After the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday released a recovery script for organizations affected by a massive ransomware attack targeting VMWare ESXi servers worldwide, reports surfaced that the malware evolved in a way that made earlier recovery procedures ineffective.The attacks, aimed at VMware’s ESXi bare metal hypervisor, were first made public February 3 by the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR), and target ESXi instances running older versions of the software, or those that have not been patched to current standards. Some 3,800 servers have been affected globally, CISA and the FBI said.To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here
IBM disputes a report that it has de-emphasized development of its Unix-based AIX operating system by moving development to India and said that it remains committed to the venerable OS.Commentary in The Register said AIX development had been transferred to India with a sub-headline not to expect "any more big AIX news." IBM’s response is that there has always been AIX development in India, and U.S.-based talent remains at work on the Power platform, which runs AIX.“For this transition, every single person that was on my US team on the day that we announced this was mapped to a new role where we needed them to help us next,” said Mark Figley, vice president of IBM Power development. To read this article in full, please click here
The awk, gawk and sed commands on Linux are extremely versatile tools for manipulating text, rearranging columns, generating reports and modifying file content.Using awk and gawk
To select portions of command output using gawk, you can try commands like those below. The first displays the first field in the output of the date command. The second displays the last field. Since NF represents the number of fields in the command output, $NF represents the value of the last field.$ date | awk '{print $1}'
Sat
$ date | awk '{print $NF}'
2023
Note that on Linux systems today, awk is usually a symbolic link to gawk, so you can type either command and get the same result. Here's what you'll probably see when you do a long listing of the awk executable:To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh. In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh. In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here
A computer network as we usually visualize it involves various cables (Ethernet, fiber optic, coaxial) connecting to appliances like routers and switches, which direct data packets where they need to go.The rise of Wi-Fi and cellular data networks have replaced some of those wires with wireless signals, but even radio waves are in the realm of the physical, and they connect back to cell towers or Wi-Fi access points.In the seven-layer OSI network reference model, all of that network equipment, processing, and communication occupies the lowest three layers: Level 3 (the network), Level 2 (the data link), and Level 1 (the physical layer).To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this month AMD quietly disclosed 31 new CPU vulnerabilities affecting both its Ryzen desktop chips and EPYC data center processors. AMD disclosed the flaws in coordination with several researchers, including teams from Google, Apple, and Oracle.AMD typically releases vulnerability findings twice a year, in May and November, but decided to release the fixes early due to the relatively large number of new vulnerabilities and the timing of the mitigations.Despite the severity and number of flaws, AMD posted the lists to its security page. The flaws include BIOS/UEFI revisions that AMD has distributed to its OEMs. Since every OEM has a different BIOS/UEFI, it’s best to check with your motherboard maker or system vendor to see if you need the updates.To read this article in full, please click here
Startup ECL has emerged from stealth mode with some mighty big plans: to reinvent the data-center industry with hydrogen-powered modular data centers that use no local power and water.Rather than drawing power from the electrical grid the company will generate electricity for its data centers using hydrogen fuel cells. The only byproduct is water either as a liquid or vapor that is used for cooling with the leftovers being returned to the local environment. “So we can give back to the community some of the water that we’re producing,” said ECL founder and CEO Yuval Bachar, who previously helped design data centers for Facebook and LinkedIn.To read this article in full, please click here
Red Hat and Oracle announced jointly Tuesday that they have partnered to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, broadening Oracle’s available public cloud options and creating a measure of détente between two long-standing competitors.The announcement couched the news as step one in a broader partnership between Red Hat and Oracle, but provided details mostly of the OCI integration. RHEL will be available on Oracle’s VMs, ranging in size from 1 to 80 CPU cores and from 1GB of memory up to 1024GB. Initial support will be limited to the newer OCI virtual machine shapes, which use AMD, Intel and Arm processors.To read this article in full, please click here
Linux systems support a number of file editors – like vi, vim, neovim, ne, GNU Emacs etc. But you can also install an editor that allows you to view the contents of and make changes to binary files--hexedit.With hexedit, you can edit images, executables and other binaries, though you have to know a lot about the format of the file you’re editing to make valid changes that don't disrupt the file's format. After all, you'll be editing one byte at a time. This is not meant to imply that you can't use this command for viewing or editing text files. There's just little or no reason to do that.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks is releasing a new version of its Apstra intent-based networking software that includes more extensive configuration capabilities, additional multivendor hardware and software support, and improved environmental analytics.Apstra keeps a real-time repository of configuration, telemetry and validation information to ensure a network is doing what the enterprise wants it to do. Companies can use Apstra's automation capabilities to deliver consistent network and security policies for workloads across physical and virtual infrastructures.In addition, Apstra performs regular network checks to safeguard configurations. It's hardware agnostic, so it can be integrated to work with Juniper’s networking products as well as boxes from Cisco, Arista, Dell, Microsoft and Nvidia.To read this article in full, please click here
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said its second infrastructure region in Australia has been made available for customers.The new region in Melbourne (codenamed: ap-southeast-4), which was first announced in December 2020, will consist of three availability zones.Availability zones are the building blocks of an AWS region that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.AWS had launched its first infrastructure region in Sydney in 2012, which also has three availability zones.Other than the two regions, Australia is home to seven Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in Australia, backed by a Regional Edge cache in Sydney. The company had launched an additional CloudFront point of presence (PoP) in Perth in 2018.To read this article in full, please click here
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
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
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
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
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
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
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