Internet Archive

"There is a speed war on the web. Browsers compete on many fronts; security, standards support, features and speed. Most people are aware of which major browser fails on three of these, but one of them is still open for grabs. Speed." On Windows, Opera was the fastest browser, while on Linux Konqueror performed the best for viewing basic pages (however, as soon as images, scripts or frequent use of back/forward buttons is involded, Opera is faster). On MacOS X, Opera and Safari perform the best. Overall, Gecko-based browsers did fairly poorly.

Apache has overtaken Microsoft as the leading developer of secure web servers. Apache now runs on 44.0% of secure web sites, compared to 43.8% for Microsoft. As the original developers of the SSL protocol, Netscape started out with a lead in the SSL server market. But they were soon overtaken by Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which within a few years held a steady 40-50% of the SSL server market.

The first-mover advantage is well chronicled, but it didn't help Netscape when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer. What drives technology adoption, and do browser upstarts such as Firefox stand a chance? A Q&A with professor Pai-Ling Yin of Harvard Business School. On a related note, a development version of Firefox now passes the Acid2 test.

Analytics firm comScore Networks announced Monday the results of its February measurement of instant messenger usage around the world, with Europe surpassing the United States in IM users for the first time. MSN Messenger was also ranked as the most used client, garnering 61 percent of the worldwide market. According to the survey, 82 million people in Europe use instant messaging software, amounting to 49 percent of the online population. In the United States only 69 million of people use IM, or 37 percent of the online population. Latin America had the highest IM penetration covering 64 percent of Web users.

"In this tutorial I will describe how to set up a highly available NFS server that can be used as storage solution for other high-availability services like, for example, a cluster of web servers that are being loadbalanced. If you have a web server cluster with two or more nodes that serve the same web site(s), than these nodes must access the same pool of data so that every node serves the same data, no matter if the loadbalancer directs the user to node 1 or node n. This can be achieved with an NFS share on an NFS server that all web server nodes (the NFS clients) can access."

"A second test version of the next generation of the open source file and print sharing software Samba has been released to the public, with numerous bugfixes and feature improvements included. The Samba suite is an implementation of Microsoft's SMB/CIFS protocol that allows other operating systems to emulate or interoperate with Windows for the purposes of sharing files or printing. The upgraded Samba software can be downloaded here."

"Ekiga is a SIP and H.323 compatible VoIP, IP Telephony, and Video Conferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with SIP or H.323 hardware and software. It supports all modern VoIP features for both SIP and H.323. Ekiga is the first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP, as well as audio and video. Ekiga was formerly known as GnomeMeeting. To get started: Download Ekiga for your distribution and get a free SIP-Address at ekiga.net."

"This tutorial explains how I was able to setup a web server in order to support Java Server Pages and Servlets using virtually hosted websites. I have spent a lot of time gathering several resources in order to get this to work. Many portions of these resources have been deprecated and required a few workarounds. It is my intention that this tutorial will help anyone that has attempted to install such a system without success."

"Whether you're running a single server with a few accounts or a massive ISP infrastructure, managing more than one domain quickly becomes a boring, time-consuming hassle. But thanks to the magic of open source and the guys at ISPConfig, this no longer has to be the case."

"This tutorial shows how to install and configure Apache2 with PHP5 and PHP4 enabled at the same time. Because it is not possible to run both PHP5 and PHP4 as Apache modules, we must run one of them as CGI, the other one as Apache module. In this document I will use PHP5 as Apache module and PHP4 as CGI, and I will describe the setup for the Linux distributions Debian Sarge and Ubuntu 5.10."

"New releases made by large free software projects usually means that a lot of people want the new release NOW, and the recent Debian and Ubuntu releases are no exceptions. This writeup details how we, Academic Computer Club at Umea University, Sweden, managed to saturate the 2Gbit/s of available internet capacity with a zero-currency budget."

AOL and Yahoo! are to start charging for sending emails. Both companies will still accept free emails but are offering the chance to pay to avoid their spam filters. By paying between a quarter and one cent per message companies will get preferential delivery of their messages. So a "business class" email will go straight to an AOL-subscriber's inbox marked with a stamp saying "AOL Certified Email" while a free email will have to run the gamut of AOL spam filters. Free mails may also have images and web links removed.

"Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above. With 3 years of development under our belt since Tridge first proposed a new Virtual File System layer for Samba3 (a project which eventually lead to our Active Directory efforts), it was felt that we should create something we could 'show off' to our users. This is a Technology Preview (TP), aimed at allowing users, managers and developers to see how we have progressed, and to invite feedback and support."

A faster Wi-Fi standard appears to be about a year away, after a task group unanimously approved a proposal for an update to the 802.11g standard.