syslog

It seems I'm always writing about change. But, change is good, right? I'm told it's an indication of progress. The first changes I want to mention don't particularly affect Sys Admin magazine, but they do affect me. Two esteemed colleagues of mine have recently left CMP to pursue other opportunities, as they say. Berney Williams, acquisitions editor for our CMP (previously R&D) Books department has left to test his luck in the educational arena. Marc Briand, Editor in Chief of Sys Admin's sister publication, C/C++ User's Journal, is returning to the engineering life, where he'll be developing avionics test systems. Aside from providing me with sound advice on editorial matters, these men have often cheered me with their dry and quirky humor in the midst of the most sour of situations. Here in our small Kansas office, this is a trait to be highly admired and one I have relished while working with them. I will miss them and all the interesting lunchtime conversations we've shared.

One of the changes in the works for the magazine is that Curtis Preston, author of the lost+found column in Sys Admin (and of Unix Backup and Recovery published by O'Reilly and Associates) will now be contributing his column on a monthly basis. I'm happy that Curtis has found time in his busy book-writing and consulting schedule to write more frequently for the magazine. This month, he continues his discussion of Storage Area Networks. Rumor has it that SANs will be the subject of Curtis's next book.

New content has also been added to the Sys Admin Web site. This month, we're debuting the Solaris Corner, which will feature a monthly column by Contributing Editor Peter Baer Galvin. You may be familiar with Pete's work from his columns, Pete's Super Systems and Pete's Wicked World, written for UnixInsider.com. He is also co-author of Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts (John Wiley & Sons). We've posted some (and intend to post all) of Sys Admin's Solaris-related articles in this section along with links to Solaris administration resources.

Note that this month we're featuring two Web-exclusive articles. Gil Held's article on script-form attacks and Ed Schaefer's article explaining how to communicate with bar code printers appear only on the Web site, so be sure to check those out. Another article of interest in this issue is Evan Sarmiento's description of his OpenRoot project using FreeBSD's Jail feature. Evan, who writes that he's in the 9th grade, surely wins the Youngest Sys Admin Author award. I invite all potential authors to send article proposals to me at: aankerholz@cmp.com, and I hope you enjoy the magazine.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief