Canonical’s eyes are on IoT

When Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, the idea behind the company was simple – promote the use of Ubuntu Linux as a desktop operating system. Fourteen years later, things have gotten a lot more complicated, as the prominent open source software vendor eyes the IoT market.Canonical’s still flying the flag for desktop Linux, but the company’s real business is in the cloud – it claims that Ubuntu accounts for about 60% of all Linux instances in the major public clouds – and it’s hoping to make its mark in the next-buzziest part of the technology sector, the Internet of Things.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Nvidia gets broad support for cutting-edge Volta GPUs in the data center + A lack of cloud skills could cost companies moneyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Wifi to Grow Grapes

Recently, California farmer Craig Thompson got a pretty nifty upgrade for his irrigation: a broadband-connected Hydrawise control system that would automatically manage and monitor the irrigation of his olive and grape fields and collect data to alert him if there was a problem. He woke up the next morning to fields he could have assumed were appropriately hydrated, but the Hydrawise system quickly proved its worth when he looked at the data coming out of it. He found that the water pressure had been much lower than expected. With that information, he was able to figure out that one of the drip irrigation wires was loose. This small detail revealed from his Wifi-enabled device could have meant the difference between success and failure for his entire season.

A Growing Market

Many farmers across the world are realizing the benefits of streamlining their businesses with broadband-enabled devices. According to a 2017 report by MarketsandMarkets, the precision farming market is expected to grow from USD 3.20 Billion in 2015 to USD 7.87 Billion by 2022. It goes way beyond irrigation: there are farms using broadband-enabled devices for security, employee management, fertilizer and spray control, real-time access to specialists and Continue reading

Cloudflare Apps Platform Update: September Edition

This is the September edition of our blog series showcasing the latest platform improvements in developer analytics, user feedback, release notes, and more!

Since launch, we’ve received hundreds of feature requests from developers and users alike. Feedback has been the source of some our most popular features. This month’s post is celebration of the innovation achieved when great ideas are shared.

Let’s dive in!

? Developer Analytics

Continuing with the theme of feedback, App developers can now track their apps’ popularity and growth:

App usage by month.

The usage charts help identify which changes have a positive impact on your app.

If you’ve created a paid app you can also track its financial performance:

App revenue & churn.

? User feedback

Charts and graphs are great for tracking trends, but what do your users actually think of your app? Wonder no longer; users can now leave comments when adding and removing apps from their site. Each comment includes sentiment tags and an optional message from the user.

Comments left by users before and after installing an app.

? Page Selectors

Cloudflare users have always been able to select which routes their apps are active, though apps this was too course Continue reading

ICANN Postpones DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover – October 11 will NOT be the big day

People involved with DNS security no longer have to be focused on October 11. News broke yesterday that ICANN has decided to postpone the Root KSK Rollover to an unspecified future date.
To be clear:

The Root KSK Rollover will NOT happen on October 11, 2017.

ICANN’s announcement states the the KSK rollover is being delayed…

…because some recently obtained data shows that a significant number of resolvers used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Network Operators are not yet ready for the Key Rollover. The availability of this new data is due to a very recent DNS protocol feature that adds the ability for a resolver to report back to the root servers which keys it has configured.

Getting More Information

Discussion on the public DNSSEC-coord mailing list indicates more info may be available in a talk Duane Wessels is giving at the DNS-OARC meeting tomorrow (Friday, September 29). The abstract of his session is:


A Look at RFC 8145 Trust Anchor Signaling for the 2017 KSK Rollover

RFC 8145 (“Signaling Trust Anchor Knowledge”) was published in April 2017. This RFC describes how recursive name servers can signal, to authoritative servers, the trust anchors that they have configured for Continue reading

Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push

Microsoft is embedding Anaconda’s Python distribution into its Azure Machine Learning products, the latest move by the software vendor to expand its capabilities in the fast-growing artificial intelligence space and an example of Anaconda extending its reach beyond high performance computing and into AI.

The two companies announced the partnership this week at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, with the news dovetailing with other announcements around AI that Microsoft officials made this week at its own Ignite 2017 show. The vendors said they will offer Anaconda for Microsoft, which they described as a subset of the Anaconda

Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The History of Networking: Tony Li on BGP

The Network Collective has another History of Networking up; this time we’re chatting with Tony Li about the History of BGP. Tony was not involved in the original origins of BGP (the famous napkin, a picture of which you can see in this book), but he did start working on it in around 1996, the year I joined Cisco as a lowly TAC engineer.

The post The History of Networking: Tony Li on BGP appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Micro-segmentation of the Epic Electronic Health Records System with VMware NSX

authors – Geoff Wilmington, Mike Lonze

Healthcare organizations are focusing more and more on securing patient data.  With Healthcare breaches on the rise, penalties and fines for lost or stolen PHI and PII data is not only devastating to the patients, but to the Healthcare organization as well.  The Ponemon Institute Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy & Security of Healthcare Data has shown that nearly 50 percent of Healthcare organizations, up 5 percent from a previous study, that criminal attacks are the leading cause of Healthcare breaches.  [1]  With breaches on the rise and Healthcare organizations feeling the pain, how can we help Healthcare start layering security approaches on their most critical business applications that contain this highly critical data?

The principle of least privilege is to provide only the necessary minimal privileges for a process, user, or program to perform a task.  With NSX, we can provide a network least privilege for the applications that run on the vSphere hypervisor using a concept called Micro-segmentation. NSX places a stateful firewall at the virtual network card of every virtual machine allowing organizations to control very granularly how virtual machines communicate or don’t communicate with each Continue reading

Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption

In an age of ongoing digital advancement, leaders across all industries are seeking new ways to improve workplace productivity, ensure competitive advantage, and facilitate continued growth. Success hinges on their ability to accelerate time to value, and work more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Innovation and sustainability are key.

This is particularly true for the energy, oil, and gas (EOG) sector. As the global economy progressively moves away from fossil fuels in search of renewable resources, EOG companies are challenged to operate faster and smarter than ever before. Many organizations are utilizing high performance computing (HPC) technologies in order

Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Spock’s wise words for today’s network managers

It’s no surprise that many network engineers are also fans of Star Trek. Personally, I have been a Trekkie for as long as I can remember. One of the appealing things about Star Trek is that it pushed the limits of what’s possible. In fact, many technologies we take for granted today were previewed on Star Trek over 50 years ago. Things such as wireless communications, immersive videoconferencing and tablet computers were all used regularly on the Starship Enterprise long before we used them down on Earth.+ Also on Network World: Star Trek medical tricorder closer to becoming reality + This week, the next wave of Star Trek kicked off with “Discovery” airing on CBS. As the dawn of this new era begins, I thought it would be fun to look back at the top seven quotes from Star Trek’s most logical person, Spock, which network managers should embrace. Incidentally, I chose seven because of the Galileo 7 episode, which was Spock’s first command.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spock’s wise words for today’s network managers

It’s no surprise that many network engineers are also fans of Star Trek. Personally, I have been a Trekkie for as long as I can remember. One of the appealing things about Star Trek is that it pushed the limits of what’s possible. In fact, many technologies we take for granted today were previewed on Star Trek over 50 years ago. Things such as wireless communications, immersive videoconferencing and tablet computers were all used regularly on the Starship Enterprise long before we used them down on Earth.+ Also on Network World: Star Trek medical tricorder closer to becoming reality + This week, the next wave of Star Trek kicked off with “Discovery” airing on CBS. As the dawn of this new era begins, I thought it would be fun to look back at the top seven quotes from Star Trek’s most logical person, Spock, which network managers should embrace. Incidentally, I chose seven because of the Galileo 7 episode, which was Spock’s first command.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Waxing or WANing

Allow me to wax poetic about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN):Ode to an SD-WAN I love your complexityAnd lack of deterministic behaviorI need your connectivityBut not new network layersOnly I can comprehendYour brittleness and insecurityAnd in the bitter endLike ATM fade in obscurityWhile SD-WANs are a hot topic currently, in reality, I believe that WANs will ultimately wane and give way to “wide area inter-networks." SD-WANs are already multi-network use cases (e.g. connecting branch networks to the corporate network). Right now, they are simple overlays, but over time, performance and functionality demands will require them to interact with the underlay network (and other layers).      To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Waxing or WANing

Allow me to wax poetic about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN):Ode to an SD-WAN I love your complexityAnd lack of deterministic behaviorI need your connectivityBut not new network layersOnly I can comprehendYour brittleness and insecurityAnd in the bitter endLike ATM fade in obscurityWhile SD-WANs are a hot topic currently, in reality, I believe that WANs will ultimately wane and give way to “wide area inter-networks." SD-WANs are already multi-network use cases (e.g. connecting branch networks to the corporate network). Right now, they are simple overlays, but over time, performance and functionality demands will require them to interact with the underlay network (and other layers).      To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2 options for deciding open computing standards—neither is great

How should open computing standards, such as the protocols and languages that make up much of the core of the internet, be decided on and handled? It’s not an easy question to answer. But the answer has vast and potentially severe ramifications for almost every company on the planet (at least if you rely on your website for doing any percentage of your business). A recent kerfuffle with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization responsible for standardizing much of the web that most people use on a daily basis, has caused many to ask for the shut-down of the W3C and the creation of a new standards body. But is that actually a good idea?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ok, I’m Giving Ubiquiti Networks Another Chance

After quite a few discussions resulting from my Epic Evaluation: Ubiquiti ERPro-8 vs Play-Doh where (spoiler alert!) the Play-Doh™ won hands down after an exhaustive six-month test, I’ve been persuaded to give Ubiqiuti Networks (aka UBNT) another chance. Another two chances, in fact.

Ubiquiti Networks Logo

Ubiqitui Networks Products

As I said in the evaluation post, I was hesitant about recommending against UBNT products not least because I owned four other UBNT devices (three wireless access points and a 48-port switch). Despite being persuaded to try UBNT again, I strongly maintain my previous recommendation to avoid the ERPro-8 like a wedding invitation from Walder Frey. For the rest of the product range I’ve decided to suspend my previous “NO BUY” verdict and reserve my final judgement while I try out some new additions to my home network and see if they can restore balance to the nerd universe.

I would also like to add that while Ubiquiti’s official Support and RMA channels were no help to me whatsoever when my ERPro-8 was behaving badly, I did appreciate one employee reaching out privately and trying to help. The conclusion for now is that flash itself has indeed become irrecoverably corrupted and the device Continue reading