nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Red Hat Open Sourced Identity, Policy, Auditing Management Security Framework Tool

Posted: 20 Mar 2008 09:44 AM CDT

Red Hat has open-sourced its identity-management and security system to promote its assertion that open-source software provides the most secure infrastructure. From the press release:

Red Hat Certificate System was acquired from AOL three years ago as part of the Netscape technology acquisition. In keeping with our commitment to open source software, today Red Hat has released all of the source code to Red Hat Certificate System. Much of the technology in Red Hat Certificate System was already open source, including the Apache web server, Red Hat Directory Server and the FIPS140-2 level 2 validated NSS cryptographic libraries, but todayâ€™s move further demonstrates Red Hatâ€™s belief that the open source development model creates more secure software.

I think the freeIPA project is really good addition. It provides central management of identity, policy, and auditing for Unix and Linux using open-source and open-standards technologies.

(Fig. 01: freeIPA running under Fedora Linux [Image Credit freeIPA project])

How To Run Common GNU Utilities Under MS-Windows

Posted: 20 Mar 2008 09:24 AM CDT

Cygwin software offers Linux-like environment for Windows making it possible to port software running on POSIX systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to Windows. However, sometime you just wanna run bc or wget under Windows without going through Cygwin. Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools. A must download for die hard gnu folks working on windows systems