Shad Lords has joined the ClearFoundation Team as a core ClearOS developer. With Shad's background with SME Server, Shad brings a wealth of experience in Linux development. Key members of the SME Server Foundation - Charlie Brady, Shad Lords and Greg Zartman - have been on the ClearFoundation Committee for some time. There is obvious synergy between SME and ClearOS since both are Red Hat derivations.

"ClearOS is really exciting. The ClearFoundation Team is a solid group with a clear development path. It will be fun to contribute new ideas and develop new features for the ClearOS roadmap." Shad Lords added, "I believe ClearOS will lead the open source market with new, powerful innovations for small business and distributed IT."

Shad - Welcome to the Team!

Ever have the feeling "ClearOS is good piece of software...maybe even great. I just wish it had __________".  All around the world, in 22 different languages, I'm sure the ending to that sentence has been completed with an equally broad range of functions - from running a media server used for streaming music and movies to your TV to cooking up a corn-beef on rye. For those that are interested, the former is coming soon while the latter...well, maybe never and definitely not from me...I'm not a big fan of the salted beef.

At any rate, I had this exact feeling over the weekend when I started wondering how I managed to fill up a 140 GB hard disk drive on my ClearOS server at home.  Seems the combination of having two girls under the age of 5 has a rather exponential effect of disk space usage with:

a) the number of digital photos of the two of them growing up (Doh! I had to buy the 15.1 megapixel model)

b) the astounding number of princess movies one can downlo....ahem, collect

But I digress, and I'm only going to get myself into copyright trouble. I know about Bash's "du" using a wack of parameters and possibly having to resort to piping the output to yet more cryptic bash commands...

l7-filter -- the Application Layer Packet Classifier for Linux -- Finds a New Home with ClearFoundation

The L7-filter software is a vibrant open source project.  The software is an application layer packet classifier that can differentiate types of network traffic by protocol; for example it can identify bittorrent, IRC, SIP and many other types of traffic.   In turn, these classifiers can be used to block or shape traffic according to a defined network policy. L7-filter is a very reputable project that has been integrated with ClearOS for some time.

ClearFoundation has been handed the reins and will take on maintenance for the project!  That means the capable ClearFoundation development team will be maintaining the code base, improving features, co-ordinating with other developers and updating software as needed. Documentation, bug tracking, testing, protocol filter definitions, and user feedback round out other maintenance tasks.  With the already thousands strong community and an open source not-for-profit foundation supporting the initiative, maintaining l7-filter is a good fit.