I think most of us have to buy Microsoft licences. I suspect all of us have got confused by Microsoft's licensing system before now - I know I have. Can anyone explain it in straightforward terms? I suggest making one answer for one bit (e.g. Desktop Windows; e.g. Software Assurance; e.g. SQL ...

I can't seem to find a clear answer to this question. What type of licenses do I need to buy ensure that everyone in my organization is licensed to use Active Directory. We want to use AD to authenticate users in our timekeeping system. Am I going to need server CALS? Is there a special AD lice...

We are currently evaluating two free bare-metal virtualization product: VMware ESXi 4.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.5. While both look good on the reviews, we are curious about their licensing. A quick glance at XenServer Installation Guide (published June 2009), I found that we have to acquire free ...

We are looking at moving our fractured code base that uses MySQL in some places and SQL Server in other places. I'm suggesting that for our purposes we don't need anything that MySQL can't do. The argument is that we have to have SQL Server anyway because we have Exchange and SharePoint. I alway...

I am having a local database in a machine in network 'xyz'. I have a database link to a remote machine in 'abc' network. My system is in 'xyz' network. But I can access 'abc' network also(by breaking the firewall). If I want to use that database link, should I break the firewall in the local mach...

It just isn't clear to me which choice is good for creating small/intermediate networks. I know one of flaws of Hubs is that they send all packets to all nodes connected to it, in contrast to Switch which can decide where each packet needs to be transmitted. Please explain to me what are the di...

I'd like to have something more simple than Nagios — I don't need historical data or a GUI, I just need to be notified if something bad is happening. Are there any bare-bones monitoring tools that I can just install with minimal config and be emailed if a disk is filling up or load is shooting up?

I realize there are a lot of SSL signing authorities I can use, which one will do the most for the open source community? What other non-price factors should I evaluate for an SSL signing authority? Which SSL signing authority would Richard Stallman use?

Have a Exec that likes to download the internet. Free files and such. Of course its all mixed and in a download directory. I know that one of the admins before me had a script written but took it with him. Can anyone steer me in the right direction on how to sort the files by extension and dump ...