In these pages, you'll learn about tools for configuring, managing, and troubleshooting your networks. You'll hear about cloud infrastructures, database systems, server plugins, and enterprise management applications. We'll tune into security and network protocols, and we'll show you the latest interoperability techniques.

This issue is packed with practical information for real networks. Red Hat published the the source code for their popular Network Satellite management tool in 2008, and a community version known as Spacewalk soon followed. Our first article takes you on a walk with Spacewalk. Other special features include a study of Icinga – a GPLed fork of the popular Nagios network monitoring system, as well as an article on the forks and patches of MySQL, and a roundup of open source backup tools.

Farther in, we'll show you the OCFS2 filesystem for Oracle clusters. We'll also look at some virtualization tools, including Microsoft's vm2008 and OpenVZ – a container-based virtualization alternative built on Linux. We'll investigate some security and system monitoring tools, and we'll cook up some recipe's for fast client configuration with the Chef configuration management app.

If you're an IT professional, and you're looking for a magazine with detailed, technical articles that are relevant to the real-life world you live and work in, read on. And if you would like to receive future issues of Admin delivered to your door, see page 58 for information on subscribing.