syslog

I was impressed with the number of responses to the Call for Papers for this issue. Not surprisingly, the topic of Perl and Shell is of keen interest to Sys Admin readers. As those of you who submitted articles already know, I received too many articles to fit into this issue. Some of the articles therefore are featured on the Web site for June, and others will be published in later issues. One particular Web-only feature article to note is PICA by Miguel Armas and Esteban Manchado. This article describes the authors' Perl Installation and Configuration Agent project, which will soon be added to freshmeat.net. PICA is used to distribute configuration files and alarm scripts to various servers and uses SSH to establish secure connections to the remote servers. Other interesting articles in this issue include "Fuzzy Text Searches with agrep and afind" by Alexander Golomshtock, "The Art of Spidering" by Reinhard Voglmaier, and "Tools for Sorting Through Snort" by Kristy Westphal. Thank you all for contributing!

The editorial survey returns are trickling in. If you haven't completed yours yet, it's not too late to submit it, and I do thank those of you who've responded. According to these very preliminary responses, 67% of you frequently (more than once a month) write shell scripts, and about 50% frequently write Perl programs.

In addition to the regular June magazine with all its fine content, you probably also noticed the AIX supplement that mailed with this issue. Thanks also to those who contributed articles for this supplement. As I mentioned previously, we intend to continue to offer OS-specific content in the form of these bonus issues. I understand that AIX administration articles do not appeal to every reader, just as Solaris- or Linux-related articles do not. We've always tried to provide diverse articles in every issue, in the hope that at least one will intrigue you, and we'll continue to provide a wide variety of technical information. By the way, according to this year's preliminary returns, Solaris is still the most commonly administered operating system, followed by Linux. In third place so far is BSD. In past years, third place has alternated between AIX and HP-UX. I'll let you know more when all results have been tallied.

As always, don't hesitate to contact me if you have comments about the magazine. I hope you enjoy this issue!

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief