This week we take a look at the all-time favorite articles ever featured on LinuxJournal.com. We'll feature the top 25 in this series, presenting you with five each day this week. These 25 articles alone represent tens of millions of page views on LinuxJournal.com. Here we go...

Top Articles 21 - 25

25. Introduction to Named Pipes by Andy Vaught
A very useful Linux feature is named pipes which enable different processes to communicate.

One of the fundamental features that makes Linux and other Unices useful is the “pipe”. Pipes allow separate processes to communicate without having been designed explicitly to work together. This allows tools quite narrow in their function to be combined in complex ways. Read more.

24. VLANs on Linux by Paul Frieden
An introduction to VLANs and VLAN trunking, how Linux interacts with VLANs and how you might use them in networks.

To begin, we must have a more formal definition of what a LAN is. LAN stands for local area network. Hubs and switches usually are thought of as participating in a single LAN. Normally, if you connect two computers to the same hub or switch, they are on the same LAN. Likewise, if you connect two switches together, they are both on the same LAN. Read more.

23. Linux Network Programming by Ivan Griffin
This is the first of a series of articles about how to devlop networked applications using the various interfaces
available on Linux.

Like most other Unix-based operating systems, Linux supports TCP/IP as its native network transport. In this series, we will assume you are fairly familiar with C programming on Linux and with Linux topics such as signals, forking, etc. Read more.

22. DVD Authoring by Ian Pointer
Trick out home videos with a fun, featureful menu system that viewers can navigate from a regular DVD player.

Traditionally, DVD authoring has been an expensive affair. Full-featured professional applications can cost thousands of dollars, while cheaper products, such as Apple's iDVD, have arbitrary restrictions that significantly reduce their usefulness. A new open-source effort, dvdauthor, is bringing the possibility of low-cost, professional-grade DVD authoring to Linux. Although it doesn't yet support all the features of the DVD specification, development is proceeding at a fast pace, and new features are being added with each release. Together with a more established open-source toolkit, mjpegtools, this article explains how to construct a relatively complex DVD application, a photo album, with dvdauthor. We also illustrate the various features that dvdauthor currently supports and how to use open-source tools to construct a DVD-R that can play on almost every DVD player. Read more.

21. Port Knocking by Martin Krzywinski
An introduction to how trusted users can manipulate firewall rules to transmit information across closed ports.

Firewall administrators are challenged to balance flexibility and security when designing a comprehensive rule set. A firewall should provide protection against malfeasants, while allowing trusted users to connect. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to filter out the bad guys, because filtering on the basis of IP addresses and ports does not distinguish connecting users. Bad guys can and do come from trusted IP addresses. Open ports remain a necessary vulnerability: they allow connections to applications but also may turn into open doors for attack. This article presents a new security system, termed port knocking, in which trusted users manipulate firewall rules by transmitting information across closed ports. Read more.

16 - 20: Top 25 LinuxJournal.com Articles of All Time, Part 2

11 - 15: Top 25 LinuxJournal.com Articles of All Time, Part 3

6 - 10: Top 25 LinuxJournal.com Articles of All Time, Part 4 releases Apr. 17

1 - 5: Top 25 LinuxJournal.com Articles of All Time, Part 5 releases Apr. 18