If your organization manages Linux, AIX, HP-UX or Solaris servers in-house, chances are your system administrators at least occasionally need low-level access to those devices. Typically, administrators use some kind of serial console—for example, traditional serial port, Serial-over-LAN or Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI).

Like many LJ readers these days, I've been leading a bit of a techno-nomadic lifestyle as of the past few years—jumping from network to network, access point to access point, as I bounce around the real world while maintaining my connection to the Internet and other networks I use on a daily basis.

If you're paying really close attention, you'll remember that in my last article, I was exploring the rudiments of a script that would accept a list of words as input and create a word search grid, suitable for printing.

Containers can be considered the third wave in service provision after physical boxes (the first wave) and virtual machines (the second wave). Instead of working with complete servers (hardware or virtual), you have virtual operating systems, which are far more lightweight.

I have covered several different software packages for doing scientific computation in Linux Journal, but I haven't spent as much time describing available libraries and the kind of work that can be done with those libraries.

I've looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren't the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro.

Let's start with some homework. Go to Google (or Bing) and search for "privacy is dead, get over it". I first heard this from Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, but it's attributed to a number of tech folk, and there's an element of truth to it. Put something on-line and it's in the wild, however much you'd prefer to keep it under control.

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.