syslog

As you may already know, Sys Admin magazine recently acquired The Perl Journal from its owner, Jon Orwant, who is President of Readable Publications and CTO of O'Reilly & Associates. Jon launched The Perl Journal in 1996, and most recently, TPJ was part of EarthWeb Inc. Earlier this year, however, EarthWeb divested itself of all editorial products, and control of TPJ reverted to Jon.

I'm excited about the addition of TPJ. I think it will provide an excellent complement to Sys Admin's editorial coverage. TPJ will be published quarterly as a supplement to Sys Admin. We're working on the next TPJ now, and it will be delivered in the polybag along with an upcoming issue. All current and future subscriptions to both TPJ and Sys Admin will include both magazines.

I'm pleased to say that Jon Orwant will continue to collaborate on TPJ as a Senior Contributing Editor. Since Jon is not only the founder of The Perl Journal but also author or co-author of three Perl books, including Programming Perl, otherwise known as the "Camel book" (O'Reilly & Associates), he's an invaluable resource to the Sys Admin team. Jon and I are currently working through the backlog of proposals and manuscripts that he developed before the change of ownership. If you care to submit a new article proposal, please email it to me.

In the meantime, this issue of Sys Admin features several articles related to backups and storage. Adam Anderson describes a cost-effective alternative to SANs, Primitivo Cervantes explains the use of the Disaster Recovery Module of Tivoli Storage Manager, and Michael Watson provides scripts for a backup solution implementing Sun's E250 server. The Web-only articles this month include an explanation of SSA and a Perl package for monitoring traffic. Note also that the Sys Admin Web site has recently been redesigned. We're still working out some bugs and making additions, so if you see any problems with the new site, please let us know. You can write to our Webmaster, Randy Reames at: rreames@cmp.com with specific Web glitches or write to me as always at: aankerholz@cmp.com.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief