Installing Snow Leopard: Not an obvious decision

Snow Leopard, Apple's newest OS, is an interesting decision for educators. The school year is about ready to start and it's always easiest to do major upgrades during the vacation periods. Snow Leopard has a number of significant advantages that make it compelling to schools. The advantage I like the most is that the new OS is actually smaller than the current OS. If your drives are packed to the gills, then this move will be potentially quite interesting.

The problem is that not every application your school may be running will operate on Leopard -- or will at least take a re-install. If you are using older versions of software because you cannot afford the upgrade, you may locked out permanently. See Computer World's story on Adobe's statements about their software on Leopard. While Adobe's position is defensible on an economic basis, it's none too comforting to people stuck with old software.

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Alternative To for knowing your options

One of the great difficulties with working on the cheap is that the software your school uses or would like to use is beyond your budget. While there are many places to find which Mac or Linux based program can replace a Windows program, there are not many sites that provide lists of alternative programs on the same OS. Alternativeto.net does just that.
Alternativeto.net lets you click on a program you use or might want to use to see what other programs do the same thing. The site is still quite basic, but given the lack of alternatives, this site is a lot better than nothing.
If anyone knows of better sites, please put them into the comments area.

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Ophcrack: Your double-edged sword

Ophcrack is one of many password cracking tools. While I cannot attest to their claims that they can crack 99.9% of passwords within seconds, it does should like they can get most passwords quicker than you would like. One of their tricks is to have a very large number of passwords encrypted into their protected form. The software then compares the encrypted password it finds on your system with the ones it has made. Once it finds it, it then knows the password required for that pattern to be produced.

The good side of this program is that it can help you to unlock computers that you don't have the password for. This can happen when you either forget, someone as reset it to something you don't know, or the computer has been donated and the owner is not around.

But, the downside is more obvious. A student could put in the ophcrack CD, boot the computer off that CD and then get the password. While I'm not positive, I suspect that finger scanners would not be much help because the finger scanner is only to confirm you identity and then the system inserts a password. The password would be sitting on the system. Probably it's complicated enough that you don't have to worry, but you may want to find out. The only system I would have confidence in would be a smart card system where the password is always changing and checked against a server in a remote and hopefully well-protected location.

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Automate the security of your Linux servers

A firm called ConfigServer Services is offering a free script that will run a security assessment on many Linux versions. The script goes through the myriad of configuration settings to make sure that the most secure options have been selected. An operating system is no more secure than its settings. A poor job of configuration can make any operating system open to attack.

There are a number of similar services, such as Bastille, that should also be considered. Bastille also works on OS X.

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Hamachi for Off-site Backups

This is not the first time I've written fondly of Hamachi. While it is especially popular with gamers because it creates a local network between players in remote locations, I've recently been able to use its file sharing feature along with my standard backup utility.

The main problem with off-site backups is getting the information some place safe without the hassle of carrying multiple CDs or DVDs. A USB device isn't large enough and carrying around an external hard disk isn't very appealing.

There are some online storage areas, but nothing is so wonderful that I can recommend it. I suspect this will change over the coming year. Hamachi is a free software application that creates a secure network between a number of computers. This can be two computers or hundreds.

Last night I turned on the capability of sharing local drives. I then mapped the remote main drive of my remote server and then used my backup program as I would normally. Naturally, this is not a fast way to backup, but it's as fast as an online storage system and there are no storage fees. If you're like me, you have plenty of extra space on your local hard drive.

One last thing, it would be a good idea to encrypt the folder you plan on saving the backups. You don't want to take a chance with your data being exposed from your computer. As for the connection during the transfer process, Hamachi is more than secure enough for that. One last thing: Hamachi runs on Linux and OS X, as well as on Windows.

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Scribus: Open Source Publishing

Most people get stuck buying an operating system they did not want because some program they had to have was only on that platform. Desktop publishing is one of those pieces of software that can determine the computer and operating system one purchases. Scribus is an open source desktop publishing application that works on all the major operating systems. It also claims to be lighter on the hardware requirements. Of course, it is less feature rich at this point in its development but that should not be an issue for a school computer lab or school newspaper.

People frequently claim that students need to learn on the systems used in the public. I find that this is often a unwarranted requirement because it's the task and procedures that are important. The menus and shortcuts are always changing even within a single product. Take MS Word, for example. Compare Word 2000 with the new Word 2007. Not much being transferred between those two versions. So, unless you are teaching graphic arts to soon-to-be professionals, make your decision on other factors.

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Outliner for the Mac

OmniOutliner looks to be an excellent outlining and organizational tool. If you are getting ready for the start of classes, this may be just what you are looking for.

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