Welcome

In the world of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) documentation can often be at a premium. This is unfortunately especially true when looking for documentation relating to using such software in a production environment. The documents on this site aim to rectify that by providing how-to style documentation guiding a user through the process of installing and configuring a variety of software commonly deployed on servers.

We often lamented the lack of suitable documentation for providing those new to working with the software we use with the basic skills and knowledge they needed to contribute effectively to the team with the minimum of wasted time covering irrelevant topics. The vast majority of the documents in the sections below started from an internal effort to produce such documentation.

As most of these documents started out as part of an internal documentation project a basic knowledge of the Gentoo Linux◳ operating system is assumed as is a working knowledge of basic shell commands and syntax. In an effort to make these documents of maximum use to the widest possible audience each document usually begins with an introduction to the concepts covered as well as some reasons why following the guidance laid out there is potentially desirable. The documents are then often further broken down into basic, intermediate and advanced levels which are mostly expected to be completed sequentially.

GPL Software

We have developed a number of software projects which we feel may be of interest to a wider audience. With the advent of Version 3 of the GNU Public Licence (GPLv3)◳ our legal concerns team were finally sufficiently assuaged and we embarked upon the task of releasing said software projects to the general public.

The projects below are the first to meet our exacting standards for public release. Each section contains full installation instructions for the relevant software project as well as complete documentation detailing the usage and configuration of each component. Documentation of a more "how-to" nature for some of the projects below can be found in the Documentation section of this website. In keeping with both the letter and the philosophy of the GNU GPL full source code to all projects is available from our VCS repositories and is also included in the software download◳ section.

We are fully committed to achieving the highest quality standards in all our products and those released under the GPL are no different. If you should find a defect in any of our software please submit a report using the Mad Hacking Bugzilla◳ and we shall do our utmost to rectify the issue as soon as possible although, as with most if not all open source projects, patches submitted with bug reports are always very gratefully received and will usually assist in a timely resolution of the issue.