If you want to check a text file for typos, Linux can help.It has a couple of tools and a number of commands that can point out the errors including aspell and enchant, and I’ll share a script that I put together recently that looks for typos using the system's words file.Using aspell
aspell is very clever tool that will point out typos and make it surprisingly easy to fix them. When used to make changes to a single file, it reverses the text and background colors to highlight misspelled words. You would start it with a command like this:$ aspell check myfile
If aspell detects no typos, it simply exits. Otherwise, it will open with a display that contains the file text (or just the top lines depending on the length of the file) followed by a list of suggested replacement words and, below that, a list of the commands that you can run. The first typo (or suspected typo) will be displayed with the text and background colors reversed as shown below.To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle and Nvidia have extended their partnership to help speed customer adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) services.As part of the deal, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is Oracle’s cloud service, will beef up the infrastructure with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, both the Ampere A100 currently on the market and the upcoming Hopper H100. Oracle will also add Nvidia’s AI software stack that supports AI training and deep learning.This includes an upcoming release of Nvidia AI Enterprise software with access to Nvidia’s AI development and deployment platform that provides processing engines for each step of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment.To read this article in full, please click here
Conventional wisdom says, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Chaos engineering says, ‘Let’s try to break it anyway, just to see what happens.’The online group Chaos Community defines chaos engineering as “the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.”Practitioners of chaos engineering essentially stress test the system and then compare what they think might happen with what actually does. The goal is to improve resiliency.For network practitioners who have spent their entire careers focused on keeping the network up and running, the idea of intentionally trying to bring it down might seem a little crazy.To read this article in full, please click here
Freeman Health System has around 8,000 connected medical devices in its 30 facilities in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Many of these devices have the potential to turn deadly at any moment. "That’s the doomsday scenario that everyone is afraid of," says Skip Rollins, the hospital chain's CIO and CISO.Rollins would love to be able to scan the devices for vulnerabilities and install security software on them to ensure that they aren't being hacked. But he can't."The vendors in this space are very uncooperative," he says. "They all have proprietary operating systems and proprietary tools. We can't scan these devices. We can't put security software on these devices. We can't see anything they're doing. And the vendors intentionally deliver them that way."To read this article in full, please click here
SolarWinds, the maker of a well-known and widely used suite of IT management software products, announced this week that it’s expanding to the cloud, with the release of Observability, a cloud-native, SaaS-based IT management service that is also available for hybrid cloud environments.The basic idea of Observability is to provide a more holistic, integrated overview of an end-user company’s IT systems, using a single-pane-of-glass interface to track data from network, infrastructure, application and database sources. The system's machine learning techniques are designed to bolster security via anomaly detection.To read this article in full, please click here
This time last year, AMD had no networking products. Today, it has three, thanks to two separate acquisitions. It's a shift that's strengthening the company’s position against competitors like Intel and Nvidia by providing a full suite of silicon, including for the enterprise.To fill out its portfolio and stay competitive, AMD had to build up its offerings of workload accelerators and its networking technologies. It's a very active market, with Nvidia (BlueField), Intel (FPGA-based smartNICs), Marvell Technology (Octeon), and Broadcom (Stingray) all competing for the smartNIC market. AMD risked being left behind.To read this article in full, please click here
At a time when most enterprises are planning cloud deployments and many are reportedly sharpening their mainframe exit strategy, IBM is seeing double-digit growth in its big iron business for the quarter ended September.The company, which declared its third quarter results on Wednesday, reported a 98% jump in revenue for its z line of mainframe computer in terms of constant currency (that is, eliminating the effect of currency fluctuations). IBM, which buckets mainframes under its infrastructure line of business, released the z16 mainframe in April before beginning to sell it in the second quarter.To read this article in full, please click here
A semiconductor startup is targeting the high-performance computing (HPC), claiming that in some instances, GPUs aren’t the best fit for the task.The chip is known for now as Thunderbird but will get a formal name when it launches in Q1 of 2023, according to Doug Norton, vice president of business development at InspireSemi. Thunderbird is mounted on a PCI Express card that plugs into a server, just as GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD do.The Thunderbird chip contains 2,560 RISC-V cores, and there are two chips per card. GPUs also come with thousands of cores but CPUs have less than 100, except for the Ampere Altra Max, with 128 cores.To read this article in full, please click here
The most important change to wide-area networking over the past few years has been the widespread deployment of software-defined WAN technology, (SD-WAN), which changes how networking professionals optimize and secure WAN connectivity.What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN uses software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers, remote offices and cloud resources. Like its technology brother software-defined networking (SDN), SD-WAN works by decoupling the control plane from the data plane.To read this article in full, please click here
Automation can make a big difference in repetitive networking tasks, and that’s just what we did to streamline an enterprise switch upgrade using scripts we created with Python and a set of open-source tools.The project reaped several benefits, three of which were eliminating much human error inherent in the manual process, faster deployment overall, and significant cost savings.Upgrading a large, switched network is always a challenge. The typical solution is to carefully document the old switch configurations and the wiring to the patch panel, then manually configure the new switches and replace the wiring. The endpoints must be carefully tracked so they are assigned to the appropriate VLAN and have the correct interface configuration.To read this article in full, please click here
As Cisco celebrates the 25th anniversary of Cisco Networking Academy, the company on Tuesday announced two new certifications and a plan to provide networking, cybersecurity and general IT training to 25 million people over the next 10 years.The training will be done through the company's networking academy, an IT skills-to-jobs program that provides IT courses, learning simulators, and hands-on learning opportunities, supporting instructors and learners in 190 countries. To date, Cisco says more than 17.5 million global learners have taken Cisco Networking Academy courses to gain IT skills, with 95% of students attributing their post-course job or education opportunity to Cisco Networking Academy.To read this article in full, please click here
New capabilities in Fortinet's secure access service edge (SASE) package are designed to help customers better secure their private and cloud-based assets.Fortinet added Secure Private Access and Secure SaaS Access features to its FortiSASE security platform, which includes SD-WAN, secure web gateway, firewall as a service, and zero-trust network access. All of Fortinet’s offerings run on top of its FortiOS operating system.To read this article in full, please click here
T-Mobile retained its place as the consensus fastest mobile data provider in the US, posting a median download speed of 116Mbps and outstripping Verizon and AT&T by a roughly two-fold margin in the latest market analysis report from network analysis firm Ookla. Additionally, the report—based on tests in the third quarter—found that Spectrum topped the rankings for fastest fixed broadband service, beating out Cox and Xfinity for the top spot with a median download speed of 211Mbps.The figures were gathered via Ookla’s online Speedtest website, which lets users test their internet connections for upload speed, download speed, latency and more.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is using its high-powered Silicon One chip technology to turn up the power and efficiency of its Nexus family of data center, hyperscaler and cloud switches.The company rolled out a new high-end Nexus switch for the data center and one aimed at disaggregated applications. Cisco also added an 800Gb Ethernet module. Each of the new additions is powered by the company’s advanced Silicon One technology. Introduced in 2019, Cisco’s Silicon One architecture uses the vendor’s custom chip technology, which features optical-routing silicon, deep buffering with rich QoS, and programmable forwarding.Silicon One boxes are programmable and can be customized for a range of applications from a single chipset, eliminating the need to deploy multiple, specific silicon for standalone processors, line-card processors, and fabric elements, according to Cisco. This is accomplished with a common and unified P4 programmable-forwarding code and SDK, Cisco says.To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle is giving cloud control to its partners and customers with the launch of Oracle Alloy, an infrastructure platform that lets organizations build and deploy custom cloud services using their own hardware and data centers.The Alloy platform is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the vendor’s portfolio of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services.“Oracle has spent a lot of money and effort to build out OCI. They’re really keen on growing share, and they’re going after programs like Alloy aggressively to do so,” said analyst Chris Kanaracus, a research director in IDC’s worldwide infrastructure practice. “Oracle is incentivized to be as appealing to customers – on economics and flexibility and localization – as possible.”To read this article in full, please click here
As the priorities of IT are driven by the needs to support business goals, one of the increasingly important needs IT leaders must to pay attention to is attracting and retaining high-quality employees.“IT now matters more than ever in the recruitment, retention, employee engagement and high performance of all enterprise employees, not just IT.” said Tina Nunno, Gartner vice president and fellow the opening keynote for the firms IT Symposium/Xpo 2022.A new Gartner survey found that only 31% of employees said that they have the technology they need, so there is an opportunity there for CIO’s to make a difference. “Employers who revolutionize the work and empower their workers with technology will become the employers of choice,” Nunno said.To read this article in full, please click here
IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence and seek technologies that can help them optimize resilience, scale industry-specific solutions and product delivery, and pioneer new forms of engagement, according to the 10 top strategic technology trends for 2023 unveiled at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo 2022.These include multiple forms of wireless, artificial intelligence, and sustainability, according to Frances Karamouzis, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, and external events are making IT pros’ decisions about them even more difficult.“Depending on what region of the world you are in there are lots of looming issues such as a potential recession, supply chain concerns, the war in Ukraine and that impact, as well as energy-related issues,” Karamouzis said.To read this article in full, please click here
Startup Graphiant emerged from stealth mode last month with what it describes as an enterprise-grade network service that provides the privacy, security, and reliability of MPLS but with the cost effectiveness, agility, and scalability of broadband internet.In addition, the service, called Graphiant Network Edge, is simpler to deploy and manage than the hybrid SD-WAN/MPLS networks that many enterprises wind up with when they adopt SD-WAN, according to Graphiant CEO Khalid Raza.To read this article in full, please click here
If you are sitting in front of a Linux system, you can always pop open a browser and query topics of interest on Wikipedia. On the other hand, if you’re logged on through a terminal emulator like PuTTY or you just prefer using the command line, there is another option: wikit.Wikit is a tool that queries Wikipedia from the command line and provides summaries of its content on a huge collection of topics. It's easy to use and allows you to quickly query and, if you want, save the rendered information in a file.How to use wikit
One of the things Wikipedia will not, at least currently, tell you about is wikit itself. So, this post will provide information on the command and show you how you can use it.To read this article in full, please click here
Network World