Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

Takeaway: Unix’s rock-solid reliability means that its relevant now more than ever – and Linux puts Unix’s power within reach. Unix has been around for a very long time. We remember the rampant ...

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both ...

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system. "It's terrible," De Raadt says.

Commercial enterprise UNIX today reminds me of vintage clothes and furniture. Just when you think certain things have become passé in favor of newer more modern things, they are somehow revived and ...

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that's a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is ...

Many people have read that post by Linus Torvalds in the comp.os.minix newsgroup on Usenet, or at least heard about it. Many more are aware of how that (free) operating system ended up taking over ...

When considering the issue of best practice as it applies to the administration of Unix servers, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself. They begin with “What is best practice?