Practical Technology

Jeff Dean, a Google Fellow who has been with the company since 1999, gave a speech at the Web Search and Data Mining meeting in 2009 where he unveiled how Google puts together its data centers (PDF). Because the meeting was in Barcelona, Spain, his speech didn’t receive the attention it deserved in the United [...]

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I’m cheap. Given a choice between buying an elaborate, full-featured server requiring expensive technicians and administrators, versus turning an out-of-date PC into a single-purpose Linux server, I’m going to go with the Linux server every time. It’s not that Linux isn’t expensive. It sometimes is. But if a department or a branch office just needs [...]

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“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” is a line from Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West. It could also apply to Windows and Linux. If you don’t know what you’re doing, getting the two to meet on the network can seem like it’s almost impossible. Fortunately, [...]

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One important piece of a multilevel security defense for companies of almost any size is network access control (NAC), which lets you enforce policies for end-user machines. The basic idea behind NAC — which can include hardware, software or a combination — is deceptively simple. Before any end user’s computer — an endpoint — is [...]

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Even a Linux fan might not have heard of CentOS Linux, but if you’re a Web or other edge-server administrator I can guarantee you know about CentOS. That’s because, according to Web Technology Surveys, in July 2010, “For the first time, CentOS is now leading the Linux distribution statistics on web servers with almost 30% [...]

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