By Barry L. Kline

Call me a geek, but I always get excited when I acquire a new, more powerful server. To me, there's nothing quite as beautiful as a well-engineered piece of hardware, and IBM's xSeries boxes never fail to bring a smile to my face. As much as I have always loved the bigger machines, I have come to realize that for some of my projects, even a minimal desktop computer is an unnecessary waste of physical space and electricity. Thus, I found myself in a quest to find minimalist computing nirvana. What a short trip! I found all that I needed was in the diminutive and hackable embedded hardware disguised as wireless routers available at your neighborhood office supply store.

During my quest for access to the System i, I uncovered an absolute diamond.

By Joe Pluta

This article is going to start out with a little bad news. Understand that most of the bad news is my fault; I'm going to have to revisit some of the problem areas I encountered when I have more time. But as they say, it's an ill wind that blows no good, and in this case in particular, my hunt for the best alternate access bore unexpectedly wonderful fruit.

By Barry L. Kline

Open-source software (OSS) was the purview of hackers and other "computer radicals" when I was first introduced to its wonders. Back then, forward-thinking geeks smuggled OSS into corporate America, where it was put to good use for replacing Windows file/print servers and for intranet/Internet infrastructure. Installing OSS had to be a clandestine operation, given that the pointy-hair management types were unwilling to believe that a free product could perform as well as, if not better than, the proprietary software it was destined to replace. Thus, there was little or no management buy-in (pun intended) or approval for its utilization.