The which, whereis and whatis commands on a Linux system provide information about commands. They provide related but not identical information. In this post, we’ll check out the differences and provide a script for getting information that’s available from all three commands. We’ll also explore some sample commands for looking at secondary (i.e., not section 1) man pages.which
The which command will show you the file-system location for a command’s executable. This is the file that is read and run whenever you type the command name.$ which date
/usr/bin/date
$ which shutdown
/usr/sbin/shutdown
Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux
The which command will also report on your aliases and show you the commands they invoke.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has added a new class of servers to its Unified Computing System that are more flexible and outfitted with management software geared to hybrid cloud.The UCS X-Series is the first major redisign since UCS hit the market in 2009. The company says the modular hardware architecture is future-proofed because it can accomodate new generations of processors, storage, nonvolatile memory, accelerators, and interconnects as they come along. Prior UCS chassis were either blade systems for power efficiency or rack systems for expandability, but the UCS X-Series combines both in the same chassis.This means the single server type is able to support a broader range of tasks, from virtualized workloads, traditional enterprise applications, and databases to private cloud and cloud-native applications. The individual modules are interconnected into a fabric that can support IP networking, Fibre Channel SAN, and management connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
Super Micro Computer, a.k.a. Supermicro, is adding a range of liquid cooling solutions to its server products. Working with customers, Supermicro will design, implement and test the latest liquid cooling technologies at the rack level. Customers who implement liquid cooling can improve data center PUE (power usage effectiveness) and TCO by more than 40% by cutting power costs, the company says.The cooling is for new systems coming to market. Like most OEMs that support liquid cooling, Supermicro isn’t recommending retrofits to existing installations. It cites two reasons: One, it would be expensive, as you’d have to drill into the rack and server chassis to make room for the cooling piping. And two, the entire rack or cluster would have to be inactive while the retrofit was being done, and most firms won’t tolerate that.To read this article in full, please click here
To many of us, Morpheus is a character played by Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix movies. To others, Morpheus is the Greek god of sleep and dreams. To others still, Morpheus is a digital synthesizer from the early ‘90s that developed a cult following.The Morpheus we’re discussing today, however, is of far greater relevance to enterprise IT professionals who constantly are searching for ways to protect their networks from the ever-present threat of hackers.Developed by a team at the University of Michigan, this Morpheus is a CPU that ingeniously protects against hacking attempts by using encryption that changes every few milliseconds, which prevents intruders from getting a fix on how a system is set up. This makes cracking the encryption nearly impossible and is sure to drive hackers crazy.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use exiftool. It's an app that you can install on your Linux system to pull metadata from jpg and png files. That metadata provides information such as the date the image was created or last modified, the image size in pixels and the image resolution.
We probably wouldn’t have a Digital Age without silicon.The second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust (oxygen is No. 1), silicon is cheap and has the ability to conduct electricity and/or act as an insulator. Converted into silicon wafers, it powers the computers, smartphones and other electronic devices we use to work and, importantly, to avoid work. So clearly silicon is indispensable.Or maybe not. Our insatiable demand for more and more data, along with the need to store it, is pushing the limits of what silicon can deliver in terms of speed, density, and security. In a bid to find a worthy successor to silicon-based memory devices, MIT physicists are zeroing in something called antiferromagnets.To read this article in full, please click here
If you run into problems building, testing or running complex bash scripts, don't lose heart. There are many ways you can help ensure that your scripts will work flawlessly. In this post, we'll examine some ways you can lessen the likelihood of errors and how to go about doing some simple but very effective troubleshooting.Through a combination of robust logic that tests for possible problems and some troubleshooting to help detect errors, your scripts are likely to be ready for showtime very quickly.Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux
Building the outer edges first
One way to avoid syntactical errors in scripts is to start your for and while loops, case statements and if/then commands using the outer logic first. If you start your script logic using a syntactical "skeleton", you won't forget to end it properly.To read this article in full, please click here
Moving compute and storage resources to edge locations can reduce latency and bandwidth needs, improve performance and save money. At the same time, widespread edge computing deployments can introduce significant management challenges. Servers can be hard enough to maintain when they’re in an on-prem data center. What if they’re deployed in the middle of nowhere?Energy companies know all too well the challenges of remote computing.“When we drill a well, it’s always in the middle of nowhere,” says Dingzhou Cao, senior advisor for data science at independent shale producer Devon Energy, a Fortune 500 company based in Oklahoma City, Okla.To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle is not the first name in cloud computing, but never let it be said Larry and company don’t try. It is making a big push with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) by offering Arm processor instances and new initiatives with the open-source community.The new instances are powered by Altra, Ampere’s 64-bit Arm processor, and are priced at 1 cent per core hour, which Oracle claims is the lowest price/performance available when compared to any x86 instance on a per-core basis.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks is releasing the latest version of its Apstra intent-based networking software that includes new monitoring features and configuration templates as well as better integration with VMware’s NSX virtualization and security platform.In January, Juniper bought Apstra and its Apstra Operating System (AOS), which was developed from the start to support IBN features. Once deployed, AOS—now just called Apstra—keeps a real-time repository of configuration, telemetry and validation information to ensure the network is doing what customers want it to do. Apstra also includes automation features to provide consistent network and security policies for workloads across physical and virtual infrastructures.To read this article in full, please click here
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
If you need to check the contents of a compressed text file on Linux, you don't have to uncompress it first. Instead, you can use a zcat or bzcat command to extract and display file contents while leaving the file intact. The "cat" in each command name tells you that the command's purpose is to display content. The "z" tells you that it works with compressed files.Which of the two commands to use depends on the type of compressed file you are examining. If the file was compressed with gzip or zip, you would use the zcat command. If the file was compressed with bzip2, you would use the bzcat command. On some systems, zcat might be called gzcat.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the help command. It's a command that provides useful information on bash "builtins". Those are commands that are built into, in other words "part of" the bash shell, not executables on their own.
Just six months after unveiling its first AI inferencing processor, Mythic AI has announced a new round of funding for $70 million in Series C investment to begin mass production of its chips and to develop its next generation of hardware and software products.In November, the company announced the M1108 Analog Matrix Processor (AMP) aimed at edge AI deployments across a wide range of applications, including manufacturing, video surveillance, smart cities, smart homes, AR/VR, and drones.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI"
For a company that is nine years old and has zero sales, it’s got some heavy hitters behind it. The new investment round was led by led by venture fund giant BlackRock and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Other investors include Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.To read this article in full, please click here
Financial traders rely heavily on computer financial simulations for making buying and selling decisions. Specifically, “Monte Carlo” simulations are used to assess risk and simulate prices for a wide range of financial instruments. These simulations also can be used in corporate finance and for portfolio management.But in a digital world where other industries routinely leverage real-time data, financial traders are working with the digital equivalent of the Pony Express. That’s because Monte Carlo simulations involve such an insanely large number of complex calculations that they consume more time and computational resources than a 14-team, two-quarterback online fantasy football league with Superflex position.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’ve never used Gimp—a free image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and other operating systems—you might be quite surprised by its capabilitiesI use it for everything from Facebook posts when the available backgrounds don’t work well for what I want to say to political buttons that I design and press out using a button-making machine.Converting and manipulating image files with Linux commands
Gimp can do everything from resizing and cropping images to adding text, changing colors or distorting images in artistic ways. You can use it to draw with its pencil or paintbrush and layer additional images. It’s quite a versatile tool. Yet I only recently noticed that it can also be used to manipulate PDF files, not just the many types of image files that most people use it to create, modify or enhance.To read this article in full, please click here
A shortage of all sorts of processors and other components could affect the availability and price of IT hardware for the next 12 to 18 months, according to CEOs of major tech companies including Intel, IBM, Extreme, Cisco and Juniper.COVID-19 triggered an explosion of the global remote workforce, which created an extraordinary demand for new tech gear. It also forced the shutdown of processor plants, and restarting them and renewing supply chains to their pre-pandemic state will be a lengthy process, according to industry executives and analysts. Beyond the pandemic, a recent fire at a large chip plant in Japan didn’t help.To read this article in full, please click here
Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software.
Read about backup and recovery:
Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference
How to pick an off-site data-backup method
Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet?
The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space
This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the traceroute command. It reports on the route taken to reach a remote system and provides timing details for each "hop" along the way (the time between routers).