Letters
Please congratulate Lydia Kinata for the magazine's new design. I have been waiting a long time for this kind of improvement. Best regards and keep improving.
—Jorge Carminati
I finally had time to read the September issue. The first thing I noticed was the new design. Looks great, keep the change! I've had a subscription for over two years and this, to me, was the best issue (look and content) I've received.
—Matt C.
Robin, I got a copy of the Linux Journal at LinuxWorld and read your article on DreamWorks—what a great visit that must have been!
Given what you saw there and may already know of, I was wondering if you could offer a suggestion. I have a teenage son that is very interested in animation, but the applications to do that are pretty expensive. Can you suggest some Linux-based rendering applications that are more affordable?
—Jack C.
Robin replies: Jack, we had a great time at DreamWorks. But DreamWorks is just the first. All the studios have Linux migration projects underway.
You may want to start with Blender, a popular, freely distributed 3-D modeling package for animation, rendering, interactive 3-D and game creation. Unlike most no-cost animation tools, there are printed books available on Blender. Other tools that may be of interest include K-3D, Ayam, AC3D, Flow, Radiance and BMRT. You can find their web pages by searching at Freshmeat.net
In the September 2001 LJ article “Loadable Kernel Module Exploit”, I was interested in the technique for hijacking the sys_call_table pointer and wrapping it within your own function. I used to do something very similar in DOS in the good ol' days, writing TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident) and other programs that “borrowed” the bios or dos interrupts vectors.
For programs, it was a simple case of restoring the original interrupt vector (pointer), but with TSRs, one had to be careful before restoring the original pointer. The problem being that if several TSR utilities were installed, two might hijack the same interrupt (often the keyboard). A properly written TSR would, before uninstalling, check that the current pointer pointed indeed to itself, if it didn't, then it could not uninstall as by doing so it would clobber another, later installed, TSR.
The cleanup_module(void) routine in the article performs no such check before restoring the sys_call_table[SYS_write] pointer, something which at first sight appears dangerous to me in a multitasking environment, especially one where the kernel can load and unload modules automatically.
—John Jacq
Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.
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Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
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| Making Linux and Android Get Along (It's Not as Hard as It Sounds) | May 16, 2013 |
| Drupal Is a Framework: Why Everyone Needs to Understand This | May 15, 2013 |
| Home, My Backup Data Center | May 13, 2013 |
| Non-Linux FOSS: Seashore | May 10, 2013 |
| Trying to Tame the Tablet | May 08, 2013 |
| Dart: a New Web Programming Experience | May 07, 2013 |
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Enter to Win an Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate Kit for Raspberry Pi

It's Raspberry Pi month at Linux Journal. Each week in May, Adafruit will be giving away a Pi-related prize to a lucky, randomly drawn LJ reader. Winners will be announced weekly.
Fill out the fields below to enter to win this week's prize-- a Prototyping Pi Plate Kit for Raspberry Pi.
Congratulations to our winners so far:
- 5-8-13, Pi Starter Pack: Jack Davis
- 5-15-13, Pi Model B 512MB RAM: Patrick Dunn
- Next winner announced on 5-21-13!
Free Webinar: Linux Backup and Recovery
Most companies incorporate backup procedures for critical data, which can be restored quickly if a loss occurs. However, fewer companies are prepared for catastrophic system failures, in which they lose all data, the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system(s) to “bare metal.” After all, before data can be restored to a system, there must be a system to restore it to.
In this one hour webinar, learn how to enhance your existing backup strategies for better disaster recovery preparedness using Storix System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin), a highly flexible bare-metal recovery solution for UNIX and Linux systems.




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