Jon Walker

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anton Chuvakin, Director of Product Management at LogLogic. We had an interesting discussion about log management and the open source project he's involved in that collects Windows event logs. Here's an overview of our chat. Drowning... (more)

Customers have high expectations that their software solutions have been stress-tested thoroughly in advance for every conceivable combination of events that might occur in production and that vendors who put out buggy products are exposed quickly. Unfortunately, inadequate infr... (more)

For the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), using technology to further the education of its 21,000 graduate and undergraduate students is nothing new. In 1983, UNCC became the first U.S. university to electronically categorize its library, and for the past 10 year... (more)

Over the last few years, we've seen and heard some pretty visceral reactions from the Linux community to Microsoft-funded reports about Linux. Rightfully so - some of the "facts" in Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign have been outright false and most have been misleading at the... (more)

As Linux continues to make significant inroads into the data center, I think it's important to look under the hood of a leading Linux server product and compare it to its rival, Microsoft. Whether I'm looking to buy a car, a stereo, or even a refrigerator, I've always loved compa... (more)

Windows Is Not Linux or Linux Is Not Windows? Here is a long justification I ran across that argues that the real problem with Linux adoption is that it is different from Windows. In other words people coming from Windows to Linux just have the wrong expectations. I don't quite b... (more)

There's been some interesting debate in the Open Source community regarding Open Source applications that run both on Linux and Windows. One camp feels most users select an operating system based on its available applications. If the applications people want are on Windows, they ... (more)

Most organizations provide their users with the ability to print, store, and access files on network servers. Accessing and saving files to network drives and printing to shared network printers is probably something administrators don't spend much time thinking about unless it's... (more)

In Part 1 (Why Are You Waiting?, September 2004 issue), I discussed the business and technical considerations in migrating Microsoft IIS Web servers to Apache on Linux as well as the overwhelming cost, security, and stability benefits of making the move. Based on the tremendous f... (more)

As with all big conferences, LinuxWorld Boston earlier this year had a few broad themes that you couldn't help be exposed to just by walking the floor. One that caught me by surprise was the excitement around thin client Linux. At first I attributed it to a combination of the big... (more)

Open source databases running on Linux like MySQL, Ingres r3, PostgreSQL, and Firebird have aroused a lot of interest. Database developers and corporate users are heralding the anticipated the release of MySQL 5.0, which includes enterprise-level features such as stored procedur... (more)

International Data Corporation (IDC) released a study in December 2004 noting that the worldwide Linux market for PCs, servers, and software will hit $35 billion by 2008. There's a general industry consensus that we're at the brink of a major Windows-to-Linux migration. However, ... (more)

Why haven't you already moved your Microsoft Windows IIS server infrastructure to Apache on Linux? Does the idea that something is inexpensive (free) automatically bring to mind the old adage, "You get what you pay for?" Do you fear that your IT staff will not be able to support ... (more)