Network World

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Working with image files on the Linux command line

While the best way to view or manipulate image files on Linux is to open them on your desktop for viewing or manipulating with tools like Gimp, there are quite a few ways to get important details on the command line.Identifying image type by file extension In general, image files can be identified on the command line by listing their names. Clearly ".jpg" represents a jpeg file, ".png" a portable network graphics file, ".gif" a graphics interchange format file, ".tiff" a tagged image file and so on.$ ls -l images -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 256093 Jul 15 2018 mycats.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 784238 Jul 15 2018 mycats.png -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 6760 Jul 15 2018 arrow.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 8853 Jul 15 2018 arrow.png Nearly all of the time you can rely on file extensions accurately reporting the file type, but there's more you can do with additional commands.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS pledges $35 billion of additional investment for Virginia data centers

Amazon Web Services has confirmed it plans to invest a further $35 billion by 2040 in Virginia, expanding its US-EAST-1 region by establishing multiple data center campuses across the state and creating 1,000 new jobs.Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin announced the news on January 20, saying he was excited that AWS has chosen to continue its growth in the region.“Virginia will continue to encourage the development of this new generation of data center campuses across multiple regions of the Commonwealth,” he said in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here

A new role for network pros: application-flow architect

There are a lot of issues that network-management people worry about. We all have heard about faults, failures, breaches. But want to know what long-term problem is keeping the smart members of the network leadership of enterprises up at night? It’s an empty chair. Their chair, at the table that makes the plans that set network requirements and directions today and for years to come. These leaders used to sit in that chair, but now they say there’s no place for them.Application designs determine network requirements We used to build networks from primitive pieces, like digital trunks and routers. Then we built them from services, like IP VPNs. That transformation was jarring to many who’d cut their teeth on real private-network technology, but they were still a big part of the game. Today, we’re still building networks from services, but the services of today are application services that include implicit network features. The really new network is built from connectivity services that are included in cloud and even data-center hosting packages. Application planners design these services, and the decisions they make frame the building-blocks of the network. One chief network officer said he’d gone from building technology to stocking Continue reading

IT to shoulder more responsibility for data center sustainability

Cutting-edge server chips are turning heads for their potential to boost performance, but next-generation processors also run hotter than older designs, and data-center operators will struggle to figure out what to do with limited guidance from chip makers.At the same time, there’s going to be increased scrutiny on the role that IT equipment can play in energy efficiency efforts. These interrelated trends are among the top predictions Uptime Institute is making for data centers this year.“Operators will struggle with new, hotter server chips,” said Jacqueline Davis, research analyst at Uptime, during a web conference on the institute’s 2023 data-center predictions. Meanwhile, “energy-efficiency focus is going to expand to include the IT equipment itself, something that we think is overdue.”To read this article in full, please click here

T-Mobile, Xfinity are tops in latest Ookla speed test report

Network intelligence provider Ookla’s latest research shows that T-Mobile had the fastest mobile network in the US, and that Xfinity edged out several competitors for the top spot among fixed providers in the fourth quarter of 2022, the company announced this week.The median download speed for T-Mobile customers, Ookla said, reached over 151Mbps, marking a sharp increase from the company’s 116Mbps mark in the previous quarter, which was already good enough to make T-Mobile the fastest mobile carrier by a distance.Verizon and AT&T posted gains — rising from around 58Mbps in the third quarter to 69Mbps and 65Mbps, respectively — but both were far behind T-Mobile. Looking at 5G performance specifically, T-Mobile again led the way by a considerable margin, posting an average 216Mbps download speed, compared to 128Mbps from Verizon and 85Mbps from AT&T.To read this article in full, please click here

Pros and cons of managed SASE

AmerCareRoyal, which provides disposable products for the food service and hospitality industries, is the product of six mergers and acquisitions over the past several years, and its former network security setup couldn’t keep up.Jeff DeSandre, who joined the company as CIO in 2019, wanted an SD-WAN platform that came with more advanced management options and firewalls. After looking at the market, he added threat detection and response capabilities to his wish list. “I was focused on getting our arms quickly around our wide area network and securing our edge, and then making sure that the solution I went with could scale to my long-term roadmap,” he says.To read this article in full, please click here

SASE enables augmented reality for glass manufacturer

O-I Glass, Inc., is a $4.6B manufacturer of distinctive glass bottles and jars; its customer roster includes producers of Scotch whiskey, French wine, German cola, Spanish olive oil, Caribbean rum, New Zealand pale ale, smoothie shots, juices, mineral water, milk, and yogurt.Headquartered in Ohio, O-I had been running an MPLS network to connect its 25,000 employees spread across 70 plants in 19 countries. But change was needed, says CIO Rodney Masney, to keep pace with the migration of applications to the cloud, the shift of workers to home offices, and the company’s efforts to re-imagine the glass manufacturing process.To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: NetOps is essential but undervalued in making multi-cloud decisions

By 2024, 88% of enterprises will use two or more infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, according to research by EMA, which believes that network infrastructure and operations teams must take a leadership role in defining network architecture that ensures the performance and security of their multi-cloud digital services.EMA recently polled a group of these enterprises, surveying 351 IT stakeholders, including 39% in network engineering, 21% in the CIO suite, 15% on cloud teams, and 11% in cybersecurity.EMA found that networking teams and network technology have become more important in 81% of multi-cloud strategies in recent years. Unfortunately, only 24% of research participants firmly believe that their networking teams have enough influence over cloud decision-making.To read this article in full, please click here

Telemetry steps into the enterprise-networking spotlight

Expect to hear a lot about telemetry this year as its use gains steam in open-source projects and vendors’ observability software.While telemetry has been used for monitoring network and application activity for years, historically it has been siloed in specific use cases, but with the advent of open-source application development along with ML- and AI-based systems, its use is expected expand significantly.“Traditional monitoring and/or siloed visibility does not work in a world driven by hybrid or cloud-native deployments, as application components have become smaller, more distributed, and shorter-lived,” said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. ““Now it’s more about using that telemetry data to watch over multiple operational domains so you can track experience in real time.”To read this article in full, please click here

Roundup of server vendors selling new Xeon processors

It’s only two years late, but the fourth generation of Xeon Scalable processors, aka Sapphire Rapids, is hitting the ground running, with every major OEM offering new servers featuring the chips.The 4th Gen Xeon Scalable is notable because it contains a number of specialty computing engines in addition to its x86 cores, and it also has lots of cores as well; up to 60. One of the special engines is for AI acceleration, as Intel is determined to make the CPU viable as an AI processor instead of GPUs. So not surprisingly, many of the new servers are built with AI processing in mind.To read this article in full, please click here

Roundup of server vendors using new Xeon processors

It’s only two years late, but the fourth generation of Xeon Scalable processors, aka Sapphire Rapids, is hitting the ground running, with every major OEM offering new servers featuring the chips.The 4th Gen Xeon Scalable is notable because it contains a number of specialty computing engines in addition to its x86 cores, and it also has lots of cores as well; up to 60. One of the special engines is for AI acceleration, as Intel is determined to make the CPU viable as an AI processor instead of GPUs. So not surprisingly, many of the new servers are built with AI processing in mind.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM boosts Power CPU core count…for Oracle

Last month, IBM quietly quietly announced it's planning to release a 24-core Power 10 processor specifically for the benefit of an Oracle database, and Oracle doesn’t know why.An announcement dated Dec. 13 called "a statement of general direction" detailed IBM’s plans around the Power S1014 server. The S1014 server is a single-socket, 4U rack mounted server with 16 NVMe SSDs and a maximum memory capacity of 64GB. The document said in part:"IBM intends to announce a high-density 24-core processor for the IBM Power S1014 system (MTM 9105-41B) to address application environments utilizing an Oracle Database with the Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licensing model. It intends to combine a robust compute throughput with the superior reliability and availability features of the IBM Power platform while complying with Oracle Database SE2 licensing guidelines."To read this article in full, please click here

Commands and setting for managing user accounts on Linux

If you’re administering a Linux server, chances are you have a lot of user accounts to manage and, along with these, a lot of files and settings to control. Here are some commands and issues that are important in setting up and managing user accounts and access rights.Dealing with IDs First, in managing user accounts, you need to be aware of both user IDs (UID) and group IDs (GID). Most accounts are set up with each user being the sole member of a group that has the same name as the user’s account. In fact, both are set up when an account is created using the useradd command. When you list a user’s home directory, you should see something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Commands and settings for managing user accounts on Linux

If you’re administering a Linux server, chances are you have a lot of user accounts to manage and, along with these, a lot of files and settings to control. Here are some commands and issues that are important in setting up and managing user accounts and access rights.Dealing with IDs First, in managing user accounts, you need to be aware of both user IDs (UID) and group IDs (GID). Most accounts are set up with each user being the sole member of a group that has the same name as the user’s account. In fact, both are set up when an account is created using the useradd command. When you list a user’s home directory, you should see something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Top 10 outages of 2022

The most significant network and service outages of 2022 had far-reaching consequences. Flights were grounded, virtual meetings cut off, and communications hindered.The culprits that took down major infrastructure and services providers were varied, too, according to analysis from ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. Maintenance-related errors were cited more than once: Canadian carrier Rogers Communications experienced a massive nationwide outage that was traced to a maintenance update, and a maintenance script error caused problems for software maker Atlassian.BGP misconfiguration also showed up in the top outage reports. Border gateway protocol tells Internet traffic what route to take, but if the routing information is incorrect, then traffic can be diverted to an improper route, which happened to Twitter. (Read more about US and worldwide outages in our weekly internet health check.)To read this article in full, please click here

What to expect from SASE certifications

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network architecture that rolls SD-WAN and security into a single, centrally-managed cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployment, improved security, and better performance.According to Gartner, SASE’s benefits are transformational because it can speed deployment time for new users, locations, applications, and devices, as well as reduce attack surfaces and shorten remediation times by as much as 95%.With the pandemic, adoption of SASE has been on an upward swing. Gartner predicts in its most recent SASE roadmap that 80% of enterprises will have adopted a SASE or SSE architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021. (Security service edge, or SSE, is a security-focused subset of SASE that’s basically SASE without SD-WAN.)To read this article in full, please click here

8 hot networking technologies for 2023

Despite the challenges posed by economic turmoil, epidemics, and political upheaval, network researchers are continuing to blaze new trails in innovation, performance, management, and security. In sum, 2023 is shaping up as a year of network evolution and transformation.Here are eight network technologies you will want to pay particularly close attention to.1. Unified SASE: Addresses hybrid workforce, hybrid clouds Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tightly integrates security and networking into a single platform. The technology uses a single-pass scanning architecture combined with a unified policy that's configured via a unified console that draws from a unified data lake. "This is significant for organizations to continue to provide a consistent and assured user experience while protecting users, devices, sites, and data amid the rapidly evolving dynamics coming in 2023," says Kelly Ahuja, CEO of networking and cybersecurity firm Versa Networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia, others promise to use new Intel Xeon processors

Intel has formally introduces its 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Sapphire Rapids) and the Intel Max Series CPUs and GPUs, which isn’t much of a secret as we have documented the processors here already, but there are a few new features to go along with them.Those new features include a virtual machine (VM) isolation solution and an independent trust verification service to help build what it calls the “industry’s most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio.”  To read this article in full, please click here

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