Jon Hill asks: "I'm curious to figure out how to guage the performance of my servers and know at what level of usage I should think about hardware upgrades. 90% of our servers run Linux and various services standard to Linux such as sendmail, samba, DNS, etc. One of our main servers (router/firewall/sendmail/spop) has been running with a load average of .5 to 1.5 regularly. It supports 200 users and is an SMP Intel machine with 2GB of RAM. I'm not sure if it needs software/kernel tweaking or hardware modifications and I can't seem to find any reference information. Suggestions?"

Linus keeps hinting (declaring, even) that he's nearly ready to work full-time on the 2.5 development branch of his kernel, and hand the 2.4 kernel off to Marcelo Tosatti. Marcelo's graciously agreeed to answer questions (you might want to read some of his mailing list contributions first), so here's your chance to ask him what he'll do in the famous footsteps of Linus and Alan Cox, and how he got there. Please only put one question per post; we'll pass along the top-rated comments to Marcelo for his answers, and hear back from him shortly.

lodn asks: "I've been using a Linux gateway for some time now. It's a simple kernel 2.2.18 install with IP forwarding. Thanks to the great HOWTO on IPchains I was able to configure it with no problems. Now I'd like to upgrade to kernel 2.4, however I have not been able to find a HOWTO for Netfilters! Does anyone know where such can be found?" Anyone know of any IPchain-to-Netfilter migration utilities? I must admit, I haven't been able to find much information about Netfilter usage either when I went looking into 2.4, however my firewall is also still 2.2. Time to upgrade, methinks.

aht asks: "OK!, here is my problem: I'm about to install a LAN of about 20 computers. Each computer must have a soundcard and a videocamera to videoconference with each other and to the outside (Internet). As Netmeeting compatibility is required, we're trying GNOMEmeeting with a USB Logitech QuickCam, but results have not been satisfactory at all. We're not sure if that bad results come from Logitech's USB driver, GNOMEmeeting or both."

Patrick Mullen writes: "The Duke of URL has posted their review of Conectiva Linux 7.0. Conectiva Linux was the first distribution to support APT-RPM, which cures most of the ails of typical RPMs. Their latest release even bundles a graphical front-end to APT, and brings the worlds of Debian and Red Hat together."

Michael Gantz asks: "What are people using for RIP2 support under Unix? It looks very bleak out there; Mrt is sitting on SourceForge and appears to have not been maintained for some time. Gated has gone commercial. What's left? I realize RIP2 is not the most advanced protocol but it's very usefull in many situations."

Ladislav Bodnar writes: "I have installed and used many Linux distributions. The editorial, entitled The Linux Distribution Game is the result of my personal experiences - it aspires to be a gentle introduction to the many distributions out there. The rest of the DistroWatch site provides pure facts; this is the only exception, although I promise to be as unbiased as possible." This page is nearly worth it for the logos alone; the links to obscure and semi-obscure distributions are a nice resource.

peloy writes: "According to Linus' changelog for Linux 2.4.15pre2, the long waited ext3fs, the sucessor of ext2 with jounaling capabilities, has finally made its way into the official kernel tree. I have never tried ext3fs but it looks that now that it is "blessed" by Linus I'll be upgrading my old and trusty ext2fs partitions soon."

Uttles asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on my machine at home and as a Linux Newbie I have been having trouble getting all of my hardware to perform correctly. The Mandrake distribution comes with a config tool called HardDrake but I have not found it very useful. It displays every piece of hardware, but it doesn't give you the option to install or configure drivers for that hardware. In fact, the only functionality it has is a "run config tool" button that for some devices launches a configuration application. I have been told that Red Hat and other distributions have similar tools, and none are very powerful. So now I am asking Slashdot: What is the best hardware configuration tool, either GUI or text based, for Linux systems?"

0backlash0 writes "I work for a not-for-profit that's involved in community media especially radio, television, and increasingly, the internet. We exist by and for the community, which is to say that we're not a large organization. Someone has registered a domain name that we used to own: kdhxfm88.org The name appears to be registered in "bad faith". Because of our size, we can't exactly afford to hire a team of lawyers to take care of this for us. What can we do and how do we do it?"

milenko81 and several others submitted this CNET story about corporate spending on information technology. The reporter seems to interpret it negatively because Fortune 1000 companies aren't dumping Microsoft 100% and going for Linux. But interpret it as you will.

stylewagon writes: "ZDNet are reporting that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox have finally agreed on which Virtual Memory manager to include in future kernel releases. Both have agreed to use the newer VM, written by Andrea Arcangeli, from kernel version 2.4.10 onwards. Read more in the article."

Jason Perlow of Linux Magazine writes:" With all of the recent computer press coverage of Amazon and Intel converting their web servers and other front end application servers to Linux, many of these stories neglect to mention that the back end systems these companies use still rely on commercial Unixes like Solaris, AIX and HPUX to host their RDBMSes (Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Informix) for their mission critical transactional applications and data mining. Are there any companies out there actively using Linux to host a mission-critical RDBMS ^? or looking to replace UNIX with Linux for this purpose?"

*no comment* writes: "Linux has broken the barrier with the 100 petabyte ceiling, and doing it at 144 petabytes." And this is even more impressive in pebibytes, too.

An AC wrote: Forget Beowulf ^? clusters, Jacques Gelinas has made available a kernel patch to enable many virtual servers running on the same machine, even the same kernel. Read his original message posted to the Linux kernel list." Imagine what this will mean for hosting companies...

MrSnivvel writes: "The new 2.4.14 kernel is out for the taking." It's in all the usual mirrors. Check out the ChangeLog and revel in the newness..

codazzo writes "Debian 2.2r4 is out. As their website states, "The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato') has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution." " You can see the press release - or get it from the FTP list.

Brian the Wise asks: "Is there anything avaible for Linux that can compare to the IP Multipathing in Solaris 8? I need it specifically for the active/passive failover of ethernet interfaces. A search around the net has only come up with HA Linux and LVS, but they're both talking about complete machine failover. All I want is for the system to move the IP configuration from one ethernet interface to a dormant one on the same machine when it detects the link going down on a single machine. Is there anything with a proven track record out there?"

barries writes: "Here is an interesting take on the Linux Project which tries to put it in a historical perspective and explain why traditional structures and theory don't fully apply to it. It overlooks a few things but gets most of the basics right." You might want to skip ahead a bit in the paper to get to the Linux-specific sections.

Hairy1 writes " Cisco has an interview with Linus which discusses among other things his thoughts - or rather lack of thoughts - about Windows. When asked about Microsoft he said - "Well, I don't know. I'm actually not a big Microsoft basher... They're very good at marketing. They're very good at trying to see What do we have to do to sell this? The bad part about it is that it does have a huge market share. And that means that it can be lazy, sort of. They don't have much competition on the desktop, which means that they have very little incentive to really fix some of the problems it does have.""