Is it weird to say that DNS is my favorite protocol? Because DNS is my favorite protocol. There's something about the simplicity of UDP packets combined with the power of a service that the entire Internet relies on that grabs my interest. Through the years, I've been impressed with just how few resources you need to run a modest DNS infrastructure for an internal network.

If you're anything like me (and don't you want to be?), you probably have more than one Linux or UNIX machine that you use on a regular basis. Perhaps you've got a laptop and a desktop. Or, maybe you've got a few servers on which you have shell accounts.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as "SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis.

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.

In my last article I wrote about accessing a PostgreSQL database in C/C++. In this article, I'm going to discuss performing the same functions in C against an SQLite database. Unlike Postgresql and the supporting libraries, SQLite creates completely self-contained databases that aren't dependant upon a client-server architecture.

I've been using this grep invocation for years to trim comments out of config files. Comments are great but can get in your way if you just want to see the currently running configuration. I've found files hundreds of lines long which had fewer than ten active configuration lines, it's really hard to get an overview of what's going on when you have to wade through hundreds of lines of comments.

Ghostscript gives you the power to combine files, convert files, and much more, all from the command line.

At the end of my profile of AlgoScore I stated that my one wished-for addition to that program would be support for OpenSound Control (OSC). Well, my wish has been granted, the latest AlgoScore supports OSC, and I'm a happy guy. This article introduces OSC and explains why it makes me a more pleasant fellow.

The internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can't be monetized and thus don't have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. I'm talking about services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries—software without which the net and the browser you're using couldn't function.

Every few years a new term is coined within the computer industry—big data, machine learning, agile development, Internet of Things, just to name a few. You'd be forgiven for not knowing them all. Some of these are new ideas. Some are refinements on existing ideas. Others still are simply notions we've all had for a long time, but now we have a new word to describe said notions. Which brings me to a topic we cover in depth in this issue of Linux Journal: DevOps.