Articles by Chris Brown

• Issue 204 - Coding Academy: Sysadmin coding - In his final article Dr. Brown tackles UDP
  
• Issue 203 - Coding Academy: Sysadmin TCP -
  
• Issue 202 - Coding Academy: System coding - System signal
  
• Issue 201 - Coding Academy: Sysadmin - permissions -
  
• Issue 200 - Coding Academy: Systems Coding -
  
• Issue 199 - Coding Academy: System coding - The good doctor tells us what time it is
  
• Issue 198 - Coding Academy: System coding - Part 3 - inotify and getopts
  
• Issue 197 - Coding Academy: Systems Coding - Part 2: files, links and directories
  
• Issue 196 - Coding Academy: System Coding -
  
• Issue 195 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria -
  
• Issue 194 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria -
  
• Issue 193 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria -
  
• Issue 192 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria -
  
• Issue 191 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria -
  
• Issue 190 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - It's X server again and Doc Brown eyes up your browser.
  
• Issue 189 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Securely log on to remote PCs and how you can make Linux and Windows play nicely.
  
• Issue 188 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The good doctor looks at NetworkManager, a ool that most of us take for granted, Red Hat's NetworkManager has just undergone a face lift.
  
• Issue 187 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Includes how to use authentication in Samba and thereby centralise all your user accounts in a Windows Active Directory.
  
• Issue 186 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Chris examines the aftermath of the Heartbleed Bug.
  
• Issue 185 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Brown clears up the confusion between 'API' and 'protocol', amongst other things.
  
• Issue 184 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Brown wonders why people just change their desktop wallpapers instead of making radical changes to the shell via command line.
  
• Issue 184 - Coding Academy: Gambas: Almost Means Basic - Dr Chris Brown demonstrates how to create your first graphical application for Linux using an object-oriented version of Basic. That’s right – Basic!
  
• Issue 183 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Chris Brown talks durable storage, automatic intrusion detection, timestamps and more.
  
• Issue 182 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Chris explains all about the kernel, and remains sceptical about CentOS and Red Hat's partnership.
  
• Issue 181 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The good doctor talks about the Network Time Protocol, secure shell and the importance of choice.
  
• Issue 180 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Brown looks at Linux statistics, Cygwin and an armchair view of the internet.
  
• Issue 179 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Dr Chris parts with more of his wisdom, including Bleachbit, an easy- to-use privacy tool.
  
• Issue 178 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Esoteric system administration goodness from the impenetrable bowels of the server room.
  
• Issue 177 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Community spirit and AWK
  
• Issue 176 - Feature:  Dr Brown's Administeria - Smoothwall and Sed.
  
• Issue 175 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Unix powertools and ZFS
  
• Issue 174 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Debain and BTRFS
  
• Issue 173 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Scammers, network reconnaissance, UUIDs and swap space.
  
• Issue 172 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Metal as a Service and Tomcat in a nutshell.
  
• Issue 170 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Proxies plus the final part of our look at the LAMP stack.
  
• Issue 169 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - ImageMagick and the M from LAMP.
  
• Issue 168 - Feature: Sysadmin - OpenNebula and part four in our series on beginning sysadmin.
  
• Issue 167 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The Open Build Service, and the LAMP stack.
  
• Issue 166 - Feature: LinuxCon Europe - Our intrepid reporter braves the lurid world of drink and software.
  
• Issue 166 - Feature: Sysadmin - Optimisation, and part six of our guide to becoming a sysadmin.
  
• Issue 165 - Feature: Sysadmin - Doc Brown keeps tabs on kernel development, and continues his series for aspiring Sysadmins.
  
• Issue 164 - Feature: Sysadmin - Entropy, Mondo and part four of our guide on how to be a sysadmin.
  
• Issue 163 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Running out of IP addresses, and part three of Doc Brown's guide to being a sysadmin.
  
• Issue 162 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Cloud costs and part two of 'how to be a sysadmin'.
  
• Issue 161 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Bitvise Tunnelier and part one of our series on how to be a sysadmin
  
• Issue 160 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Securing the human, NFS, passwords and unity
  
• Issue 159 - Feature: Sysadmin - Esoteric system administration goodness from the impenetrable bowels of the server room.
  
• Issue 158 - Tutorial: Administeria - Talk the talk, know your weaknesses and SELinux
  
• Issue 157 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - War, cats, clouds and more.
  
• Issue 156 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Reluctant e-mails, Linux Jobs, and the Illustrated Etcetera part four.
  
• Issue 155 - Feature: Dr Brown`s Administeria - Introducing Anaconda`s new hub and spoke model and how to manage your system with Webmin.
  
• Issue 154 - Feature: Dr Brown`s Administeria - Books on system administration, software RAID and the illustrated Etcetera, part 3.
  
• Issue 153 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - We look at the life of Dennis Ritchie. Plus: We ask whether you need to be certified and delve deeper in to /etc
  
• Issue 152 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - We look at extending your in-house network into a Virtual Private Cloud. Plus: exploring the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files, and Guestfish.
  
• Issue 151 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Server rollouts striking a bad chord? Let Ubuntu Orchestra bring some harmony back into your life. Plus: getting started with virtualisation.
  
• Issue 150 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - How to be a sysadmin - eight simple steps on the path to admin heaven. Plus: Unix time formats, and Software as a Service.
  
• Issue 149 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Don't struggle to install complex software stacks - BitNami has done the hard work for you. Plus: Byobu, Collectd and P7zip
  
• Issue 149 - Coding Academy: C Primer: Roll your own shell - Looking to become a kernel developer? You'll need to learn C. Make a start (and write your own shell) with our gentle guidance.
  
• Issue 148 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Welcome to the future, as hundreds of sites take part in World IPV6 day. Plus: Privilege escalation and setuid.
  
• Issue 148 - Tutorial: Eucalyptus: Cloud control - With Eucalyptus - and just a little bit of help from Ubuntu - we discover that it's really not that hard to set up your very own private cloud.
  
• Issue 147 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - BoxGrinder: Scratch-build virtual machine images based on Fedora, Red Hat or CentOS. Plus: PowerNap and Grub 2
  
• Issue 146 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Drowning in log files? The Splunk "search engine for operational intelligence" could be the answer. Plus: XML for administrators.
  
• Issue 145 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Job trends: Linux skills are increasingly sought-after in the jobs market. Which distro comes out on top? Plus: cross-platform application development with Mono.
  
• Issue 144 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - A new network device naming scheme will be introduced in Fedora 15 to make things more consistent. But is it progress? Plus: the secrets behind the /etc/shadow file, Cron and Anacron.
  
• Issue 143 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Think Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel? That's only 0.4% of the story. Find out who else did. Plus: IPMI, and systemd.
  
• Issue 142 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The doc covers Rackspace cloud hosting, backslash characters, and DNS server configuration.
  
• Issue 141 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Linux Standards Base - for devs targeting a range of platforms, the LSB isn't the least significant bit. Plus: learn how DNS works.
  
• Issue 140 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - htop - a new command for your sysadmin's toolbox. Plus: OpenSolaris fork OpenIndiana, all the roles of the dollar sign, and the B-tree filesystem (btrfs).
  
• Issue 139 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The latest edition of Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook is the best in its class. Plus: the uncomplicated firewall (ufw) and file comparison tools.
  
• Issue 138 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - 'Little languages' are languages specifically designed for a unique purpose, such as bc, dc, Sed and Awk. We explain all.
  
• Issue 137 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Do you aspire to have more Linux-related know-how than you know what to do with? Here are some of the best books. Plus: a cryptography materclass and GnuPG.
  
• Issue 136 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - How many filesystems does Linux understand? Prepare to be very impressed. Plus: Linux on Windows with Cygwin, and remote access to Linux via SSH, FTP and VNC.
  
• Issue 135 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Tweak Ubuntu to your liking, and learn to copy files in any number of ways.
  
• Issue 134 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Filesystem forensics: throw away the fingerprint dust and magnifying glass, and try Sleuthkit instead. Plus: containment technologies, and managing multiple machines with Landscape.
  
• Issue 133 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Boot sectors: the 2TB barrier in disk space means abandoning MBR partitions. Plus: special characters and discovering network latency issues with SmokePing.
  
• Issue 132 - Feature:  Dr Brown's Administeria - Lucid Lynx server - is the new long-term release of Ubuntu a giant leap for mankind? Plus: reverse DNS, and FTP serving with ProFTPD.
  
• Issue 131 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - BOINC project - If your computer's sitting idle, donate your spare CPU cycles to worthy causes. Plus: a quick guide to RPM, and understanding signals.
  
• Issue 130 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Virtual classrooms: the doctor reports on his own experience with two competing technologies. Plus: Minix, and processes demystified.
  
• Issue 129 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - All change for upstart: how Ubuntu 9.10's boot process has changed and its documentation improved. Plus: the life of a datagram.
  
• Issue 128 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - IPv4 address exhaustion: with IPv4 addresses running out, will we finally extract our binary digits and roll out IPv6? Plus: managing hundreds of machines on heterogeneous networks with Puppet.
  
• Issue 127 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Build your own cloud with some Karmic Koalas and a sprig of Eucalyptus. Plus: first steps with the Xen Live CD, and renting bits of the cloud from Amazon.
  
• Issue 126 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - LimeSurvey - construct and conduct your own web-based surveys with zesty free tools. Plus: Apache virtual hosts and modules on Debian, and understanding the Tomcat server.
  
• Issue 125 - Feature: Virtualise the easy way - There's a huge amount of literature out there on virtualisation, but really all you need is KVM, Qemu and our guide.
  
• Issue 125 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Maximise uptime with KSplice - keep servers busy and save upgrade hassle. Plus: access control lists (ACLs) and setuid.
  
• Issue 124 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Seeing the boot process with Bootchart, customising Bash, and recovering deleted files with PhotoRec.
  
• Issue 123 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Moblin - the netbook distro. Plus: Bash auto-completion and Webmin.
  
• Issue 122 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - A quarter of a century of Gnu's Not Unix. Plus: inside the info and man documentation systems.
  
• Issue 121 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Take the pain out of joining your Linux server to an Active Directory domain with Likewise Open. Also: SSH security tips and Wireshark.
  
• Issue 120 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - LDAP with a GUI, the Munin system monitor, and discovering DHCP.
  
• Issue 119 - Feature:  Dr Brown's Administeria - Deliver online training with Moodle, understand the structure of Debian/Ubuntu package repositories, and use those repos via proxies and mirrors.
  
• Issue 118 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Gobby - the collaborative document editing and chat tool with a pretty colour-coded interface. Plus: scalable backups with BackupPC, and build your own Debian packages.
  
• Issue 117 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Rackspace cloud computing; Fuse userspace filesystems; the Linux Terminal Server Project.
  
• Issue 116 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - USB authentication with YubiKey; making sense of DNS with Dig; the ext3cow filesystem.
  
• Issue 115 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Understand the sysfs file system, and harden your machines with firewalls.
  
• Issue 114 - Feature:  Dr Brown's Administeria - Predict hard disk failure with Smart, understand fstab, and secure your data with ecryptfs.
  
• Issue 113 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - The doctor deals with security books, Clonezilla, and chroot jails using Jailkit
  
• Issue 112 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Manage your servers from your iPhone, understand file permissions and audit your boxes.
  
• Issue 111 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Virtual appliances: use pre-configured virtual machine images with JumpBox. Plus: Bonnie++ and VMware
  
• Issue 110 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Unison, the bi-directional synchronisation tool, explained. Plus: keep tabs on your boxes with top and vmstat.
  
• Issue 109 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Distributed replicated block devices, Kickstart preseeding, and upstart boot system handling
  
• Issue 108 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - An intro to Posix, keeping your passwords safe and using AppArmor
  
• Issue 107 - Review: Axigen 6.0 - Ever wanted to set up a mail server on Linux but been frightened off by arcane commands and config files? Here's a pain-free alternative.
  
• Issue 107 - Feature: Dr Brown's Administeria - Esoteric system administration goodness from the impenetrable bowels of the server room.
  
• Issue 107 - Tutorial: Kernel: Modules in a nutshell - It's the indispensable bit of software at the centre of your machine, but what does the kernel actually do? We crack it open and take a peek inside.
  
• Issue 106 - Feature: The Linux pub quiz - So you think you know Linux? Prove it: test yourself with our quiz. The brainteasers range from the ridiculous to the downright obscure...
  
• Issue 105 - Tutorial: LDAP: Remote /home access - We build on the LDAP authentication created last issue to provide secure access to your home directory from anywhere in the world/office.
  
• Issue 104 - Tutorial: LDAP: Support Dovecot logins - We can't let people use our mail server without authenticating the users - that would be madness! Let's keep things ship-shape with LDAP.
  
• Issue 103 - Tutorial: Build your own mailserver - Most people who use it haven't got the faintest clue how email actually works. Banish the darkness of ignorance today with our beacon of knowledge.
  
• Issue 102 - Tutorial:  Linux Virtual Server - Building load-balancing clusters with LVS is as good at keeping out the cold as chopping logs on a winter's day...
  
• Issue 101 - Tutorial: Clusters: high availability - A failover capacity gives your cluster the means to survive power outages and other calamities. Here's how to maintain availability.
  
• Issue 100 - Tutorial: When Linux won't boot - It's a moment that every user of any OS dreads: your computer failing to boot. Follow our methods for soothing your troubled brow.
  
• Issue 99 - Tutorial: Experiments with PAM - It's an area of your system you may have overlooked because 'it just works' - but how do pluggable authentication modules actually work?
  
• Issue 99 - Tutorial: Files: find what you're looking for - Ever mislaid an item in Linux? That mayonnaise recipe? Emails to Auntie Gwen? That huge file you downloaded? Fear not - help is at hand.
  
• Issue 98 - Feature: 48 Linux tricks - We all love Free Software, but sometimes it just doesn't work quite how we want it to. Team LXF put their heads together to figure out the top problems that people face on a daily basis, and went about fixing them for you...
  
• Issue 98 - Tutorial: Diagnosing your network problems - If your network is sick, call the Doctor! Luckily, though he can't make house calls for readers, Dr Chris Brown is here to share his diagnostic tips with us all...
  
• Issue 97 - Tutorial: Filters and pipes - Grab your snorkel and flippers, and join us in an exploration of the murky underwater world of filters and pipelines.
  
• Issue 96 - Tutorial: Vim: A guide to the basics - The venerable Vim remains the editor of choice for many Linux professionals. It has a reputation for being hard to learn, but it's worth it.
  
• Issue 95 - Feature: The great Linux filesystem tour - Have you got lost in the Linux filesystem? Given up trying to figure out why things are where they are? Join our tour!
  
• Issue 95 - Tutorial: Cron: Automate your Linux box - A Cron job a day helps you work, rest and play. We show you how to configure crontabs and use Anacron to have your system running like clockwork.
  
• Issue 92 - Feature: Log file lumberjack - Can't see the wood for the trees? Prune log files with some clever configuration and your data will be much easier to manage.
  
• Issue 91 - Feature: The diaries of daemons - Learn how to read log files properly, and they will yield valuable data about your system. We open this two-part series with guidance on syslog.
  
• Issue 88 - Tutorial: Security: Detect intruders - Add intrusion detection to your systems with Aide and Tripwire, the sysadmin's equivalent of fingerprint dusting and, er, tripwire.
  
• Issue 87 - Tutorial: Security: Build a Linux firewall - Any networked computer is open to attack. We show you how to reduce your vulnerability by creating a firewall using standard Linux tools.
  
• Issue 86 - Tutorial: Security: Probe your system - This month: vulnerability scanning. We show you how to seriously test the windows and rattle the doorknobs of your network.
  
• Issue 85 - Tutorial: Security: Restrict rogue services - Unnecessay services on your machine could be the enemy within. Find out how to locate them, shut them down and keep crackers out.
  
• Issue 84 - Tutorial: Security: Harden passwords - The first line of defence on a Linux box is the user password system. We show you how it works, and how to make it even more secure.
  
• Issue 80 - Tutorial: Regular expressions - Find your way around regular expressions, and go looking for genomes. Maybe.