Business Internet and Telephony, since 1985

NorthTech Computer is a full service VAR/ISP specializing in Enterprise and Small Business Voice, Data, and Software solutions.

With offices and network centers located in Europe, Australia, and the United States, our staff is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure the availability and integrity of your operating environment and mission critical data.

From the SOHO to the Enterprise. NorthTech.

Throwing Away Your Password to Enable Secure Logins on Remote Hosts.

Posted 6 June, 2011 - 04:52 by tallship

We thought we would clarify the process by which someone creates a SSH key pair in order to securely connect to one or more remote hosts.

This method alleviates and obviates the need for you to login using your password in combination with your username on a remote host, but more importantly, it secures that connection because afterward, you should disable the ability to login with a password for the given account... Read more »

DTN - RFCs at Last! Our work in Delay Tolerant Networking Bears Fruit After Many Years of Hard Work!

Posted 26 May, 2011 - 01:42 by tallship

About an hour ago, Several RFCs hit the repos of the IETF related to many years of hard work as a result of our efforts as a key participant of the Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group of the IRTF.

NorthTech.US has been operating nodes of the DTNbone for many years on our globally distributed NOMAD Internetwork. We've been a member of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), which is the part of the ISOC which focuses on very long term research projects, and this one has finally come through for us.

We would like to take a few minutes now, to tell you a little about the work of our group, what it is, what it means, and a bit of history about Northtech's particular participation as a pioneer in Internet history... Read more »

Skype is Dead! Long Live Skype!

Posted 24 May, 2011 - 13:42 by tallship

Today we received an email notification form Digium. All Digium partners received the same email heralding the death of one of the few proprietary systems that has been conveniently overlooked by the FOSS community for about a decade.

Skype. The ubiquitous niche carving communication system combining at least as good as old Ma Bell's POTS based voice telephony with chat, video and conferencing all three of those methods into one single, and [albeit proprietary] free application... Read more »

Melee of Madness and Mayhem Ensues in the Aftermath of Slackware 13.37 Release

Posted 26 April, 2011 - 13:37 by tallship

Overcoming inertia is paramount before the movement of a given object can occur. An object at rest would rather stay at rest, while an object in motion exhibits a tendency to remain that way.

Self confessed deadhead Patrick Volkerding's Slackware Linux distribution is no exception to that rule, and mere moments following the release of his latest stable release of the oldest extant Linux distribution on the planet, ISPs were complaining, gearheads were leeching, and Slackware zealots the world over were intimately re-acquainted with the term, "melt down" - popularized in the movie "China Syndrome", so many years ago.

Slackware Linux was one of the first popular free software projects to champion and encourage the use of BitTorrent technology as a method of sharing and distributing itself, yet we haven't seen anything like this since Tommy Lee and Pamela's missing video tape was found - on the net... Read more »

Adding Convenient Layers of Persistent Abstraction to Simplify Remote Administration

Posted 11 March, 2011 - 04:03 by tallship

So you've been searching for a tool that you can group and pile a bunch of your live work into, providing continuous access when you want it, and available from anywhere you need it, when you need it.

Something that can manage several remote sessions at once, and something you don't really ever have to close down. Something that works with or without a mouse. Something that works equally well in a simple console, or under X and your favorite window manager. i.e., KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc.

Enter twin. A seasoned and stable software offering that can greatly impact your productivity and organize the multitudes of local and remote sessions you typically manage. With twin, you don't have to continuously launch several Xterm windows, or open a bunch of tabs you can't see all at once in an Xterm window, or keep switching around from one virtual console to another - you can keep everything all nice and neat in one, single toybox, and you can access it from anywhere, at anytime... Read more »

Slackware 13.37 RC1 has been released

Posted 9 March, 2011 - 13:37 by tallship

A couple of months back, I was participating in a discussion where the Slackware banter was especially light, and Slackware maintainer Patrick Volkerding chimed in.

Rather candidly, and seemingly more tongue in cheek than anything else, Patrick dropped onto the table the possibility for a cult-like version number scheme with regards to the next version of Slackware to be released... Read more »

Mageia 1 Alpha 1 released today

Posted 15 February, 2011 - 05:30 by tallship

Mageia Linux has tossed its hat into the ring of Linux distributions with the release of it first alpha. A second alpha release in the middle of March is expected to yield a liveCD, with a revised target date of 01 June for the first stable release... Read more »

Is Slackware a Binary or Source-Based Linux Distribution?

Posted 14 November, 2010 - 09:24 by tallship

This question (and we get asked this an awful lot), or the exclamation that it is (or isn't), is often bantered about in blogs, forums, and mailing lists.

It seems that there are different perceptions of just exactly what a source-based distribution is, and what constitutes a binary Linux distribution.

Before we begin, I think a couple of qualifiers to lay down some groundwork are in order. Read more »

It's Official! Google's VP8 Goes Open Source!

Posted 19 May, 2010 - 02:01 by tallship

Yes, it's official, but not quite actually "officially" official until Google announces it during their annual I/O developers conference over the next two days... Read more »

The Bleeding Edge: A New Frontier - Clangalang Clang Clang BSD!

Posted 16 April, 2010 - 21:00 by tallship

Just announced: Clang is self hosting! it can compile the FreeBSD World, and to quote a David Bowie song of yonder years, it is, "...stepping through the door", of new possibilities.

Possibilities that not only endear it to the community of early adopters and voracious testers, but also the doorstep of becoming it's own 'Flavor' of UNIX - ClangBSD... Read more »