As I wrote in a previous post, "Attributions and Plagiarism", someone had ripped of my "HOWTO - Limiting Access to TCP-wrapped Services with hosts.allow" article and posted it on their site. I was trying to find a way to contact the blog owner and got a link to a DMCA takedown form for Blogger.

Even though I do not like how the DMCA came into being, nor do I think it is the way to truly handle copyright infringement and to stop piracy, it was the only method of trying to complain about the blog post. So I submitted a DMCA takedown request to Blogger several weeks ago and, today, received an e-mail stating that Blogger had removed the infringing post.

I just wanted to say that I'm glad that Blogger takes copyright infringement seriously and that I appreciate the action that they took.

As you may know, working with tight budgets can sometimes lead to very interesting solutions. The company that I work for has over 30 retail locations and several branch offices that connect back to the corporate network using point-to-point T1 or broadband connections. The connection speed is a major concern and with the demand of data and network services increases, a need for a branch office server became apparent.

One of the options that had been considered was to use a local Windows XP workstation to be a file/print server, but the restriction of a maximum of 10 concurrent connections was a significant issue. And since the company is primarily a Microsoft shop, the option of deploying Windows Server 2008 at each location would be nice... except it meant spending a lot of money on licenses alone.

The other option that I was thinking about was to load up a system with Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and use Samba and CUPS for file and print services. The next piece was trying to choose what type of hardware to deploy as the branch office server. At first, I was looking at a small desktop model from Dell, but power consumption and physical size was a big concern. So I remembered a model that Dell was marketing as a flexible, smart desktop that would fit between a thin client and a normal desktop. The model in question is a Dell OptiPlex 160, which uses an Intel Atom processor (single or dual-core) and can take either a standard hard drive or a flash module. So I decided to get a demo unit from Dell and started the process of loading Ubuntu Server on it and documented the build process. So far, the demo unit has been working perfectly, barely gets warm under heavy load and sips power.

In the meantime, I have cleaned up the document and re-wrote it for public consumption and it is available at: http://static.closedsrc.org/articles/ubuntu-lts-optiplex160.html

Along with the new article, I decided to relocate the existing articles that I wrote for Dæmon News to a new location, http://static.closedsrc.org/articles/.

In the days of blatent copyright infringement and plagiarism, it does not surprise me that people decide to copy content from articles and not include any form of attribution or link back to the original article. Well, I just ran across such a case when going through the Google Webmaster Tools results for my site.

Someone decided to copy and paste the text of my "HOWTO - Limiting Access to TCP-wrapped Services With hosts.allow" article that I wrote for the June 2002 release of Daemon News e-zine. The person decided to not include the original author, much less the copyright text.

It may seem like a victimless crime, but damn... where is the decency in citing your sources?

Here is the link to the plagiarized copy of my article: http://boilinglinux.blogspot.com/2008/05/setting-up-hostsallow.html

Unfortunately, the plagiarizer does not have any direct means of contact, only way is through posting comments.

Starting in mid-2000, I became involved in the Dæmon News community by posting BSD-related news items, which progressed to writing articles on my experiences with BSD operating systems and writing book reviews. By the autumn of 2003, I got a bad case of writer's block and stopped writing articles and doing book reviews.

Below are the articles that I wrote for Dæmon News, which have since been cleaned up and made XHTML 1.0 compliant. Due to several changes made to Dæmon News over the past several years, the published articles are no longer available on their website.

Since then, I have found other ways to contribute to the BSD community by maintaining several FreeBSD ports and submitting bug reports here and there.

• Setting up FreeBSD on an iPaq (August 2000)
• Review: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide (March 2001)
• Remote Administration with Webmin (May 2001)
• Book Review: FreeBSD: An Open Source Operating System for your Personal Computer, First Edition (September 2001)
• HOWTO - Backing up a Windows Machine from FreeBSD (October 2001)
• Book Review: FreeBSD Unleashed (January 2002)
• Book Review: The DOSSIER Series (March 2002)
• HOWTO - Limiting Access to TCP-Wrapped Services With hosts.allow (June 2002)
• Communicating With Users using ntalkd and ytalk (June 2002)
• HOWTO - Setting Up ISC-DHCP 3.x Under FreeBSD (July 2002)
• Book Review: Programming PHP (July 2002)
• Book Review: Absolute BSD (October 2002)
• Backing Up FreeBSD using tar (December 2002 – Dæmon News Print Magazine)
• Book Review: Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition (January 2003)
• Book Review: Essential System Administration Pocket Reference (January 2003)
• Replacing FreeBSD Base System's BIND with BIND 9 (March 2003)
• Book Review: FreeBSD: The Complete Reference (June 2003)
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2003 Coverage (August 2003)