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Using the zip and zipcloak commands on Linux
Both the Linux zip and zipcloak commands can create encrypted zip files, but they have some important and interesting differences. Here’s what you need to know about how they work and what you should understand when using them.zip The zip command provides an easy way to take a group of files and squeeze their content into a single smaller file. To join a group of files into a single file—often done to make copying them to other systems considerably easier—use a command like the one shown below. The first argument is the name to be used for the zip file and is followed by the list of files to be included.To read this article in full, please click here
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UK competition agency launches inquiry into Broadcom’s $61B VMware buy
The UK’s Competition and Market’s Authority (CMA) has announced it is investigating Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware to determine whether the deal would raise problems for competition.Semiconductor manufacturer and infrastructure software giant Broadcom first announced its intention to acquire VMware in May, in a deal worth $61 billion in stock and cash. However, not everyone is happy with the proposed deal, with senior analyst for Forrester, Tracy Woo, noting back in September that Broadcom had a poor track record when it came to previous acquisitions.To read this article in full, please click here
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Dell expands data-protection product line
Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ways to look at logged in users on Linux
There are quite a few ways on Linux to get a list of the users logged into the system and see what they are doing. The commands described in this article all provide very useful information.users The users command displays a simple list of logged-in users. In this example, one user is logged in twice and is, therefore, listed twice.$ users nemo popeye shs shs Note that the users are listed in alphabetical order.who The who command provides additional information. The login terminal is identified along with the login date and time. The final field displays the terminal or the IP address of the connecting system.To read this article in full, please click here
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AMD partners with Arm developer for exascale computing
AMD has announced plans to work with French chip designer SiPearl to build exascale-level supercomputing systems that use SiPearl's Arm-based Rhea processor with AMD's Instinct GPU accelerators.SiPearl is a relatively small startup that began operation in 2019 with a license for Arm’s Neoverse high-performance technology. It has forged a number of alliances with partners including Intel, Nvidia, HPE, and Graphcore.SiPearl is also involved with the European Processor Initiative (EPI), a consortium selected by the European Union to support the development of a European microprocessor specifically for high performance computing (HPC), as well as emerging applications such as artificial intelligence. The EPI's goal is to develop an Arm-based processor for an exascale supercomputer by 2023.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco announces $600M restructuring plan, including layoffs
Cisco today said it will take a $600 million charge associated with layoffs and restructuring of its businesses. In an 8-K filing for its fiscal first-quarter, the company announced a restructuring plan “in order to rebalance the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas. This rebalancing will include talent movement options and restructuring.” The company said it will make some real estate changes as well.During a financial call with analysts, CEO Chuck Robbins talked briefly about the restructuring but said employees will hear more details on Thursday.To read this article in full, please click here
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Palo Alto targets zero-day threats with new firewall software
Palo Alto Networks has released next-generation firewall (NGFW) software that includes some 50 new features aimed at helping enterprise organizations battle zero-day threats and advanced malware attacks.The new features are built into the latest version of Palo Alto's firewall operating system – PAN 11.0 Nova – and include upgraded malware sandboxing for the company’s WildFire malware-analysis service, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and a new cloud access security broker (CASB).WildFire is Palo Alto’s on-prem or cloud-based malware sandbox that is closely integrated with Palo Alto’s firewalls. When a firewall detects anomalies, it sends data to WildFire for analysis. WildFire uses machine learning, static analysis, and other analytics to discover threats, malware and zero-day threats, according to the vendor.To read this article in full, please click here
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Networking for remote work puts the emphasis on people, not sites
Many companies had to support work-from-home (WFH) during COVID, and most looked forward to having their staff back in the office. Most now tell me that some or all of the staff isn’t coming back, and that remote work is a given for at least some positions, likely for a very long time. That’s opened major questions about how these now-forever-roaming workers are connected to information resources and to each other.Didn’t we solve this already, with Zoom and Teams? Sort of. Collaborative video applications provide a reasonable substitute for meetings, but you still have the challenge of application access and information delivery. A bit over 80% of enterprises I’ve talked with say they need to make a remote worker look like they’re at their desk, and they need to be able to work as though they were as well.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco study: Network teams look to SDN, automation to manage multicloud operations
Networking teams have been challenged to provide hybrid workers with secure access to cloud-based applications, and they’re looking for greater automation and additional visibility tools to help them manage today’s diverse enterprise workloads.That’s among the key findings of Cisco’s new Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report, which surveyed 2,500 IT decision makers in 13 countries to discern the trends and priorities of organizations that are managing workloads across multiple private, public cloud and edge computing environments. Cisco said its report is aimed at looking at how these multicloud environments impact network operations.To read this article in full, please click here
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AMD gives new Epyc processors a big launch with help from partners
AMD has officially launched the fourth-generation of its Epyc server processors for high performance computing (HPC) in the data center, and all the top OEMs showed up for the party.Officially named the Epyc 9004 but commonly referred to by its codename “Genoa,” the new chip is based on the fourth generation of AMD’s Zen microarchitecture and built on a 5nm manufacturing process by TSMC.Thanks to its chiplet design, which breaks the monolithic CPU into smaller “chiplets” that are tied together with a high speed interconnect, Genoa has up to 96 cores (double Intel’s best at the moment). The chiplets, with 16 cores each, are easier to manufacture than a single 96-core CPU. Genoa includes the latest I/O technology, such as PCI Express 5.0, 12 channels of DDR5 memory, and CXL 1.1.To read this article in full, please click here
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HPE launches supercomputers for the enterprise
Supercomputers are super expensive, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced plans to make supercomputing accessible for more enterprises by offering scaled down, more affordable versions of its Cray supercomputers.The new portfolio includes HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, which are based on the Frontier exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs. These servers come with the full array of hardware, including compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software, and flexible power and cooling options.To read this article in full, please click here
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World’s fastest supercomputer is still Frontier, 2.5X faster than #2
Frontier, which became the first exascale supercomputer in June and ranked number one among the fastest in the world, retained that title in the new TOP500 semiannual list of the world’s fastest.Without any increase in its speed—1.102EFLOP/s—Frontier still managed to score 2.5 times faster that the number two finisher, Fugaku, which also came in second in the June rankings. An exascale computer is one that can perform 1018 (one quintillion) floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOP/s).Despite doubling its maximum speed since it was ranked number three in June, the Lumi supercomputer remained in third-place.There was just one new member of the top-ten list, and that was Leonardo, which came in fourth after finishing a distant 150th in the TOP500 rankings in June.To read this article in full, please click here
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Looking at user login time with the ac command
While not a very well known Linux command, ac can provide very useful stats on user login time. In its simplest form, it will show you how much time users have spent on the system in the time period covered by the wtmp file. All you have to type is “ac” to get a figure showing overall login time for all users.$ ac total 8360.60 The figure above indicates that users spent a total of 8,360.6 hours on the system. Looking at the wtmp file with the who command, we can see that the saved logins started on June 6th – a little more than 6 months earlier.$ who /var/log/wtmp | head -2 shs tty2 2022-06-06 16:00 (tty2) shs pts/1 2022-06-06 16:23 (192.168.0.12) To look at the times by user, add the -p (people) argument.To read this article in full, please click here
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Should security systems be the network?
Recently during a research interview with a small but fast-growing business, for the first time I encountered an organization with a “no-network-vendor” network. That is, instead of using Cisco or Dell or even a white-box solution for switching and routing, the company deployed only Fortinet equipment for its entire network. That is, every network component is part of the security infrastructure for them.They built the network this way not just to bake security into its core (a great idea in itself) but also for: ease of management: they have one tool, it manages every component ease of deployment: they have only two or three versions of each appliance, all the same except for capacity and port count ease of expansion to new locations: every site is the same as any other site of similar size They have a small stock of replacement appliances on the shelf, with which they provide rapid recovery for all locations. They could easily also consume security-operations center as-a-service, and use professional services for nearly all the rest of their network operations. In essence, their security solution could become their complete network solution as well.To read this article in full, please click here
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8 free, cheap, and hands-on ways to learn about network administration
A diploma and certifications are great to have, but hands-on experience can take you even further than your educational accomplishments. Playing around with the technology might help you retain information better, too. So don’t just read how to do something, but actually do it.You probably don’t have a rack full of enterprise routers and switches to play around with, but there are some free and budget-friendly ways to get experience. You just need some time and eagerness to learn.Here are eight ideas to get you some of that hands-on experience with networking, starting with simpler projects and progressing to more complex ones. Some of the earlier tasks may just take just a few minutes, while others are more for a weekend project.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM goes big on quantum-computer hardware, software
IBM has rolled out its most powerful quantum-computing system so far—the Osprey, a 433-qubit machine that supports three times more qubits than its current Eagle system, and reiterated its plan to have a 1,121-qubit processor, called Condor, out in 2023.At the IBM Quantum Summit 2022, the company also said it was continuing development of a modular quantum platform called System Two that will combine multiple processors into a single system with new communication links that IBM says will use hybrid-cloud middleware to integrate quantum and classical workflows.In addition IBM said it will continue to prototype quantum software applications for specific use cases. By 2025, IBM said, developers will be able to explore quantum machine-learning applications and more.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel announces CPUs and GPUs for high-performance computing
Intel has announced new processors with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) geared toward high-performance computing (HPC), supercomputing, and artificial intelligence (AI).The products are known as the Xeon CPU Max series and GPU Max series. The chips are based on existing technology; the CPU is 4th Generation Xeon Scalable, aka Sapphire Rapids, and the GPU is Ponte Vecchio, the data center version of Intel's Xe GPU technology.To read this article in full, please click here
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VMware adds more security for diverse cloud workloads
VMware has added more security features to its forthcoming on-demand multi-cloud networking and security service called Northstar that it previewed during its August VMware Explore 2022 conference.VMware said then that Northstar will provide a central console for turning up networking and security services across private clouds and VMware Cloud deployments that run on public clouds. It will include VMware services such as Network Detection and Response, NSX Intelligence, advanced load balancing and Web Application Firewall. Within Northstar, Network Detection and Response support will provide scalable threat detection and response for workloads deployed in private and/or public clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
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Bash: A primer for more effective use of the Linux bash shell
Bash is not just one of the most popular shells on Linux systems, it actually predates Linux by a couple of years. An acronym for the “GNU Bourne-Again Shell”, bash not only provides a comfortable and flexible command line, it delivers a large suite of scripting tools—if/then commands, case statements, functions, etc.—that allow users to build complex and powerful scripts.This post contains a collection of articles about important aspects of bash that will help you make better use of this versatile shell.Commands vs bash builtins While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself. To get a list of the bash builtins, just type “help” when you’re on the bash command line. For more about built-ins, refer to “How to tell if you’re using a bash builtin”.To read this article in full, please click here
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VMware says its SD-WAN client makes remote-access VPNs unnecessary
VMware is prepping client software for individual devices to connect to its SD-WAN services without the need for remote-access VPNs.Aimed at the work-from-home or hybrid worker, the company will launch VMware SD-WAN Client software that provides secure access to PCs and mobile devices, and provides management, visibility, and policy support as if they were in the office. When it becomes generally available in the spring, it will include versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android and be bundled with the VMware SD-WAN package.“Post pandemic secure remote access is obviously important, and all of the challenges that led IT to deploy SD-WAN in the first place, like simplicity of management at scale, automation, visibility, and network error correction, are amplified as people work from home,” said Craig Connors, vice president and general manager of SASE Business at VMware. “The software client will bring all of that SD-WAN technology right to your desktop or mobile phone and leapfrog legacy remote access VPNs via a cloud-native, cloud-delivered package.”To read this article in full, please click here