Any web developer, designer, or webmaster can benefit from having a local web server. Even if that developer has no interest in securing and maintaining the server his or her websites live on, a local server can act as a convenient mirror for testing updates, trying new designs, and other general sand-boxing activities.

Web developers whose hosts utilize the popular LAMP platform (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) are frequently hit with a dilemma. Since understanding Linux is not a prerequisite for website administrators, many of them lack the knowledge necessary for setting up a LAMP server from scratch (or at least they may think so). But thanks to the improved package management on Linux distributions like Debian, installing a functional web server is not nearly the chore it was just a couple years ago.

There are a lot of people out there that say "You don't need an antivirus program for Linux." I believe that you do. Even though there are very few viruses in the wild that affect Linux there is still the looming possibility for more and more viruses to be created. This tutorial will walk you through the main steps of installing and configuring AntiVir on Ubuntu Linux. The setup will also enable AvGuard, the real-time scanning engine for AntiVir.

Password auditing and recovery is often described with a very unfortunate catchall: cracking. The problem with calling it that is that it does not come close to correctly encapsulating an absolutely necessary and invaluable practice for network administrators.

Like most practices related to security, this coin is a double-sided one. This reality is demonstrated in the kinds of tools used by security professionals; you'll often see tools developed for malicious hacking used in legitimate security audits just as you'll often see legitimate security tools used for dubious purposes.

Having trouble getting .WMV, .WMA, and .ASF files - the Windows-based media formats - to open on your Linux box? Being forced to dual-boot or switch workstations just to listen to or watch audio and video clips is usually more effort than it's worth. But fortunately, if you are using Xine and one of its frontends like Totem, you can add support for these file formats within Linux.

Looking for a more convenient way to grab an image of the latest Debian installation CD? Jigdo not only makes downloading the image faster, but allows you to customize the image and even update older images without downloading many of the same packages all over again.

Wildcard subdomains are useful for a variety of reasons. If you want to host blogs or forums for multiple users, they are handy because they can get username.domain.tld working no matter what username is without any administrative work. It can also be used by content management platforms like Drupal to handle multiple subdomains with a single installation. If nothing else, it can be used to make sure links that start with misspellings like ww and wwww go where they were intended to.

So how does one set this up?

Have you ever needed to have a copy of a file in more than one location? Perhaps you need copies of the files on your desktop machine on your laptop and persistent remote access isn't an acceptable solution? Maybe you're an administrator and would like to consolidate log files from multiple hosts for your review. rsync is a good solution for both of the above scenarios as well as just about any situation where you would like to keep updated copies of files in multiple locations.