30+ Awesome Free and Open Source Audio Applications List

Open Source community has great Audio Applications. We had featured 20 Audio Editors. Here is a best of the Audio Applications list that has, Audio Editors, Audio Sequencers, Stream Rippers, CD Rippers and much more. This list is constantly updated and comments, additions are most welcome. Thanks for commenting and helping us to grow the list.

Amarok – Rediscover music

Amarok is a powerful music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it!

Ardour – Digital Audio Workstation

Record Audio, Mix, Edit and Collaborate. One of the Ultimate Audio Editing software for Mac OS X and Linux.

Audacity - The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Banshee – Music Player

Play your music and videos. Stay entertained and up to date with podcasts and video podcasts.  Sync your G1 phone, iPod, and other devices. We think you’ll love the new Banshee! Banshee is written in C# on the Mono platform using GNOME technologies (Gtk#, GStreamer, etc).

CDEx – Audio CD Extractor

CDEx is a very popular Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 38 million downloads.

Grip – CD Ripper/CD Player

Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia built-in, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav). It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 (and other audio format) encoders, letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. Internet disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers.Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified “computerized” version of your music collection.

Hydrogen – Advanced Drum Machine For GNU/Linux

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Jokosher – Multi-Track Audio Studio

Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

LMMS – Linux Multimedia Studio

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

MuseScore - Free music composition & notation software

MuseScore is a free cross platform WYSIWYG music notation program, licensed under GNU GPL.

   

MusikCube – Fast, Lightweight Music management

musikCube is an mp3 player for the modern generation. It helps you just listen to what you want to hear, while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere. For the
technical user, musikCube is based on an embedded SQL database engine known as sqlite. For the non technical user, that means its fast. Really fast. “Dynamic playlists” allow fully automatic, randomized playback of songs based on your observed listening habits. The more you listen, the smarter it gets. It also features browsable, user sortable playlists.

MusE – Audio Sequencer

MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written originally by Werner Schweer now developed and maintained by the MusE development team. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux, it is published under the GNU General Public License.

Rosegarden – Audio Sequencer

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

Songbird – Manage Your Music

Click, Download and Start listening to your music in an organized way. Very simple, useful Audio Player. It is an alternative to Apple’s iTunes.

SoundKonverter – KDE Sound Application

soundKonverter is a frontend to various audio converters. The key features are:
- Audio conversion
- Replay Gain calculation
- CD ripping

StreamRipper – Internet Radio Recorder

StreamRipper is an Open Source (GPL) application that lets you record streaming mp3 to your hard drive. There is an alternative Open Source Stream Recording software – StreamHijacker.

WinLAME – Audio Encoder (Windows)

winLAME is an encoder for several audio formats, including mp3 (MPEG Layer 3), Ogg Vorbis and more. winLAME lets you set up the encoding process with an easy-to-use wizard-style user interface.

 

Updated List

 

Breakage – Intelligent Drum Machine

Breakage is an intelligent drum machine designed to make it easy and fun to play complex, live breakbeat performances. A step-sequencer pattern editor and previewer, database, sample browser, neural network, pattern morphs, statistics and probabilistic pattern generator give you the tools to work with breaks on a higher level than ever before.

Bristol – Synthesiser Emulation On Linux

 

BpmDJ – DJ Tools For Linux

BpmDJ is a tool to do DJ on Linux, plays MP3s and Ogg’s.

DJPlay – DJ App for Linux

DJPlay aims to be a high class live DJing application for Linux.

Exaile – Play It, Enjoy It

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

FluidSynth – Real-Time Software Synthesizer

FluidSynth is a real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications.

Helix Player – Media Player For Linux

The Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating system versions are currently in development.

Jack – Audio Connection kit

JACK is system for handling real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI). It runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows (and can be ported to other POSIX-conformant platforms). It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a “plugin”). JACK also has support for distributing audio processing across a network, both fast & reliable LANs as well as slower, less reliable WANs.

JAMin – Professional Audio Mastering

JAMin is the JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK) Audio Mastering interface. JAMin is an open source application designed to perform professional audio mastering of stereo input streams. It uses LADSPA for digital signal processing (DSP). JAMin is licensed under the GPL.

LilyPond – Music Notation For Everyone

LilyPond prints music in the best traditions of classical engraving with minimum fuss. Don’t waste time on tuning spacing, moving around symbols, or shaping slurs. Impress friends and colleagues with sharp sheet music!

LinuxSampler – Audio Sampler

LinuxSampler is a free, streaming capable open source pure software audio sampler with professional grade features, comparable to both hardware and commercial Windows/Mac software samplers and to introduce new features not yet available by any other sampler in the world.

Mixxx – Beatmix, better

Mixxx is free, open source DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes.

MPD – Server Side Application For Playing Music

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol. MPD has lots of clients such as Sonata, LnkMusic, MPCool, Ario etc. Check out Clients section here.

RhythmBox – Inspired By iTunes

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework.

Sonic Visualiser – Audio Visualiser

Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files.

TerminatorX – Real-Time Audio Synthesizer

TerminatorX is a real-time audio synthesizer that allows you to “scratch” on digitally sampled audio data (*.wav, *.au, *.ogg, *.mp3, etc.) the way hiphop-DJs scratch on vinyl records. It features multiple turntables, real-time effects (built-in as well as LADSPA plug-in effects), a sequencer and MIDI interface - all accessible through an easy-to-use gtk+ GUI. This software is designed to run under Linux, FreeBSD and the like.

Ipod Touch 4G torn down, only 256MB RAM found

iFixit has finally gotten their hands on the new iPod Touch and did their customary “teardown” to take a look inside the device. A couple of interesting things were found, sort of letdown in my opinion.

When they got into the 1GHz A4 processor, they found that the model is identical to the one used on the iPad and not the iPhone 4. What this means it that just like the iPad, the new iPod Touch only has 256MB RAM and not 512MB as most people initially believed.

Another thing to point out is with regards to the Retina Display. The iPod Touch 4G has the same resolution as that of the iPhone 4. However, it lacks the In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology that’s available on the iPad and iPhone 4.

The IPS gives these devices a wide-viewing angle of up to 178 degrees and the new Touch doesn’t have it. This might result to less than stellar viewing on games requiring you to tilt the iPod.

These and the poor camera that you may have already heard about makes the iPod Touch 4G a bit of a letdown for me despite the initial hoopla. But it won’t stop me from getting one.

Check out the interesting step-by-step teardown did by iFixit. It’s really interesting.

source: PinoyTechBlog

Seven Steps to Better SIP Security with Asterisk

In case any of you were wondering why there has been a fairly notable upswing in the attacks happening on SIP endpoints, the answer is “script kiddies.”  In the last few months, a number of new tools have made it easy for knuckle-draggers to attack and defraud SIP endpoints, Asterisk-based systems included.  There are easily-available tools that scan networks looking for SIP hosts, and then scan hosts looking for valid extensions, and then scan valid extensions looking for passwords.  You can take steps, NOW, to eliminate many of these problems.  I think the community is interested in coming up with an integrated Asterisk-based solution that is much wider in scope for dynamic protection (community-shared blacklists is the current thinking) but that doesn’t mean you should wait for some new tool to defend your systems.  You can IMMEDIATELY take fairly common-sense measures to protect your Asterisk server from the bulk of the scans and attacks that are on the increase. The methods and tools for protection already exists – just apply them, and you’ll be able to sleep more soundly at night.
 

Seven Easy Steps to Better SIP Security on Asterisk:
 

1) Don’t accept SIP authentication requests from all IP addresses.  Use the “permit=” and “deny=” lines in sip.conf to only allow a reasonable subset of IP addresess to reach each listed extension/user in your sip.conf file.  Even if you accept inbound calls from “anywhere” (via [default]) don’t let those users reach authenticated elements!
 

2) Set “alwaysauthreject=yes” in your sip.conf file.  This option has been around for a while (since 1.2?) but the default is “no”, which allows extension information leakage.  Setting this to “yes” will reject bad authentication requests on valid usernames with the same rejection information as with invalid usernames, denying remote attackers the ability to detect existing extensions with brute-force guessing attacks.
 

3) Use STRONG passwords for SIP entities.  This is probably the most important step you can take.  Don’t just concatenate two words together and suffix it with “1″ – if you’ve seen how sophisticated the tools are that guess passwords, you’d understand that trivial obfuscation like that is a minor hinderance to a modern CPU.  Use symbols, numbers, and a mix of upper and lowercase letters at least 12 digits long.
 

4) Block your AMI manager ports.  Use “permit=” and “deny=” lines in manager.conf to reduce inbound connections to known hosts only.  Use strong passwords here, again at least 12 characters with a complex mix of symbols, numbers, and letters.
 

5) Allow only one or two calls at a time per SIP entity, where possible.  At the worst, limiting your exposure to toll fraud is a wise thing to do.  This also limits your exposure when legitimate password holders on your system lose control of their passphrase – writing it on the bottom of the SIP phone, for instance, which I’ve seen.
 

6) Make your SIP usernames different than your extensions.  While it is convenient to have extension “1234″ map to SIP entry “1234″ which is also SIP user “1234″, this is an easy target for attackers to guess SIP authentication names.  Use the MAC address of the device, or some sort of combination of a common phrase + extension MD5 hash (example: from a shell prompt, try “md5 -s ThePassword5000″)
 

7) Ensure your [default] context is secure.  Don’t allow unauthenticated callers to reach any contexts that allow toll calls.  Permit only a limited number of active calls through your default context (use the “GROUP” function as a counter.)  Prohibit unauthenticated calls entirely (if you don’t want them) by setting “allowguest=no” in the [general] part of sip.conf.
 

These 7 basics will protect most people, but there are certainly other steps you can take that are more complex and reactive.  Here is a fail2ban recipe which might allow you to ban endpoints based on volume of requests.  There is discussion on the asterisk-user and asterisk-dev mailing lists of incorporating this type of functionality into Asterisk – let’s hear your ideas!
 

If you’d like to see an example of the tools that you’re up against, see this demo video of an automated attack tool that does scan, guess, and crack methods via a click-and-drool interface.
 
In summary: basic security measures will protect you against the vast majority of SIP-based brute-force attacks.  Most of the SIP attackers are fools with tools – they are opportunists who see an easy way to defraud people who have not considered the costs of insecure methods.  Asterisk has some methods to prevent the most obvious attacks from succeeding at the network level, but the most effective method of protection are the administrative issues of password robustness and username obscurity. 

source: Digium

Petabytes on a Budget

Petabytes on a budget:
How to build cheap cloud storage

At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867.

In this post, we’ll share how to make one of these storage pods, and you’re welcome to use this design. Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze.

Below is a video that shows a 3-D model of the Backblaze Storage Pod. Continue reading to learn the exact details of the design.

You can download the full 3-D model of the Backblaze Storage Pod here.

Backblaze Needs Plenty of Reliable, Cheap Storage

To say that Backblaze needs lots of storage is an understatement. We’re a backup service, so our datacenter contains a complete copy of all of our customers’ data, plus multiple versions of files that change. In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive. A long time ago we stopped measuring storage in our datacenter in gigabytes or terabytes and started measuring in petabytes.

To get a sense of what this looks like, here is a shot of me deploying new pods in our datacenter. The small stack of six pods in the rack I’m working on contains just under half a petabyte of storage.

To offer our service at a reasonable price, we need affordable storage at a multi-petabyte scale.

No One Sells Cheap Storage, so We Designed It

Before realizing that we had to solve this storage problem ourselves, we considered Amazon S3, Dell or Sun Servers, NetApp Filers, EMC SAN, etc. As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense. When you strip away the marketing terms and fancy logos from any storage solution, data ends up on a hard drive. But when we priced various off-the-shelf solutions, the cost was 10 times as much (or more) than the raw hard drives. Here’s a comparison chart of the price for one petabyte from various venders:

Based on the expense, we decided to build our own Backblaze Storage Pods. We had two primary goals: Keep upfront costs low by using consumer-grade drives and readily available commodity components and be as power and space efficient as possible by using green components and squeezing a lot of storage into a small box.

The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at a material cost of $7,867, the bulk of which goes to purchase the drives themselves. This translates to just three-tenths of one penny per gigabyte per month over the course of three years. Even including the surrounding costs—such as electricity, bandwidth, space rental, and IT administrators’ salaries—Backblaze spends one-tenth of the price in comparison to using Amazon S3, Dell Servers, NetApp Filers, or an EMC SAN.

What Makes a Backblaze Storage Pod

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. Specifically, one pod contains one Intel Motherboard with four SATA cards plugged into it. The nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them (45 hard drives in total).

Above is an exploded diagram, and you can see a detailed parts list in Appendix A at the bottom of this post. The two most important factors to note are that the cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and that the rest of the system is made entirely of commodity parts.

Wiring It Up: How to Assemble a Backblaze Storage Pod

The power wiring diagram of a Backblaze Storage Pod is seen below. Power supply units (PSUs) provide most of their power on two different voltages: 5V and 12V. We use two power supplies in the pod because 45 drives draw a lot of 5V power, yet high wattage ATX PSUs provide most of their power on 12V. This is not an accident: 1,500 watt and larger ATX power supplies are designed for powerful 3-D graphics cards that need the extra power on the 12V rail. We could have switched to a power supply designed for servers, but two ATX PSUs are cheaper.

PSU1 powers the front three fans and port multiplier backplanes 1,2,3,4, and 7. PSU2 powers everything else. (See Appendix A for a detailed list of the custom connectors on each PSU.) To power the port multiplier backplanes, the power cables run from the PSUs through four holes in the divider metal plate that holds the fans at the center of the case (near the base of the fans) and then continue to the underside of the nine backplanes. Each port multiplier backplane has two molex male connectors on the underside. Hard drives draw the most power during initial spin-up, so if you power up both PSUs at the same time, it can draw a large (14 amp) spike of 120V power from the socket. We recommend powering up PSU1 first, waiting until the drives are spun-up (and the power draw decreases to a reasonable level), and then powering up PSU2. Fully booted, the entire pod will draw approximately 4.8 amps idle and up to 5.6 amps under heavy load.

Below is a picture of a partially assembled Backblaze Storage Pod (click on the photo for a larger image). The metal case has screws mounted on the bottom, facing upward, where we attach nylon standoffs (the small white pieces in the picture below). Nylon helps dampen vibration, and this dampening is a critical aspect of server design. The circuit boards shown on top of the nylon standoffs are a few of the nine SATA port multiplier backplanes that take a single SATA connection on their underside and allow five hard drives to be mounted vertically and plugged into the topside of the board. All the power and SATA cables run underneath the port multiplier backplanes. One of the backplanes in the picture below is fully populated with hard drives to show the positioning.

A note about drive vibration: The drives vibrate too much if you leave them sitting as shown in the picture above, so we add an “anti-vibration sleeve” (essentially a rubber band) around the hard drive in between the red metal grid and the drives. This seats the drives tightly in the rubber. We also lay a large (16″ x 17″ x 1/8″) piece of foam along top of the hard drives after all 45 are in the case. The lid then screws down on top of the foam to hold the drives securely. In the future, we will dedicate an entire blog post to vibration.

The SATA wiring diagram is seen below.

The Intel Motherboard has four SATA cards plugged into it: three SYBA two-port SATA cards and one Addonics four-port card. The nine SATA cables connect to the top of the SATA cards and run in tandem with the power cables. All nine SATA cables measure 36 inches and use locking 90-degree connectors on the backplane end and non-locking straight connectors into the SATA cards.

A note about SATA chipsets: Each of the port multiplier backplanes has a Silicon Image SiI3726 chip so that five drives can be attached to one SATA port. Each of the SYBA two-port PCIe SATA cards has a Silicon Image SiI3132, and the four-port PCI Addonics card has a Silicon Image SiI3124 chip. We use only three of the four available ports on the Addonics card because we have only nine backplanes. We don’t use the SATA ports on the motherboard because, despite Intel’s claims of port multiplier support in their ICH10 south bridge, we noticed strange results in our performance tests. Silicon Image pioneered port multiplier technology, and their chips work best together.

A Backblaze Storage Pod Runs Free Software

A Backblaze Storage Pod isn’t a complete building block until it boots and is on the network. The pods boot 64-bit Debian 4 Linux and the JFS file system, and they are self-contained appliances, where all access to and from the pods is through HTTPS. Below is a layer cake diagram.

Starting at the bottom, there are 45 hard drives exposed through the SATA controllers. We then use the fdisk tool on Linux to create one partition per drive. On top of that, we cluster 15 hard drives into a single RAID6 volume with two parity drives (out of the 15). The RAID6 is created with the mdadm utility. On top of that is the JFS file system, and the only access we then allow to this totally self-contained storage building block is through HTTPS running custom Backblaze application layer logic in Apache Tomcat 5.5. After taking all this into account, the formatted (useable) space is 87 percent of the raw hard drive totals. One of the most important concepts here is that to store or retrieve data with a Backblaze Storage Pod, it is always through HTTPS. There is no iSCSI, no NFS, no SQL, no Fibre Channel. None of those technologies scales as cheaply, reliably, goes as big, nor can be managed as easily as stand-alone pods with their own IP address waiting for requests on HTTPS.

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block

We have been extremely happy with the reliability and excellent performance of the pods, and a Backblaze Storage Pod is a fully contained storage server. But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post). When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failures—it’s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure. Each pod in itself is just a big chunk of raw storage for an inexpensive price; it is not a “solution” in itself.

Cloud Storage: The Next Step

The first step to building cheap cloud storage is to already have cheap storage, and above we demonstrate how to create your own. If all you need is cheap storage, this may suffice. If you need to build a cloud, you’ve got more work ahead of you.

Building a cloud includes not only deploying a large quantity of hardware, but, critically, deploying software to manage it. At Backblaze we have developed software that de-duplicates and chops data into blocks; encrypts and transfers it for backup; reassembles, decrypts, re-duplicates, and packages the data for recovery; and monitors and manages the entire cloud storage system. This process is proprietary technology that we have developed over the years.

You may have your own system for this process and incorporate the Backblaze Storage Pod design, or you may simply seek inexpensive storage that won’t be deployed as part of a cloud. In either case, you’re free to use the storage pod design above. If you do, we would appreciate credit at Backblaze and welcome any insights, though this isn’t a requirement. Please note that because we’re not selling the design or the storage pods themselves, we provide no support nor warranties.

Coming next: In the next few weeks, we’ll talk about iPhone vibration sensors, swiss cheese pod designs, why electricity costs more than bandwidth, and more about the design of big cloud storage.

Credits and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The Backblaze Storage Pod design would not have been possible without an enormous amount of help, usually requested with little notice, from some amazingly smart and generous people who answered our questions, worked with us, and provided key insights at critical moments. First, we thank Chris Robertson for the inspiration to build our own storage and his early work on prototypes; Kurt Schaefer for advice on metal work and the concept of “furniture” for circuit boards; Dominic Giampaolo from Apple Computer for his advice on hard drives, vibration, and certifications; Stuart Cheshire from Apple Computer and Nick Tingle from Alcatel-Lucent for low-level network advice; Aaron Emigh (EVP & GM, Core Technology) at Six Apart for his help on initial design work; Gary Orenstein for insight into drive reliability and the storage industry in general; Jonathan Beck for invaluable advice on vibration, fans, cooling, and case design; Steve Smith (Senior Design Manager), Imran Pasha (Director of Software Engineering), and Alex Chervet (Director of Strategic Marketing) at Silicon Image who helped us debug SATA protocol problems and loaned us 10 different SATA cards to test against; James Lee at Chyang Fun Industries in Taiwan for customizing SATA boards to simplify our design; Wes Slimick, Richard Crockett, Don Shields, and Robert Knowles from Western Digital for their help debugging Western Digital drive logs; Christa Carey, Jennifer Hurd, and Shirley Evely at Protocase for putting up with hundreds of small 3-D case design tweaks; Chester Yeung at Central Computer for coming through quickly and repeatedly with locally supplied parts when it really mattered; Mason Lee at Zippy for power supply advice and custom wiring harnesses; and Angela Lai for knowing just the right people and providing gracious introductions.

Finally, we thank the thousands of engineers who slaved away for millions of hours to bring us the pod components that are either inexpensive or totally free, such as the Intel Processor, Gigabit Ethernet, ridiculously dense hard drives, Linux, Tomcat, JFS, etc. We realize we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

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How to join Ubuntu 8.04 to Windows Active Directory (Domain)

These days many more companies are using mixed IT enviroments using a mixture of Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac’s and I for one am using a mixture of Microsoft Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). On my network I use a Microsoft Active Directory and want to be able to get all Server (Linux & Windows) as well as Desktops (Linux and Windows) to authenticate in a central location.

Since browsing the web I managed to find this cool package that can be installed on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) which enables you to add and authenticate Ubuntu 8.04 against a Windows Domain Controller (Microsoft Active Directory)

So here goes…

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install likewise-open
sudo domainjoin-cli join fqdn.of.your.domain Administrator
sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

Using the above commands you have installed ‘likewise-open’ which is the package that makes it possible for the Ubuntu client/server to logon to a Windows domain, added the client/server to the windows domain, updated the system services and then started the service.

Now that the LikeWise package has been installed you can now logoff (although I recommend full system reboot) and logon in this format:

DOMAIN\username

You need to ensure that you prefix the username with the Domain name.

The good points about this kind of setup is as follows:

• Single username/password combination across entire network.
• Enforces password policys
• Likewise Open enables Linux, Unix and Mac authentication on a Microsoft network using Active Directory. A user can now interactively log in to the Linux, Unix or Mac machine using Active Directory credentials, and can access any kerberized services that the non-Windows machine hosts.

OpenDns | Speed Up your Internet Browsing

OpenDNS.com is free DNS service provider that offers help in building a safer, faster and smarter internet.

Website Outlook Price: $7.63 million



OpenDNS was founded in July 2006 by David Ulevitch through a venture capital funding from Minor Ventures.

It has a variety of features in its system such as anti-phishing (through PhishTank), domain blocking, Recursive dns, Anycast routing, typo correction and advanced web content filtering.

It is powered by high speed and distributed network of Open DNS Server.

It provides protection from phising scams, malwares, unsolicited emails, and other unethical online practices without any DNS server download.

It is widely used in schools, major enterprises, companies and organizations worldwide to protect users from unwanted information access, provide tighter security and attain a faster browsing speed through an easy to configure dns server.

OpenDNS uses the two (2) IP addresses namely: 208.67.222.222and 208.67.222.220.

Corporate headquarter is located at 199 Fremont St, 12th Floor, San Francisco, California with CEO Nand Mulchandani.

In February 2009, OpenDNS and Kaspersky Lab Team fought against Massive Windows Conficker Worm (a.k.a. 'Downandup' or 'Kido') spreading in the internet.

OpenDNS.com was registered in September 04, 2003 through Directi Internet Solutions Pvt. Ltd. and a Google PageRank of 6.

It has a Forum, Blog, and Support Knowledge Base.

It is popular in the US, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Algeria, UK, Italy, China, Iran, Brazil, Germany, Canada, Philippines, Australia, and Russia.

Competitors are DNSStuff, and DynDNS.