A set of vulnerabilities in TCP/IP stacks used by FreeBSD and three popular real-time operating systems designed for the IoT was revealed this week by security vendor Forescout and JSOF Research. The nine vulnerabilities could potentially affect 100 million devices in the wild.Nucleus NET, IPNet and NetX are the other operating systems affected by the vulnerabilities, which a joint report issued by Forescout and JSOF dubbed Name:Wreck.In a report on the vulnerabilities, Forescout writes that TCP/IP stacks are particularly vulnerable for several reasons, including widespread use, the fact that many such stacks were created a long time ago, and the fact that they make an attractive attack surface, thanks to unauthenticated functionality and protocols that cross network perimeters.To read this article in full, please click here
Just because Linux appeals to the nerdiest of nerds doesn't mean that it can't be extremely helpful for those who don't want to spend a lot of time delving into the technical details of how to use various commands. In fact, Linux provides a series of tools that can help anyone master the command line or just get the task at hand done more quickly and efficiently. This post covers 10 of the best options.man pages You can always go to the man pages to answer usage and syntax questions you might have on a Linux command. Just type "man" followed by the name of the command (e.g., man ps), and you'll get a lot of descriptive information. On the other hand, if you really just want to see some examples of how to use a particular command, the content of a man page might be a lot more than you want to comb through. In the remainder of this post, I'll explain some other options for finding the command that you need and learning how to use it.To read this article in full, please click here
AT&T, Hughes, and Verizon were selected as the top three SD-WAN providers for the third year in a row in the latest Vertical Systems Group rankings for year-end 2020. Comcast jumped to fourth place.Despite the pandemic, expansion of carrier-managed SD-WAN services in the U.S. increased 39% in 2020. Demand was resilient across bandwidth-intensive markets, but vulnerable for verticals like retail and travel.Vertical Systems Group is an independent market research firm focused on network services. Each year it issues its Carrier Managed SD-WAN Services Leaderboard.The one notable change was Comcast has replaced Lumen Technologies in fourth place, moving up from seventh position in 2019. Lumen is now in sixth, Windstream remains in fifth and Aryaka dipped from sixth to seventh.To read this article in full, please click here
In the year since Cisco revamped its DevNet certification portfolio to focus more on network programing, automation and application development, the need for those software-based skillsets has never been more important. IT Salary Survey on Insider Pro IT Salary Survey 2021: The results are in IT Salary Survey 2021: Compensation holds steady despite pandemic IT Salary Survey 2021: Hiring rate expected to increase but priorities will shift IT Salary Survey 2021: Over half of IT pros are satisfied at work – but nearly half are job hunting IT Salary Survey 2021: Security and cloud computing certifications on the up The requirement for software skills in the networking environment is being driven by a number of factors including the tremendous increase in the use of automation, the need to have an intelligent pipeline to remote users, and the growing necessity to efficiently network and secure multicloud resources. Many of these changes were already underway of course, but tons more are being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on many enterprise data-center, campus and wide area network operations.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia kicked off its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2021 with a bang: A new CPU for high performance computing (HPC) clients--its first-ever data-center CPU--called Grace.Based on the Arm Neoverse architecture, NVIDIA claims Grace will serve up to 10-times better performance than the fastest servers currently on the market for complex artificial intelligence and HPC workloads.But that’s comparing then and now. Grace won’t ship until 2023, and in those two years competitors will undoubtedly up their game, too. But no one has ever accused CEO Jen-Hsun Huang of being subdued.Nvidia made a point that Grace is not intended to compete head-to-head against Intel's Xeon and AMD's EPYC processors. Instead, Grace is more of a niche product, in that it is designed specifically to be tightly coupled with NVIDIA's GPUs to remove bottlenecks for complex AI and HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here
You can't navigate business challenges without the right instruments. Done right, analytics initiatives deliver the essential insights you need, as these five articles explore.
There’s open, then there’s open. At least that seems to be the case with network technology. Maybe it’s the popularity and impact of open-source software, or maybe it’s just that the word “open” makes you think of being wild, happy, and free—whatever it is, the concept of openness in networking is catching on. Which means, of course, that the definition is getting fuzzier every day.When I talk with enterprises, they seem to think that openness in networking is the opposite of proprietary, which they then define is a technology for which there is a single source. That suggests that open networking is based on technology for which multiple sources exist, but as logical as that sounds, it may not help much.To read this article in full, please click here
If you want to move assets out of your data center but for whatever reason can’t shift to the cloud, a colocation, or “colo” for short, is increasingly a viable option.Colo is where the client buys the compute, storage, and networking equipment but instead of putting it into their own data centers, they put them in the data center of a hosting company. They still own and manage the hardware, but they don’t have responsibility for manage the facilities—heating, cooling, lighting, physical security, etcNow see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" As such, colocation facilities attract considerable interest from enterprises. IDC puts the 2020 US colocation market at $9 billion, growing to $12.2 billion by 2024 for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8%. Grand View Research estimates the global data-center colocation market size was valued at $40.31 billion US dollars in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.9% from 2020 to 2027. Gartner makes the bravest prediction, saying that by 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud, and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020.To read this article in full, please click here
Samsung Electronics last month announced the creation of a 512GB DDR5 memory module, its first since the JEDEC consortium developed and released the DDR5 standard in July of last year.The new modules are double the max capacity of existing DDR4 and offer up to 7,200Mbps in data transfer rate, double that of conventional DDR4. The memory will be able to handle high-bandwidth workloads in applications such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics, the company says. Read more: World's fastest supercomputers: Fugaku still No. 1To read this article in full, please click here
Major League Baseball is taking network visibility to the next level.“There were no modern network-management systems in place before I came in. It was all artisanally handcrafted configurations,” says Jeremy Schulman, who joined MLB two years ago as principal network-automation software engineer. Tech Spotlight: Analytics Analytics in the cloud: Key challenges and how to overcome them (CIO) Collaboration analytics: Yes, you can track employees. Should you? (Computerworld) How data poisoning attacks corrupt machine learning models (CSO) How to excel with data analytics (InfoWorld) Major League Baseball makes a run at network visibility (Network World) Legacy systems, including PRTG for SNMP-based monitoring and discrete management tools from network vendors, allowed MLB to collect data from switches and routers, for example, and track metrics such as bandwidth usage. But the patchworked tools were siloed and didn’t provide comprehensive visibility.To read this article in full, please click here
Last week I told you about an immersion-cooling firm called LiquidStack being spun off from its parent company, the China-based server vendor Wiwynn. The story mentioned how Microsoft was experimenting with immersion cooling, and now Microsoft has pulled back the curtain on the whole show.It’s been trying out immersion cooling for two years but is now going full throttle, at least at its Quincy, Washington, data center. Situated in the middle of the state, the city of Quincy is tiny—just 6,750 as of 2010—but the Columbia River cuts through it, making it ideal for a hydropower-based data center, and there are several data centers in this tiny town.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista Networks has added intelligent features to its core CloudVision management platform to help manage and automate distributed workloads.CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, and analytics across the data center, campus, and more recently, IoT devices on edge networks. CloudVision’s network information can be utilized by Arista networking partners such as VMware and Microsoft.To read this article in full, please click here
Researchers at Gartner said that all IT spending segments—from data center to enterprise software—are forecast to have positive growth through 2022 with overall IT spending projected to hit $4.1 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.4% from 2020.Gartner forecasts the highest growth will come from devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones (up 14%) and enterprise software (up 10.8%) as organizations shift their focus to providing a more comfortable, innovative and productive environment for their workforce, said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel today launched the third generation of its Xeon Scalable server-processor line with more than three dozen new chips built on its long-overdue 10-nanometer manufacturing process and featuring a host of specialized features for security and AI.The new chips were developed under the codename Ice Lake and were long in coming, due to the delays Intel had getting its manufacturing process down to 10nm. AMD, through its TSMC manufacturing partner, is at 7nm and its Epyc processors are slowly but increasingly taking market share from Intel.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Intel says the Ice Lake series has a 20% improvement in the number of instructions that can be carried out per clock cycle over the prior generation, thanks to the smaller process node letting them cram more transistors into the package.To read this article in full, please click here
Arm Holdings has introduced the Armv9 microarchitecture, the first overhaul of its CPU architecture in a decade, with heavy emphasis on security and all things artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).Arm, for the unfamiliar, does not make CPUs like Intel and AMD. It makes basic architectural designs that licensees modify with their own special technological sauce. It makes variances for high-performance, mobile, embedded, and edge/cloud.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] As part of Arm’s Vision Day event earlier this week, the company announced the first details of the Armv9 architecture, with more to come later this year. The company has to tread cautiously as it is in the process of being acquired by Nvidia, and forces are lining up to oppose the deal.To read this article in full, please click here
A 3D-printed antenna could turn high-frequency 5G signals into a wireless power source, potentially eliminating the need for batteries in low-power IoT devices, according to researchers at Georgia Tech. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The antenna, which the researchers call a mm-wave harvester, is about the size of a playing card and has visible circuitry printed on it. It uses a technology called a Rotman lens as a waveguide to focus multiple beams of millimeter-wave electromagnetic radiation used in 5G into a coherent whole.To read this article in full, please click here
Quantum computers can learn to reason, even when burdened with uncertainty and incomplete data, concludes a team of scientists from U.K.-based quantum software developer Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC).This ability is similar to intuitive human reasoning, which allows people to draw conclusions and make decisions despite a lack of comprehensive information. CQC’s research confirms a belief among many scientists that quantum computers have a natural propensity for reasoning.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] In a paper published on the open-access scholarly archive arXiv, CQC scientists detail how they developed methods that demonstrated how quantum machines can learn to infer hidden information from general probabilistic reasoning models. If replicable, these methods could improve a broad range of applications for quantum computing, including medical diagnoses, fault-detection in mission-critical machines, and financial forecasting for investment management.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says upgrades to its Catalyst switch and AppDynamics application-monitoring package will let enterprises more easily see and fix network and applciation problems.The company has added network intelligence-monitoring capabilities it bought from ThousandEyes in May 2020 to its Catalyst 9300 and 9400 Series boxes and its AppDynamics Dash Studio application-management dashboard.More Cisco Live! News: Cisco takes its first steps toward network-as-a-serviceTo read this article in full, please click here
5G networks that incorporate legacy technology could be vulnerable to compromise via a lack of mapping between transport and application layers, according to a report by Ireland-based AdaptiveMobile Security. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises Network slicing is central to realizing many of 5G’s more ambitious capabilities because it enables individual access points or base stations to subdivide networks into multiple logical sections—slices—effectively providing entirely separate networks for multiple uses. The slices can be used for different purposes—say, mobile broadband for end-users and massive IoT connectivity—at the same time, without interfering with each other.To read this article in full, please click here
One of the really nice things about working on the Linux command line is that you can get a lot of work done very quickly. With a handle on the most useful commands and some command-line savvy, you can take a lot of the tedium out of your daily work. This post will walk you through several handy tricks that can make your work load feel a little lighter and maybe be a little bit more enjoyable.Emptying files with > Any time you have an important file that you need to empty because it's become too large or the data is no longer needed, you can do that by using the command > filename. This is much faster than removing the file and recreating it with the original permissions. The > sign followed by the file name works the same as typing cat /dev/null > filename, but is wonderfully quick. It empties the file, but leaves permissions and ownership intact.To read this article in full, please click here