You've probably heard about the WiFi Pineapple from Hak5. It's a fascinating device that allows you to do some creepy pen testing. It's the sort of tool that could be used for evil, but it's also incredibly useful for securing networks.

Migration to the cloud, the flexibility of network virtualization and the promise of IoT involve IT transformations that have placed incredible strain on enterprise security.

At one point in time, when you wanted to attach an external block storage device to a server, you mapped it as a Logical Unit (LU) across a Storage Area Network (SAN). In the early days, you would do this over the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. More recently, iSCSI (SCSI over IP) has usurped FC in most data centers.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the new kids on the block. It promises connection of sensors and actuators to the internet, for data to flow both ways, and once on the internet, to become part of new and exciting business systems, reaching up into the realms of big data and artificial intelligence.

The management team of cloud provider VMKing, as developers themselves, found standard virtual servers not to be well tailored to the developer community—too much or too little space, insufficient security and no support for their preferred Linux OS(!).

Note: This article was first published in the October 2016 issue of Linux Journal.

Microsoft Windows is usually a presence in most computing environments, and UNIX administrators likely will be forced to use resources in Windows networks from time to time. Although many are familiar with the Samba server software, the matching smbclient utility often escapes notice.

For every article, I try to write something that is interesting, entertaining, educational and fun. Sometimes I even succeed. Many other times I have some things I'd like to talk about, but there's not enough of it to fill the space. This time, I decided a disjointed hodge podge would be the theme. So let's just have a virtual nerdy talk about stuff, shall we?

Two new NETGEAR, Inc., Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) switches feature a novel "Virtually Anywhere" mounting system that delivers modern high-power PoE+ to devices that others cannot.

TRENDnet recently released an innovative new solution that creates dead-spot-free home Wi-Fi by leveraging a home's existing electrical system.

Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of a recently exposed vulnerability or gain control using a stolen password.

How would you find out how much RAM is free on your Linux desktop? That's a really easy question with a lot of answers—free, any of the implementations of top and Glances all are valid responses.

It used to be that the true sign you were dealing with a Linux geek was the pile of computers lying around that person's house. How else could you experiment with networked servers without a mass of computers and networking equipment? If you work as a sysadmin for a large company, sometimes one of the job perks is that you get first dibs on decommissioned equipment.

One of the most important characteristics of the contemporary data center, notes Applied Expert Systems, Inc. (AES), is that an ever-increasing amount of the traffic is between servers. Realizing the resulting need to facilitate improved server-to-server communications, AES developed CleverView for TCP/IP on Linux v2.5 with KVM Monitoring.

In a previous article, I introduced the Tiny Internet Project, a self-contained Linux project that shows you how to build key pieces of the internet on a single computer using virtualization software, a router and free open-source applications.

In 1937, Ronald Coase gave economics something new: a theory for why companies should exist. Oddly, this hadn't come up before.

One of the great works of geekdom is Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, an essay-length book that came out in 1999. As with Linux, the code was open. Still is.

Most of the time when I start a project, or spin up a virtual server, it's done in my own basement "server farm". Not too many years ago, if I wanted those services to be public, I'd simply port-forward from my static IP into my personal machines. Or, perhaps I'd set up a name-based virtual host as a reverse proxy if I needed to expose a Web app.

As LJ readers well know, Linux drives many of the technologies we use every day, from smart TVs to Web servers. Linux is everywhere—except most homes and classrooms.

Making life easier for the 2.2 million Web sites that deploy the Varnish Cache HTTP engine is the point of Hitch from Varnish Software.