I am sure magazine readers are already familiar with sponsored articles, which are born when an external company pays the author to write about something the company cares about, under a positive light. Sponsored articles have a bad reputation because, if a for-profit company is calling the shots and paying the author to write good things about a product or service, how can the resulting article be trustworthy? Sponsored articles are a challenge to write because you need to write the truth, but you cannot be negative towards the sponsor.
The article deals with ELevate, a tool from the Alma Linux people which is designed to make migrating away from CentOS painless and easy. It also doubles up as an upgrade tool, compatible with the usual Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The article itself is available for free. ELevate is interesting because Red Hat derived distributions have traditionally been a pain to upgrade. Besides, CentOS is a sinking ship and many System Administrators need a plan out. I think using ELevate to migrate away from CentOS to Alma Linux is a reasonable proposition.
The biggest roadblock in writing this article was that ELevate was incapable of upgrading or migrating systems which used unofficial repositories, such as EPEL. This lack of core functionality is the sort of thing that must be mentioned in an honest article, but is hard to put in a sponsored piece because it makes the sponsor look bad, so I opted to include some workaround about the issue. Thankfully, the sponsor noticed this and decided to fix the issues on their end to EPEL was supported by ELevate and no negative points had to be raised by Linux Magazine. I think this speaks well about the professionalism of the people behind ELevate.
]]>iRedMail are very attractive for computer enthusiasts and small business who want to roll their own email solution, without having to contract an external entity to host their email infrastructure. iRedMail is interesting because its free-tier product is sufficient for most small deployments - such as those in which a single firm is using the server. It may run on a number of platforms, including OpenBSD, FreeBSD and most enterprise-oriented Linux distributions.
]]>Both ports are availble in my Gopher site and, hopefully, will eventually be available on the official OpenBSD ports system.
]]>MikroTik routers are attractive for small network deployments and home enthusiasts because they are extremely flexible for their price. Specifically, the firmware (which is based on Linux) is nearly enterprise-grade, which means you can operate a router with VPN capabilities, advanced firewalling, advanced routing and scriptable actions for an affordable price.
]]>It turns out the hardware hosting the games started showing issues due to old age, so I migrated most of my services to a new machine. The game server, and the CVS repository, were backed up but not put back online right away because I lacked the time.
Good news is that summer holidays have allowed me to put my TODO list in order. I have rebuilt the dgamelaunch instance and loaded upgraded versions of Brogue and Rapid Brogue, which will be offered as releases 1.12 and 1-4-0, respectively. I am still testing the new deployment, but it should be available to players in a matter of weeks.
If you are an existing user, your games and recordings are preserved.
Thanks for playing classic games with me!
]]>This article is quite interesting because, in addition to offering proper explanation to features documented in System Rescue’s official site, it also explains how this Linux distribution can be used as a poor man’s OS provisioning system. The idea is that you may boot your custom image on a computer, and the computer will morph into the sort of server you need it to be automatically.
Do you need a file server? Set your System Rescue image to download an FTP server and configure it if it detects it is being assigned a certain IP Do you need a chat server? You may use the same image, and set it to download a chat server if it detects it has been assigned a different IP. Possibilities are endless.
You may find the article in Linux Magazine #274.
]]>If you use any of my build scripts, you need not fear, for these are being adopted by other maintainers as I write these lines.
The reason why I am ceasing my involvement with the SlackBuilds team is that I have ceased being a Slackware user. I still think Slackware is a worthy distribution and with both the main developers and the SlackBuilds maintainers my best wishes.
]]>My article should be of interest to any Slackware fan that manages a medium to large fleet of Slackware computers. Not only do I explain how to build a repository of customized packages, but I also explain how to integrate your clients machines with it in such a way that custom packages won’t create conflicts with official ones. I also offer an overview of the advantages of the Slackware model of software distribution, so the article ought to be interesting for users of other distributions up to a certain point.
This publication is meant to be a sweet farewell to the Slackware world. I have been using Slackware since the days of version 13.1, and while I love its software distribution model and its overall design philosophy, I have found myself drawn closer and closer each year to the BSD world, to the point I have replaced most of my personal Linux systems for OpenBSD ones. I only have one Linux machine left, which happens to be running Devuan. Of course, I still administrate many Linux machines at work, but none of them happens to have Slackware on it.
You may find the article in Linux Magazine #272.
]]>Easy!Appointments is a web application designed to let your customers book your services online. Do you run a clinic and want your patients to schedule an appointment with their Doctor over the web? Easy!Appointments has you covered! This web application lets customers book an appointment with their Doctor at any hour their need (assuming the hour has not been taken by another patient and that the Doctor is available). Every party involved may get email notifications for their appointments. It is quite neat for a free application.
Of course, it can be used for other scenarios. In fact, I first came in contact with Easy!Appointments when a customer, who runs a Beauty Saloon, asked me for a solution for letting customers book appointments in advance.
You may find the article in Linux Magazine #269.
]]>I had a powerful solar array installed at home last September (you may check the article for the pictures!), so I naturally wanted to be able to predict the power yield I could expect day by day, so I could schedule my power consumption in advance. In other words: I wanted to be able to know if a given day is a good day to turn on the washing machine and the garden watering pumps, or if it would be wiser to wait for a day with a more favorable solar irradiation forecast.
The article includes a very handy Perl program that is capable of giving you a forecast which reaches up to 3 days in the future.
You may find the article in Linux Magazine #268.
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