I spend the majority of my days working with OpenSource Unix derivatives and have to say I enjoy every minute of it! Not a day goes by where I do not learn something new or discover a new way to solve a problem all thanks to Unics (Everything has a beginning).

If you are passionate about GNU / Unix / Linux / OpenSource I apologise for the generalization “Unix” but wanted to focus on the OS and tools that make moving between one Unix variant and another as easy as pie.
Putting aside all the nuances that distinguish the many flavors of Unix, once you gain a core understanding of the Community, Tools and Kernels, you find that moving from one OS flavor to another is as simple as uname and man.

Take for instance my latest branch off the Unix tree – HP-UX. Having minimal exposure to HP-UX I wanted to get up to speed quick as possible, so I grabbed a copy of the HP-UX Study Guide and booked the CSA exam knowing that if I had a goal I would not just move onto the next flavor.

The book was a great resource and I only wished I had read it sooner as it covered many tools and concepts that are commonplace in SVR4 Unix derivatives such as Solaris. I felt like I was stepping back 10 years to when I first started to discover basic utilities such as cat, sed and awk but explained in so much detail that I found myself learning some new tricks!. Even if you are not interested in HP-UX this book is so well written and easy to condense that it is worth a place on your Unix bookshelf!.

As for HP-UX, well I felt right at home and only had to spend time learning the key differences such as Software Management and HP’s Partitioning Continuum technology (Virtualization to you and me) – very cool!.

Would I run HP-UX on my own servers? Probably not, it’s not OpenSource for starters (plus I don’t have the hardware), and to be honest I have been running FreeBSD for over 10 years now and no matter how many Unix/Linux derivatives I encounter not one has been able to surpass FreeBSD’s community, stability and manageability. Plus FreeBSD is Free in every sense!.

Speaking of FreeBSD you might have noticed the image in the upper left corner of this post – yes you guessed it; FreeBSD 7.0 has been released!.
I have been running a release candidate for a while now and have to say that the one thing you will notice is how fast it runs. Don’t take my word for that either, check out the Benchmarks and read through the new features explained in detail over at the BSD Devcenter. With performance like that why would you want to run any other OS?

Download your copy from here and never look back.

AuthStor came to life back in late 2007 after the Password Safe I had been using became corrupt. Not through any failure in Password Safe’s functionality but really to the way it was being used – Multi-User.

I had been seeking a decent Web Based Password Manager (Open Source of course) for ages but had not found anything that I liked. All the semi-decent software out there seemed to be Closed Source with license fees attached and to be honest I would feel more comfortable if I understood the inner workings, especially if this software is storing the key to my empire (mwuhahahaha).

So after a long history of Spreadsheets, Password Safe, Keychain and various other methods of storing passwords I finally decided to scratch the itch and roll my own password manager.

Now AuthStor is not my first attempt at a password manager, in fact I originally started to write an extension to MoinMoin that provided a method of storing passwords directly within the Wiki. This worked great for a while but was not the most secure method of managing passwords, especially as the secret key was embedded within the Python code!. I learned a lot from mmPasswords and hope to improve upon that greatly through the development of AuthStor.

So what is in store for AuthStor? (Get it? ) Well key features will include Multi-User capability, Full auditing, GnuPG encryption, REST like interface and that is just the start. Future plans include interfaces like SMS, VoIP and anything else I can think up.

Here is a sneak peak of the progress made so far:

The application itself is written in Perl and runs on top of the Catalyst Framework. Why Catalyst? Flexibility, Performance, Scalability, the list goes on… Catalyst’s plugin architecture provides multiple views (among many other things) so I can focus on the functionality and not worry about the presentation. Speaking of presentation, AuthStor makes extensive use of the Yahoo! User Interface Library to provide a rich interface with dynamic elements such as DataTable’s, Toolbars and Treeviews and all wrapped in a BSD License!!. Nice work folks!.

Expect a commit in the next few weeks…