OSS Solutions

A NIDS is a Network Intrusion Detection System, a system to detect intrusions from the network and take counter-measures ranging from (temporarily) blacklisting to logging through responding with specially crafted IP packets to slow down or kill the attacking host. It extends the principle of IDS to the network.

Mailman is a very flexible and powerful mailing-list manager written in Python. We use it to communicate internally, as well as with partners and customers. It's fully managable by e-mail or web interface.

This article was first written in August 2003 for
the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/56)

Here are a few examples you'll probably find useful at some point. Counting the number of lines of a C project

$ wc -l `find -name "*.[ch]"|xargs`

Execute a command on a directory and all its subdirectories

$ find "path" -exec "command" {} ;

Deleting all the files not accessed for 1 day in the current directory and all its subdirectories

$ find .

grep is a tool to extract text lines from files (or command outputs using pipes).

SSH (the Secure SHell) is a secure replacement for many UNIX tools like telnet, ftp, rsh, rcp, rlogin, rexec, and many more, which have proven to be insecure, even if most UNIX systems still use them by default, and even Microsoft has now begun to integrate those into his operating systems. I'll talk about the most used one, and free OpenSSH, which has been created by the OpenBSD team.

Pagers are commonly used under UNIX, because many, many documents are just plain text or text output of other commands or tools. The best known is more because it's also the oldest still living out there. less or most are clones, which bring together a lot of missing features to more and can be used to completely replace it.

If you have the same problem as we have, that most of your technical documentation has been input into Glasnost but that you want to move to Apache 2 and Glasnost doesn't support it, then you are likely to be looking into a way to convert these Glasnost articles to HTML to insert them in some other tool. This is a work in progress, so although we wanted to be able to do a one or two-parts script that extracts articles from Glasnost, converts them to HTML and inputs them into Drupal 6, we have been unable to do so (so far) because of the inadequacy of the Drupal solution (we looked into module

In this matter, which is rather vague and embraces many concerns, three types of tools are available:

• Services Monitoring Tools (and Outage Notification)
• Usage Graphing Tools
• Network Management Systems

Nagios is of the first kind, Cricket and MRTG are of the second. Both kinds may happily co-exist, and you often need both, if your network is important to you.

Nagios is a powerful network services monitoring tool. It was previously called NetSaint. It features a lot of agents to monitor a lot of service types and report it several ways, like SMS, web interface, e-mail, print, ….

This article was first written in January 2004 for 
the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/101)

There's about time relatives of mine don't want to change their operating system to Linux because they fear to be lost, but commonly use a lot of softwares under "test periods" to assist them in Windows because there's a natural lack of some of these functionalities that you would want your computer to have. Here is a list that will become longer with time of tools from the Open Source Community that run under Win32 OSes like a road-runner would run just in