? Oh yes, and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to buy either. In fact, it can be yours for nothing. Free. Zilch. Zero.

Remember too - that you can also run the same OS, properly configured, on the Desktop too. Why do you think PC manufacturers are literally falling over each to bring out new, low-cost, Linux powered laptops (Asus, Everex, Acer, Via, Palm, Intel, LeMote, OLPC, Dell, Lenovo)? Barely a day goes by without a new announcement. It certainly isn’t because they aren’t any good…

Tell Someone Else!

Everyone knows that there are lots of Viruses, Malware, Spybots and the like out there….

But now, according to the BBC these malicious programs have reached unprecedented levels.

Reports vary but some estimates suggest there were five times as many variants of malicious programs in circulation in 2007 compared to 2006.

Security company Panda Software said it was getting more than 3,000 novel samples of so called malware every day.

And it gets worse…

Security software testing organisation AV Test reported that it saw 5.49 million unique samples of malicious software in 2007 - five times more than the 972,606 it saw in 2006.

And to cap it all…

Most of the malicious programs detected by these security organisations are aimed at the various versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Now there are many reasons why the criminal hacker writes mainly for Windows, and most are to with the very poor system level architecture of the file and operating system itself.

There are countless examples and descriptions on the Internet as to why viruses and the like do not seem to target Unix, Linux and Macs and they all, in the main, boil down to the fact that these systems use proper, multi-user file and process management.

As with any virus in the real world, if it can’t jump from one host to another, it can’t propagate and will simply die or fester on its own. This is just the same with computer viruses.

Microsoft’s Windows OS, when connected to the Internet, is just like the world’s biggest toddler’s nursery. You know (if you’ve have ever had kids) how they all mix fluids and spread diseases between themselves faster than you can get a tissue to wipe their dribbly nose.

On a “proper” computer operating system, the analogy would be each kid living in a hermetically sealed bubble. But with the tools to be able to communicate and transfer “solids” through appropriately secure membranes specifically fit for purpose.

Go on, dump Windows.

[Update] I just went and checked the latest WILDLIST. The list of all “active” known viruses actually in the wild. Just read the list and look at the names. Notice how many are for non-windows architectures… About 2. One for Javascript and one html based.

Tell Someone Else!

After this article I picked up on recently about the 30,000+ desktops having moved to Linux in India, we now have the news this morning that the French Paramilitary Police Force will be dumping ALL it’s Microshaft software in favour of Open Source Linux. And they are, somewhat surprisingly in my book, choosing Ubuntu rather than their own - home grown - Mandriva distribution.

Anyway, this is a pretty big story as the lead paragraph states:

PARIS (AFP) - The French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break.

See… I told you so

The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops currently use Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. But these will progressively change over to the Linux system distributed by Ubuntu, explained Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie’s IT department.

“We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer,” he said, “so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014.”

There are three reasons behind the move, Geraud said at the Solution Linux 2008 conference here. The first is to diversify suppliers and reduce the force’s reliance on one company, the second is to give the gendarmerie mastery of the operating system and the third is cost, he said.

He also added that “the Linux interface is ahead of other operating systems currently on the market for professional use.”

And even more impressively is this comment about the savings they make by using OpenOffice.org compared to buying MS Office.

The move away from licensed products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.

“In 2004 we had to buy 13,000 licences for office suites for our PCs,” he said, “but in the three years since then we’ve only had to buy a total of 27 licences.”

I thought of making the title of this piece:

French Police Buy 27 MS Office Licenses!

But I wasn’t sure it was catchy enough. lol.

[Update: How about this then?

Hasta La Vista Bebé

Sorry. Couldn't resist it...]

Vive la France!

(Until the Six Nations Rugby gets underway at least!)

Many thanks to Sophie on the OpenOffice.org Marketing Mailing List for pointing this out.

Tell Someone Else!

It’s right about time; and the time is about right…

It really does appear as though we are approaching that point of critical mass, where something other than Windows could become a dominant desktop OS.

Apple have just recorded their best ever quarter and so have the legions of converts to OS X. As there is almost no condescension about their slick and user friendly Operating System. Oh yes, the core of OS X is Open Source, built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5. But you still have to buy a MAC to run it so it is not the least expensive alternative and let’s not forget we have hundreds of millions of Intel/AMD i86 compatible PCs out there.

But now we have that bastion of conservative enterprise solutions, IBM saying

In an announcement this week at the Lotusphere 2008 conference in Orlando, IBM said that it will provide full support for Ubuntu Linux with Lotus Notes 8.5 and Lotus Symphony using its Open Collaboration Client software, which is based on open standards.

Antony Satyadas, chief competitive marketing officer for IBM Lotus, said the Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers.

Support for Ubuntu. From IBM. Just think about that for a moment…

“We’re doing pilots with customers now,” Satyadas said. “Some of the requests came from big companies” with as many as 100,000 users that are interested in moving to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop.

100,000 users moving to Linux on the desktop - wow. Just how much will that save MegaCorp Inc.? Who knows, but I bet it is a pretty sizeable truck load of cash.

IBM have endorsed Ubuntu. This is, actually, really big news. For a firm the size of IBM they don’t do things like this lightly or “just for fun”. This means there must be serious demand from their enterprise customers for a change; and it’s a big change. Their own press release for this entitled “IBM Accelerates Desktop Customer Choice With Support for Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell Software” just shows how far we have come. Three alternative Linux operating systems. All with support from IBM.

“All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

In the past, IBM has said Linux on the corporate desktop wouldn’t happen until the operating system was good enough to allow companies to have all the functions they need to run their businesses. At the same time, an adequate supply of critical business software that would run reliably and efficiently on Linux would be needed.

“We are putting our money where our mouth is,” Satyadas said. “We think now the time is really [here]” and the needed business applications are available to make it work for corporations.

“Linux is cool now,” he said. “We use it ourselves. We are able to offer a secure, rich and cost-effective Microsoft alternative.”

We also have seen reports of very large scale deployments happening all over the world where tens of thousands of desktops are moving to free and open operating systems. Here’s a recent one from India. This is a really good read and shows just what can be done with OSS in the enterprise, and at some speed too! I especially enjoyed his comments on the complete non-issue that anti-virus and malware problems are since their migration to Linux.

…A year later, Umashankar and his team had moved 30,000 computers and 1,880 severs belonging to some of the state’s schools to Linux — creating possibly the largest Linux rollout in India.

And here’s the very simple “why” this made so much sense:

The decision to migrate to Linux was driven primarily by cost. It was hard to escape the cold figures before Umashankar: Elcot saved Rs 5 crore¹ on every 20 servers it set up with Linux. And they had over 1,800 servers.

In addition, Umashankar says that the shift saves them about 25 percent on any general hardware purchases — and as much as 90 percent on the high-end servers.

Umashankar says that his office uses the Openoffice.org suite. This saves them close to Rs 12,000 on each desktop, he says.

“We buy Intel dual core desktops with 19″ TFT monitors for Rs 21,600 including the Linux OS. If we bought a proprietary office suite at Rs 12,000 for each desktop, the cost of commissioning infrastructure would go up to Rs 33,600 — a 55 percent increase,” he says.

55% uplift on every desktop. Just for your Office Application suite. If only more people realised this…

When you realise the kind of savings that are to be had, and knowing that there are now several free and excellent Desktop alternatives such as:

• Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (I have heard very good things about Mint recently),
• OpenSuse,
• Fedora,
• And many others. See Distrowatch for a up-to-date list of what’s hot and what’s not.

it really makes me angry that our UK government are so blind to the opportunities.

With all of these Linux desktop distributions come, literally, thousands of free applications which provide an almost total replacement for available commercial products, and also offer many more that are not present in the commercial domain at all.

We now have top quality products that fulfil most of the mainstream business requirements. I’m thinking, Firefox, Thunderbird (or Evolution), OpenOffice.org, The Gimp and Inkscape. There are multiple offerings in back-office and network/desktop management solutions, again, free and open and there are numerous excellent development environments, libraries and integration tools to enable unlimited customisation.

There are now plenty of big companies like Novell, IBM, Sun HP, and even Oracle, providing Linux desktop products and enterprise level support services. For the smaller business there are now companies that provide the support services, knowledge and skills that suit the SME sector (like our own business, The Open Learning Centre), there are huge numbers of students leaving University having worked on and engaged in the Open Source community which should help to round out the support side. And of course there is the Open Source community itself. I know of know other place where I can drop a quick email about a problem I’m having, or a question about configuration for example, which gives me consistently, fast and accurate assistance. Bugs are generally caught, logged and fixed with frightening speed and courtesy too.

Is Linux ready for the Desktop? Undoubtedly yes.

Will 2008 be the year it really takes off? I don’t know but I really do hope so. The only reasons it might not are fear and ignorance. Two issues which are easily surmountable.

Fear? Just show them, or better still give them a copy and don’t forget to tell them that they are free to copy and redistribute it too.

Ignorance? Just tell people about Open Source…

“Ignorance is bliss” the old adage goes. I think as far as OSS is concerned, that should be “Ignorance is expensive”.

1 According to the Wikipedia a Crore denotes 10 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore and you get about 40 Rs to the US dollar. So they are saving a huge amount of money however you look at it.

Tell Someone Else!

Oh dear, it just keeps getting worse for our friends in Redmond according to Silicon.com…

Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system is failing to win over silicon.com readers, with two-thirds (65 per cent) saying their organisation will never move onto XP’s successor.

“Never move…” That’s quite a big statement.

Just two per cent of more than 800 respondents to the poll said their company has already made the move to Vista.

So that’s 16 companies out of 800 have moved already.

But despite these concerns, Microsoft says the business uptake of Vista has met expectations and is following the same pattern as previous major OS releases.

Gosh - that’s pretty low expectations for their biggest ever product release. If their shareholders were told this a few years ago ["Yeah, this is going to be our biggest ever OS release. It will cost billions of dollars to build, take us years and years, be a couple late probably and we think - oh at least a few hundred companies will buy it - especially if we give it away - and oh yes, it will have a really pretty interface"] I reckon plenty would have walked away in disgust.

But the bit I liked the best was this:

In another recent silicon.com poll, XP was named by 42 per cent of respondents as their most preferred OS. Vista gained 14 per cent of the vote but was beaten by both Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux.

Goody…

Tell Someone Else!

LOL,

That bastion of corporate IT journalism, CIO.com has released their nominations for the best [worst] ten Technology failures for 2007.

And coming up the rear is - yes you guessed it - Vista.

One of the longest—five years!—and priciest development projects at Microsoft, the Vista OS has yet to penetrate enterprise computing in any major way. The corporate version shipped in late 2006, and 2007 was supposed to be Vista’s march into the enterprise. But many IT leaders have called it a costly resource hog that makes them love Windows XP. Even Vista’s much-touted security isn’t helping. Now, some companies who’ve been waiting for the first service pack before deploying may skip Vista altogether due to lingering performance concerns.

I have to say I whole heartedly agree with their findings

There are plenty of excellent, reliable, rock-solid, secure and free alternatives out there. Don’t waste your money any more guys and gals. Go and try some Open Source alternatives…

Tell Someone Else!

If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there. Alternatively if you click on the Untangle tag in the tag cloud then you should get all of the posts so far.

Hi all,

I’ve not yet got any further with the Untangle portion, but pretty much everything else is now in place and working

Last night I built and installed the few remaining applications that are necessary to support my objectives:

• MySQL (I need this for Joomla! and vtiger)
• Postgresql (I need this for untangle)
• Apache
• PHP (and some associated libraries for added functionality, i.e. HTML-Tidy, mm, libmcrypt, mhash…)

I have also been thinking about what it is actually I am trying to achieve. I find a picture really helps so here’s a block diagram of the applications I want and how they should interface to the outside world…

This was a good exercise that helped me to understand the flow of traffic and what needs to be prevented from passing through the server. The dotted line from Apache to the Internet is because I’m not sure yet whether I’ll actually provide any sort of public web presence from this box or not. I doubt it somehow but you never know…

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvements I’d be happy to hear them. I made the original diagram in OOo draw. Here’s the original file if you want to use it or alter it. As with all other stuff on here, its CC licensed.

Tell Someone Else!