One of the first things Linux users need to learn is how to move around the Linux file system and, eventually, how to make it even easier to move around the file system. This post describes both the basic commands you need and some smart moves to make navigating easier.Absolute and relative paths
Before we get moving, it’s important to understand the difference between absolute paths (like /home/jdoe) and relative paths (like images/photos and ..). Absolute paths always begin with a / that, of course, represents the base of the file system. If the specified path doesn’t start with a /, it’s relative. Here are some examples of both relative and absolute paths:To read this article in full, please click here
You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities:
Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time
Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time)
Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time)
Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time)
Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.To read this article in full, please click here
You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities:
Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time
Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time)
Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time)
Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time)
Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’re looking to add more certifications to your resume, don’t forget about wireless. Whether you’re just starting your IT career, have been in IT before Wi-Fi was a thing, or even if you have a non-IT position, there are certifications to help prove your wireless knowledge and skills.For starters, there are vendor-neutral certifications from Certified Wireless Network Professionals (CWNP), one of the most popular programs in the wireless world. These are great if you aren’t already loyal to a networking brand. And even if you already have a favorite brand, these go deeper into the 802.11 standards and radio frequency (RF) technology without all the proprietary details and brand specifics.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux more command is a fairly obvious command to use when you want to scan through a text file a screen at a time, but there still might be quite a few things you don’t know about this command. For one thing, you don’t have to start at the top of the file if you don’t want to. Add an argument like +20 and you will start with the 20th line in the file with a command like that shown below.$ man +20 myfile
Note that the more command automatically adjusts itself to the number of lines in your terminal window. In addition, the last line displayed will not be a line from the file by default, but an indication of what percentage of the text has been displayed thus far – at least if there’s more text to follow. It will look like this:To read this article in full, please click here
Micron has introduced memory expansion modules that support the 2.0 generation of Compute Express Link (CXL) and come with up to 256GB of DRAM running over a PCIe x8 interface.CXL is an open interconnect standard with wide industry support that is meant to be a connection between machines allowing for the direct sharing of contents of memory. It is built on top of PCI Express for coherent memory access between a CPU and a device, such as a hardware accelerator, or a CPU and memory.PCIe is normally used in point-to-point communications, such as SSD to memory, while CXL will eventually support one-to-many communication. So far, CXL is capable of simple point-to-point communication only.To read this article in full, please click here
Networking giant Cisco’s final quarter of fiscal 2023 was a surprising success, as an easing of the supply chain crisis enabled the company to fulfill back orders and increase quarterly revenue by 16% year over year, reaching a total of $15.2 billion.Cisco’s said that total software-related revenue was up 17% year on year, and revenue from software subscription services rose 20%. That’s part of what the company refers to as its business model transformation, as slack overall demand for collaboration technology resulting from the easing of the pandemic creates the need for Cisco to target new types of business.Net income for the quarter jumped 41% year over year to $4 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
Data replication has stood the test of time, providing organizations with a reliable means of safeguarding critical information for decades. Replication creates redundant copies of vital data, ensuring its availability and resiliency in case of disasters or system failures. In this article, I will explore the intricacies of data replication, examining its fundamental components, types, and potential limitations.Data replication starts with the selection of a source volume or filesystem that needs protection. This source volume might be a virtual disk, often referred to as a LUN (logical unit number), sourced from a storage array or volume manager. It may also take the form of a filesystem. Replication can occur either at the block level, a common practice due to its efficiency, or at the filesystem level, although the latter tends to be less favored for its relatively inferior performance.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Israel-based Tower falls apart, as China fails to approve the deal before the companies' agreement deadline.
Intel's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Israel-based Tower falls apart, as China fails to approve the deal before the companies' agreement deadline.
Kneron has rolled out a new type of neural processing unit, the KL730, which integrates image signal processing and high energy efficiency for use in edge, security and automotive applications.The San Diego-based chip designer, in an announcement Tuesday, said that the KL730 is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A55 CPU, along with its own-brand, fourth- generation neural processing unit, as well as a host of connectivity options, including SD, USB 2 and 3, and Ethernet. Its image processing technology also packs in the ability to read high-definition inputs at up to 8MP at 90 frames per second, hardware dewarping for full panoramic views, and several other image signal processing features.To read this article in full, please click here
As enterprise networks get more complex, so do the firewall deployments.There are on-premises firewalls to manage, along with firewalls that are deployed in virtual machines and firewalls deployed in containers. There are firewalls for clouds and firewalls for data centers, firewalls for network perimeters, and firewalls for distributed offices. According to Gartner, by 2026, more than 60% of organizations will have more than one type of firewall deployment."A firewall used to be a box or a chasse with multiple cards," says Omdia analyst Fernando Montenegro. "Then we had a firewall in a virtual machine. And now we have a container form factor for a firewall because customers are deploying containers. And, oh, we need firewalls-as-a-service to support SASE."To read this article in full, please click here
The pandemic forced businesses to send employees home to work, but even in recovery, the workforce trend is going strong. Some remote work measures were considered a temporary fix, and now the hybrid work reality demands IT organizations reassess how they can deliver consistent support, service, and technology to employees wherever they decide to work.“There have been a lot of conversations about return to work, but it’s not really happening,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, during a recent webinar.To read this article in full, please click here
Linux shells like bash have a convenient way of remembering commands that you type, making it easy to run them again without having to retype them. Just use the history command (which is a bash built-in) and then use an exclamation point followed by the number shown in front of the command in the history command output that you want to rerun. Alternatively, you can back up to that command by pressing the up arrow key as many times as needed to reach that command and then press return. Don’t forget, though, that you can also set up commands you are likely to use often as aliases by adding a line like this to your ~/.bashrc file so that you don’t need to search for them in your command history. Here’s an example:To read this article in full, please click here
The latest quarterly report from Backblaze on hard drive reliability reveals a rise in failures among certain drives.Backblaze is a pure storage provider; cloud storage is all they do, and they dig deep into the statistics of hard drive failure and share their data with the industry. The company currently has a massive inventory of 241,297 hard disk drives of varying capacities and from various brands. (In recent quarters, Backblaze has added SSD performance to its measurements, but SSDs are still early in their deployment lifecycle, so patterns over time have yet to fully emerge.)To read this article in full, please click here
ECL has announced what it says will be the world’s first modular, sustainable, off-grid data center that uses hydrogen as its primary power source, promising carbon neutral performance and 99.9999% uptime.Modular data centers are designed to go together like building blocks, allowing companies to start small and grow as their capacity needs increase. The ECL data centers will come in 1 megawatt blocks.ECL's data-center-as-a-service offering is geared primarily to mid-sized data center operators, as well as large companies with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT environments. It claims its data centers will have a total cost of ownership that's two-thirds of what a traditional colocation data center environment would cost when measured over five years.To read this article in full, please click here
Pricing API will provide an inventory of public services and SKUs along with account-specific custom prices and discounts with additional metadata, down to the SKU level.
Three of Red Hat’s chief enterprise Linux competitors are banding together to create an alternative to Red Hat-based software, after the company made changes to its terms of use earlier this summer, making it more difficult to access its source code.Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ, in a joint statement issued Thursday, said that the new Open Enterprise Linux Association will “encourage the development” of Linux distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by providing free access to source code.“With OpenELA, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE join forces with the open source community to ensure a stable and resilient future for both upstream and downstream communities to leverage Enterprise Linux,” said CIQ CEO Gregory Kurtzer, in the statement.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco continued filling its shopping bag with various technology firms – this time saying it intended to acquire cloud native mobile core developer Working Group Two (WG2) for an undisclosed amount.The WG2 buy is Cisco’s fifth since June and its nineth this year. WG2 is known for its mobile technology that helps public and private service providers and enterprise customers build secure and scalable mobile backbones.The technology will become part of Cisco’s Mobility Services platform which offers a full-stack cloud-native converged core network and distributed edge support.Introduced in February, the Mobility Service is designed to simplify how service providers build, manage, and deliver new mobile services globally at scale and supports a variety of technologies to bring 5G, edge, and cloud technologies, Cisco says.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to solidify its position as the dominant global supplier of chips that support generative AI workoads, Nvidia announced new GPUs and servers as well as a range of new software offerings at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles this week.On the hardware side, Nvidia announced a new line of servers, the OVX series. The server line is designed to use up to eight of the company’s L40S GPUs. The GPUs are based on the company's Ada Lovelace architecture, which succeeded Ampere as the microarchitecture in use in its main line graphics cards. Each L40S packs 48GB of memory and is designed with complex AI workloads in mind, boasting 1.45 petaflops of tensor processing power.To read this article in full, please click here
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