As with the Linux kernel, compiling the FreeBSD kernel is something of an essential skill. The newly compiled kernel will give you access to your new hardware. It will be your custom configuration. And finally, it will elevate you a couple of points up the Guru scale. Read on for more on how you can achieve all of the above.

A common problem faced is allowing non root users to dial and establish a connection to the Internet.

An easy and safe solution with sudo, assuming you use wvdial, is to put the following line in /etc/sudoers. (syntax explained later)

ALL ALL=/usr/bin/wvdial

This allows any user to run the program wvdial with root privileges when the user runs sudo as

sudo wvdial

Note: sudo issues a password prompt where the password to be entered is that of the user running sudo.

How does sudo make handing out root privileges more secure?

You have made up your mind to install Linux. The question then is where can you get Linux. And once you figure that out, you realize that there's no such thing as a single `Linux' - there are dozens of varieties (distributions) of Linux. That leads to another question -- How does one choose from the many `Linux_distro_' (common jargon for distribution) available in the market?

Last week, we had a look at the concept of TCP Wrappers from the theoretical perspective. As we have already mentioned, TCP Wrappers isn't meant to fulfill the security measures you would want for an enterprise network. But it surely does fall into the greater scheme of rule sets that would make up a comprehensive strategy to protect an enterprise network. The author of TCP Wrappers mentions this stating, that TCP Wrappers could be made use of along with a firewall box on your corporate gateway with minimum services running.

Will opens the door to success.

- Louis Pasteur

What according to you would be the best way to fortify your machine from the anarchy of the Internet? Let's look at a few options.

We'll be using Vgetty, part of the mgetty package. The official site is http://alpha.greenie.net/vgetty. You probably not have to visit the site because just about every distribution carries it. We grabbed the mgetty package off our SuSE CD. The version used is 1.1.12. Alternatively, you can download the release along with the mgetty source package from http://aplha.greenie.net/mgetty. The latest version on site that we saw on the site was 1.1.25. Grab the source if you like.

So we decided to look around and what better place than Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net). A little sniffing around Freshmeat and we came up with some good tools to make simple and handsome presentations. We downloaded the following software:

Prestimel

PPresenter

Magic Point

Now that you have installed FreeBSD, would you like to use your FreeBSD box as a client on a network running NIS? Well, here is an article just for you.

Starters for Linux - Part 3

Hi friends! Welcome to the third and final segment of our journey through Linux CLI. We’ll wrap up this series by looking at a number of commands that deal with Basic System Administration and Networking.

Basic System Administration Commands

printtool

(as root in X-terminal) Configuration tool for your printer(s).

To access the settings directly go to the file /etc/printcap.

setup

The Linux kernel is the heart of the operating system. It is important that it is kept up to date and working properly for your system to work at its optimum potential. The stable 2.4.0 kernel is a conglomeration of patches and additions that have been made throughout the experimental 2.3.x series of the kernel.