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Category Archives for "Networking"

Make a Wi-Fi gadget with a $9.99 Orange Pi development board

If you want to fashion a smart gadget, robot, or drone with wireless capabilities on the cheap, a US$9.99 development board from Orange Pi will help you reach that goal.The Orange Pi i96 shouldn't be confused with the $35 Raspberry Pi 3, which is much more powerful and can be a full-fledged Linux PC. The smaller Orange Pi has limited horsepower and is targeted at smart gadgets, drones, and internet of things devices.If you want to create a gadget to show off at a Maker Faire event, the Orange Pi i96 is the kind of board you'll rely on. The board was first announced at the Linaro Connect conference, happening this week in Las Vegas.For its price and target market, the Orange Pi has features not found on competitive boards. It includes Wi-Fi, 4GB of flash storage, and 2GB of RAM. It also has a micro-SD slot, a micro-USB connection, and includes the Linux-based Ubuntu OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mediatek’s developer board features a 10-core chip and Android 6.0

Like PCs, developer boards like Raspberry Pi are getting more horsepower to run faster applications and 4K graphics.Take the Mediatek X20 Development Board, which started shipping for US$199 this week. It is crammed with the latest mobile chips that give the developer board PC-like computing power.It has a 10-core Mediatek X20 chip, which is being used in new mobile devices from companies like Meizu and LeEco. The board comes with Android 6.0, and it's not yet known if it will be upgraded to Android 7.0.There still isn't much need for 10 CPU cores in smartphones or tablets, but the developer board could put the chip to good use. Quad core chips are considered powerful enough for handsets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

63% off Anker Compact Car Jump Starter and Power Bank – Deal Alert

This device from Anker is small enough to fit in your glove box, but packs enough power to jump start your 3L gas or 2.5L diesel engine a whopping 15 times on a single charge. Advanced safety features ensure total protection against reverse polarity, surges and short circuits. So there's no risk in hooking it up wrong or backwards like with traditional jump starters. It also has two built-in USB charging ports for your mobile devices, and comes with an 18-month warranty. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from 1,000 people on Amazon (read reviews), and its list price has been reduced to just $59. See the discounted Anker car jump starter on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bringing IoT data into public clouds is getting easier

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection.On Tuesday, two companies moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform.While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said. And more advanced analytics, including better error correction, in some cases can give enterprises the same insights with fewer sensors, he said. Trading hardware for software -- especially the cloud-based kind -- typically means savings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bringing IoT data into public clouds is getting easier

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection.On Tuesday, two companies moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform.While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said. And more advanced analytics, including better error correction, in some cases can give enterprises the same insights with fewer sensors, he said. Trading hardware for software -- especially the cloud-based kind -- typically means savings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

Today, Cloudflare turns six years old, and if you’re reading this on our blog, you may have noticed that we look a bit different today than the cloudflare.com that you’ve visited in the past. More on that a bit later in this post.

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

What we’re most excited about today is that over the past six years, we’ve made the Internet safer, faster and a more reliable place for any domain whether it’s used for a website, web application or API.

We currently count more than 4,000,000 customers as members of the Cloudflare community, and we’ve been working very hard to bring the best of the modern Internet to you.

Levelling the Internet playing field is Cloudflare’s mission and it’s what gets us out of bed every morning and into one of our offices. Last week, we took away what we think are the last excuses for any domain to not be encrypted with our three launches during Encryption Week.

Yesterday, we announced the 100th city added to the Cloudflare global network of data centers. In the coming days, we have more exciting products that we’re opening up to the public for early access that will expand our offering to Continue reading

Down the rabbit hole, part 1: Making my life private and secure

Over the years I’ve done a number of—let’s just call them “experiments in computering”—where I attempt to use my computers in such a way that is outside of my comfort zone. Living entirely in a terminal. Getting rid of all Google software and services. Using nothing but a version of FreeDOS. That sort of thing. I typically give myself the simple goal of “do it for 30 days, and see how it goes.” In the process, I always learn something—about what I like, about what is possible. And even if I don’t learn a cotton-pickin’ thing of value, it’s still kinda fun—kinda. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Down the rabbit hole, part 1: Making my life private and secure

Over the years I’ve done a number of—let’s just call them “experiments in computering”—where I attempt to use my computers in such a way that is outside of my comfort zone. Living entirely in a terminal. Getting rid of all Google software and services. Using nothing but a version of FreeDOS. That sort of thing. I typically give myself the simple goal of “do it for 30 days, and see how it goes.” In the process, I always learn something—about what I like, about what is possible. And even if I don’t learn a cotton-pickin’ thing of value, it’s still kinda fun—kinda. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six senators demand more details about the Yahoo data breach

Six U.S. senators have called Yahoo's massive data breach "unacceptable," and they're demanding that the company provide more details about the incident.In a letter addressed to Yahoo's CEO, the lawmakers said they were particularly "disturbed" that the breach occurred in 2014, but that Yahoo only publicized it last week."That means millions of Americans' data may have been compromised for two years," the letter said. "This is unacceptable."The hacking incident, which Yahoo said it only learned recently, affects at least 500 million users, making it perhaps the largest known data breach in history. Account information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and hashed passwords, may have been stolen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: What’s it like to be a cloud startup

In a market dominated by vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google is there room for startups? Thinkstock Many entrepreneurs and investors believe so. I’ve been interested in what it takes to start up a business in the uber-competitive cloud computing market. To help explore the issue, Cloud Chronicles visited ClearSky Data in downtown Boston to chat with co-founder Ellen Rubin – a cloud industry veteran and three-time entrepreneur – to talk about what Clear Sky is and how it competes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six senators demand more details about the Yahoo data breach

Six U.S. senators have called Yahoo's massive data breach "unacceptable," and they're demanding that the company provide more details about the incident.In a letter addressed to Yahoo's CEO, the lawmakers said they were particularly "disturbed" that the breach occurred in 2014, but that Yahoo only publicized it last week."That means millions of Americans' data may have been compromised for two years," the letter said. "This is unacceptable."The hacking incident, which Yahoo said it only learned recently, affects at least 500 million user accounts, making it perhaps the largest known data breach in history. Account information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and hashed passwords, may have been stolen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker 1.12 swarm mode elastic load balancing


Docker Built-In Orchestration Ready For Production: Docker 1.12 Goes GA describes the native swarm mode feature that integrates cluster management, virtual networking, and policy based deployment of services.

This article will demonstrate how real-time streaming telemetry can be used to construct an elastic load balancing solution that dynamically adjusts service capacity to match changing demand.

Getting started with swarm mode describes the steps to configure a swarm cluster. For example, following command issued on any of the Manager nodes deploys a web service on the cluster:
docker service create --replicas 2 -p 80:80 --name apache httpd:2.4
And the following command raises the number of containers in the service pool from 2 to 4:
docker service scale apache=4
Asynchronous Docker metrics describes how sFlow telemetry provides the real-time visibility required for elastic load balancing. The diagram shows how streaming telemetry allows the sFlow-RT controller to determine the load on the service pool so that it can use the Docker service API to automatically increase or decrease the size of the pool as demand changes. Elastic load balancing of the service pools ensures consistent service levels by adding additional resources if demand increases. In addition, efficiency is improved by releasing resources Continue reading

Being an Effective Interviewer

One challenging aspect of being an engineer is interviewing other engineers. The interview process is rife with various problems, including the discomfort of interviewing someone who you perceive as being a better engineer than you are, or figuring out how to draw out actual engineering skill versus simply finding out how much someone has memorized. Does that CCIE or degree on their resume really mean anything? What does an effective network engineering interview look like?

There are, of course, several different theories “out there.” For instance, some companies focus on giving candidates “real world” problems to solve, and checking with them several days later to see how they’ve done. This is potentially useful, but quite often I find my best work is done with a team, rather than by myself. Such systems seem to tend towards pitting the candidate against well known or well established problem sets, which can easily revert back to memorization skills, or towards difficult/obtuse problems. Either way, this doesn’t test the candidate’s ability to work in a team, or interact with others in solving difficult problems.

What about tossing other sorts of puzzles towards the candidate to see how they do? This also seems problematic Continue reading