Are your systems behaving? Is your newest workstation too busy for its memory? Stay ahead of problems on your network with the free and versatile monitoring tool known as Nagios.

Nagios monitors your network and provides early warning for problems with hosts and services.

GroundWork is a user-friendly front-end for the Nagios monitoring tool.

Home and business users are starting to wonder how Windows Vista will work with Linux. In this month’s cover story, we’ll show you Vista from the eye of Linux.

Vista is no better than its predecessors at accessing Linux partitions. If you need to access a Linux filesystem from Vista, you will need a third-party tool.

If you want to share files your own way, Vista might need some help.

Microsoft’s new PowerShell relies on .NET framework libraries and thus has access to a treasure trove of functions and objects. How does PowerShell measure up to traditional shells like Bash?

If you think your systems are too obscure for an attacker to worry about, think again. Today’s intruders are happy for any victim.

Backdoors give attackers unrestricted access to a zombie system. If you plan to stop the bad guys from settling in, you’ll be interested in this analysis of the tools they might use for building a private entrance.

Track down and expose intruders with the versatile admin tool lsof.

Why wait for cron? iWatch monitors critical files and directories in realtime. This handy Perl script then notifies the user or runs a configurable command when change occurs.

The BackTrack live distribution lets you act like an intruder to test your network’s security.

Spammers charge real money for their dubious services, and hundreds of advertisers are willing to pay. We’ll show you some innovative techniques for controlling and containing spam, including strategies for slowing down spam bots, keeping spammers from getting your address, and separating spam from legitimate email.

Sometimes the best way to keep spam out of your mailbox is to keep the spammers from getting your address.

A tarpit slows down spam by reducing the effectiveness of the spammer’s weapons.

Spam filters can help smooth the waves in your inbox, as long as they are reliable and don’t have too many side effects. We’ll show you what we found when we tested five antispam appliances and two service providers.

We’ll show you a custom solution for moving spam to a separate folder and adding new spam signatures to SpamAssassin.

What happens when you feed an ODT document created with OpenOffice to a word processor like AbiWord, KWord, or Writely? Read on to find out.

With a little help from the ODF plugin, Microsoft Office can open up documents saved in the free Open Document format. A short test reveals just how well it works.

If OpenOffice is too fat and feature-rich for your taste, try one of the office alternatives. We found much to like and much to wish for when we put six office suites to the test.

A mobile office without a laptop? No problem – a new generation of web applications converts your browser into a word processor or spreadsheet.

OpenDocument format offers a new approach to data storage and document exchange for office applications. But what does ODF mean for the user? What’s inside an ODF file? How portable is ODF? We examine these questions in this month’s cover story.