syslog

Interest in last year's supplement focusing on console servers was so favorable that we decided to do another one. Accompanying this issue, you'll find the Console Servers Supplement containing a product survey compiled by Steve Michnick and the Sys Admin staff that details features and specifications of various console server offerings. The survey includes information only from those console server vendors who completed and returned the form we sent out.

Other articles in the supplement include "Worldwide Access to Your Serial Consoles" by John Fox and Mark Uris, which provides implementation details of the authors' experience building a centralized console management solution using conserver software, and "Console Design Considerations" by Ron McCarty, which explains some important features and requirements to consider when designing and acquiring a console infrastructure.

I always welcome reader's comments and suggestions, and I recently heard from Casey Milford in response to Hal Pomeranz's article, "File Integrity Assessment via SSH" that appeared in the February issue. Milford recommends a tool called RFC (Remote Filesystem Checker) as an alternative to Hal's solution. According to the Web site, RFC (http://rfc.sourceforge.net) is a set of scripts that aims to help sys admins run a filesystem-checker (like Tripwire, Aide, and so on...) from a master node to several slave nodes using SSH, scp, sudo, and few other common shell commands. Check it out.

Reader Bernardino Lopez wrote that he'd like to see an article on Xen virtualization, and our technical editor, Hal, heartily seconded the suggestion. In fact, Hal says he's interested in virtualization in general -- Xen, UML, VMWare -- as well as what people are doing with it as far as server consolidation and migration, security, etc. Hal would also like to see articles on the following:

• What's up with Sendmail X, Perl 6, and other "emerging" open source projects?
• Newer Web technologies like Ajax and Ruby on Rails. How do these impact the jobs of systems and Web administrators?
• Sun seems to be betting heavily on its new AMD64-based hardware platforms. Are they really sexy or just ho-hum? Is there anything exciting from any of the other commercial Unix vendors?

So, if you'd like to share your knowledge of these topics with your peers, please send an article proposal (a brief outline detailing what you plan to cover) to me or directly to the managing editor, Rikki, at: rendsley@cmp.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief