At some point in the past, Unix — the progenitor of Linux — treated virtually everything as a file, and all files were created more or less equal. Programs didn’t care if a file was local, on the ...

Managing large numbers of Linux and UNIX systems takes a lot of organization, automation and careful use of technology. A significant chunk of one's time as a system administrator is spent building ...

In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic ...

In Part I of this article, I briefly mentioned the generic USB driver in the context of getting a USB device to communicate through it easily, with no custom kernel programming. Unfortunately, I ...

Alarmingly, these ports are often connected to modems or serial port servers for remote access to systems too: making for as many as 114,000 serial port servers out there that are accessible from the ...