There are many ways to manage large numbers of computers. The premise of clusterssh is to define clusters of computers that can be connected to through ssh (telnet and rsh are also supported) so that commands can be passed to all sessions at once. What separates clusterssh from other solutions is that it displays all windows at once and allows the user to enter commands into any one window as well as all windows quite easily. These features make it better than using terminal programs with tabs that the user must toggle input between 1 and all sessions.

Ubuntu used to a have a “commercial” repository for packages that were commercial software, such as the vmware-server package. Apparently the new plan is to have commercial vendors submit packages for their products to a new “partner” repository that when added to an Ubuntu system will enable easy downloading of those software packages. I wanted to see what was currently being offered in the repository.

Encrypting the swap space on any computer makes a lot of sense for anyone interested in security. The swap area always has a chance of containing sensitive user information that could easily be recovered from the disk. Furthermore, since swap storage does not need to be preserved across reboots it is trivial to use a random key, thus greatly decreasing the odds that any information can be recovered. The only downside that I’ve found on Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux operating systems is that there are too many ways to do encryption in general and swap in particular. But here is a relatively simple way to setup an encrypted swap file.

I noticed that ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) the sound has been broken in Pidgin. Sound notifications are quite useful when away form the computer but within earshot or when focused on another task that prevents one from noticing visual notifications. While I’m not sure this is an ideal fix it suited my purposes since I didn’t really want to delve into the problem at this time.

I’ve long wanted a good open source groupware/erp (enterprise resource planning)/crm (customer relationship management) product. Unfortunately I have yet to succeed in finding anything that meets the needs of my business. I decided to round up candidates for evaluation, starting with software that is already packaged in Ubuntu and has active development. Here’s what I found.