The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual.

In the never-ending quest for more performance, we examine three different journaling device options for ext4 with an eye toward improving metadata performance. Who doesn't like speed?

Packet Fence bundles many useful and powerful network protection tools into an attractive, integrated package. Such as network access control, monitoring, intrusion detection, VLAN isolation, DHCP fingerprinting, and captive portal. Eric Geier introduces us to this protective powerhouse.

One of the complains I often get for my QA work (which I have to say is vocally not appreciated even by the other devs), is that I could just go on and fix the issues I find rather than opening bug for them. No it does not take five minutes to fix something, I can assure you!

One tool to help you manage your secure shell connections is the GNOME SSHmenu tool. This helpful application adds a small applet to the GNOME panel that allows you to make secure shell connections with a single click.

On Ubuntu I have a user account "administrator" which is in the admin group. It has a complicated password for security. OpenSSH by default allows all users to attempt to login remotely. Since user accounts often have weak passwords it's unsafe to allow this.

Setup bellow might seem strange unless you will become aware of some ongoing issues with VNC-Console behavior during virt-install running on the most recent OSOL builds 130 and 129.The first ones having xVM 3.4.2.