Integration of a Go service with systemd

Unlike other programming languages, Go’s runtime doesn’t provide a way to reliably daemonize a service. A system daemon has to supply this functionality. Most distributions ship systemd which would fit the bill. A correct integration with systemd is quite straightforward. There are two interesting aspects: readiness & liveness.

As an example, we will daemonize this service whose goal is to answer requests with nifty 404 errors:

package main

import (
    "log"
    "net"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    l, err := net.Listen("tcp", ":8081")
    if err != nil {
        log.Panicf("cannot listen: %s", err)
    }
    http.Serve(l, nil)
}

You can build it with go build 404.go.

Here is the service file, 404.service¹:

[Unit]
Description=404 micro-service

[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/404
WatchdogSec=30s
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Readiness

The classic way for an Unix daemon to signal its readiness is to daemonize. Technically, this is done by calling fork(2) twice (which also serves other intents). This is a very common task and the BSD systems, as well as some other C libraries, supply a daemon(3) Continue reading

Oracle settling with ex-worker over alleged fiddling of cloud accounts

Oracle has informed a federal court that it is settling a lawsuit in which a former employee had charged that she had been terminated from her job for refusing to go along with accounting principles that she did not consider lawful.In a joint submission Wednesday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, lawyers for Oracle and the former employee Svetlana Blackburn asked for the vacation of a case management conference scheduled for Thursday, while submitting a notice of settlement to notify the court “that the lawsuit has been settled in principle, and to request thirty (30) days in which to file a dismissal.”The lawsuit had drawn interest amid concern that companies could be dressing up their cloud revenue in a highly competitive environment. Gartner, for example, warned in December 2015, that “assessing vendor cloud revenue claims has become more challenging, with many vendors' IT-related businesses being complicated and nuanced.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launhces IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm.Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launches IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm. Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launhces IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm.Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launches IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm. Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Low-power IoT networks go global with a satellite backbone

Inmarsat says it’s built a global IoT network by combining land-based low-power networks with its mesh of communications satellites, bringing data connections to things like cattle in Australia and reservoirs in Malaysia.The system will combine global reach with one of an emerging class of networks designed for small, low-power devices like sensors. With cellular-or-better range but slower speeds than LTE, these networks can be an economical way to connect widely dispersed devices that use small amounts of data.The land networks that link to Inmarsat’s satellites will use LoRaWAN, a technology that enterprises can roll out on their own, including at sites that mobile operators don’t serve. Multiple vendors make equipment for LoRaWAN, which is based on a specification from the LoRa Alliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Low-power IoT networks go global with a satellite backbone

Inmarsat says it’s built a global IoT network by combining land-based low-power networks with its mesh of communications satellites, bringing data connections to things like cattle in Australia and reservoirs in Malaysia.The system will combine global reach with one of an emerging class of networks designed for small, low-power devices like sensors. With cellular-or-better range but slower speeds than LTE, these networks can be an economical way to connect widely dispersed devices that use small amounts of data.The land networks that link to Inmarsat’s satellites will use LoRaWAN, a technology that enterprises can roll out on their own, including at sites that mobile operators don’t serve. Multiple vendors make equipment for LoRaWAN, which is based on a specification from the LoRa Alliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s next for open-source Spark?

Boston -- A conference focused on a single open source project sounds like the sort of event that will feature a lone keynote speaker speaking to maybe 100 interested parties in a lecture hall at a local college. Spark Summit East was very much the opposite.A total of 1,503 people watched the five keynote speakers in a cavernous ballroom at the Hynes Convention Center lay out the future of Spark, the big data processing engine originally developed at the University of California – Berkeley by Matei Zaharia. Spark underlies huge data-driven applications being used by major players like Salesforce, Facebook, IBM and many others, helping organize, analyze, and surface specific grains of sand from beach-sized databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US idea to collect travelers’ passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US idea to collect travelers’ passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rackspace is cuting 6% of its workforce

Via a blog post by CEO Taylor Rhodes, Texas-based cloud computing company Rackspace announced that it is cutting about 6% of its workforce in areas that have seen slowed growth in recent years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering +Rhodes says the cuts will primarily be focused on the company’s corporate administrative expenses and management, and that the company’s “front-line” support staff and product teams will be least impacted by the layoffs. Rackspace did not provide additional details about where the cuts will come from, saying only they are in areas “where the workforce has grown more rapidly than the revenue.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In the Labs: Connected vehicles in Ohio, artificial intelligence in Illinois and Massachusetts

Activity on the tech labs front is happening faster than we can get to it these days, so here are a few "in case you missed it" items...$45M for Transportation Research Center The state of Ohio, JobsOhio and the Ohio State University are putting $45 million into an expansion of the Transportation Research Center's (TRC) 540-acre Smart Mobility Advanced Research and Test (SMART) Center in the Columbus area. Research will focus both on connected and driverless vehicles within this section of the 4,500-acre TRC expanse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista Founder: Networking Standards Move Too Slowly for Cloud Giants

Arista is trying to start a grass-roots standards effort for 800 Gb/s optics.

Networking Pros Grapple With “Clockgate”

After Ryzen, AMD has no immediate plan to purge its other PC chips

An AMD Athlon or Sempron chip may not drum as much excitement as Ryzen, but loyalty has helped those brands stick around for more than a decade.So what happens to those and other PC processors, like the A-series and FX, when AMD's new Ryzen chips start flooding the market in March? AMD has said the first high-end desktop Ryzen chips will ship in March.For now, AMD plans to make no changes to its lineup of existing chips, a company spokesman said.Instead, the chips will be regrouped to focus on price-sensitive PC buyers.Ryzen-based PCs are expected to be priced at a premium, competing with Intel's top gaming CPUs. The FX chips will not go away once Ryzen arrives, and will be targeted toward budget gamers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, IBM, Nokia join to make IoT systems safer

Some big players in security and the internet of things, including AT&T and Nokia, are joining forces to solve problems that they say make IoT vulnerable in many areas.The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance, formed Wednesday, also includes IBM, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and mobile security company Trustonic. The group said it won’t set standards but will conduct research, educate consumers and businesses, and influence standards and policies.As IoT technologies take shape, there’s a danger of new vulnerabilities being created in several areas. Consumer devices have been in the security spotlight thanks to incidents like the DDoS attacks last year that turned poorly secured set-top boxes and DVRs into botnets. But the potential weaknesses are much broader, spanning the network, cloud, and application layers, the new group said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, IBM, Nokia join to make IoT systems safer

Some big players in security and the internet of things, including AT&T and Nokia, are joining forces to solve problems that they say make IoT vulnerable in many areas.The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance, formed Wednesday, also includes IBM, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and mobile security company Trustonic. The group said it won’t set standards but will conduct research, educate consumers and businesses, and influence standards and policies.As IoT technologies take shape, there’s a danger of new vulnerabilities being created in several areas. Consumer devices have been in the security spotlight thanks to incidents like the DDoS attacks last year that turned poorly secured set-top boxes and DVRs into botnets. But the potential weaknesses are much broader, spanning the network, cloud, and application layers, the new group said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Is your IT infrastructure healthy?

From my experience, if you look at 200 or so companies, you’ll find approximately 10 with enterprise tool sets for infrastructure management, six with middle-of-the-road packages, and four with home-grown solutions. That’s 20 total, just 10 percent. To make matters worse, the enterprise tool sets tend to be difficult to install and use, so system admins fail to use them as much as they should.Based on my observations, most businesses do not have a good read on the health of their IT infrastructure. They need a cost-effective, practical solution to monitor their IT environment so they can manage it more efficiently.Preventing Murphy’s Law IT infrastructure management tools can help to prevent slowdowns and downtime, thus help you to avoid the firefights that occur when Murphy’s Law strikes. That, of course, should be a priority. After all, when you have three people hunting down a problem for a week, each spending perhaps 10 hours on the problem, you waste 30 working hours.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Algorithm-based technology patents are raging

Algorithms are hot – so hot that Gartner is saying that by 2019, 250,000 patent applications will be filed that include claims for algorithms, a tenfold increase from five years ago.Gartner wrote that according to a worldwide search on analytics vendor Aulive, nearly 17,000 patents applied for in 2015 mentioned "algorithm" in the title or description, versus 570 in 2000. Including those mentioning "algorithm" anywhere in the document, there were more than 100,000 applications last year versus 28,000 five years ago.At this pace, and considering the rising interest in protecting algorithmic intellectual property, by 2020 there could be nearly half a million patent applications mentioning "algorithm," and more than 25,000 patent applications for algorithms themselves, Gartner stated. Of the top 40 organizations patenting the most algorithms the past five years, 33 are Chinese businesses and universities – IBM is the only western tech company on the list at No. 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here