Survey says! 3 surprising IT facts

I’m always interested in Spiceworks’ annual State of IT survey of hundreds of IT folks around the world. Last year I wrote about results indicating that PCs continue to top IT hardware investments. Well, the 2017 report isn’t out yet, but the company has release a few teaser findings, which still piqued my interest.1. The cloud is growing—duh First, and least surprising, the results indicate continued cloud computing momentum. According to Spiceworks, “38 percent of IT pros consider cloud very or extremely important in 2016 compared to 29 percent in 2015.” That kind of growth is only to be expected in the current environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey says! 3 surprising IT facts

I’m always interested in Spiceworks’ annual State of IT survey of hundreds of IT folks around the world. Last year I wrote about results indicating that PCs continue to top IT hardware investments. Well, the 2017 report isn’t out yet, but the company has release a few teaser findings, which still piqued my interest.1. The cloud is growing—duh First, and least surprising, the results indicate continued cloud computing momentum. According to Spiceworks, “38 percent of IT pros consider cloud very or extremely important in 2016 compared to 29 percent in 2015.” That kind of growth is only to be expected in the current environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cambium Networks helps provide the network for the IoT

We here a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Call it the IoT, the industrial internet, the internet of customers or some other variation on a theme, but it means essentially the same thing—devices and sensors in a dizzying variety of different locations being connected and able to exchange data. But many of the use cases we see for IoT are pretty lightweight in terms of their operating requirements. While a connected toaster, refrigerator or toothbrush might make for a great concepts video, it’s not exactly difficult from a connectivity perspective—just leverage the existing wireless network that already exist in a home and from there jump onto the public internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Router Basics: The Lost Configuration

User-Centric Networks Will Drive New Architectures

On eve of iPhone 7, a third of iPhones are 3+ years old

A third of the iPhones now in use are three or more years old, an app analytics vendor said a day before Apple unveils the new iPhone 7. According to Boston-based Localytics, 32% of all iPhones used in August were models that debuted in 2013 or earlier, with that year's iPhone 5S the third-most popular device at 17%. Others, including 2012's iPhone 5 and 2011's iPhone 4S, accounted for single digit shares. Localytics measured share by tallying the models among more than 100 million iPhones that reported data to the app developers that use its analytics tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Google Bigtable scales with ease

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New tech can help catch spearphishing attacks

A CEO said that his controller had just received an email, ostensibly from him, asking her to process an urgent outgoing payment.Everything about the letter looked legit."It has my display name, spelled correctly," said Kevin O'Brien, co-founder and CEO at Belmont, Mass.-based GreatHorn. "There are no attachments. There's nothing in the email that's misspelled. My signature line was copied from my real emails."The text of the email was totally something that a CEO might say."Hi Caitlin," the message said, addressing the company's controller, Caitlin McLaughlin. "Are you available to process an outgoing payment today? Let me know and I will send the payment details as soon as I receive it from the consultant shortly; I am traveling and this is urgent."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New tech can help catch spearphishing attacks

A CEO said that his controller had just received an email, ostensibly from him, asking her to process an urgent outgoing payment.Everything about the letter looked legit."It has my display name, spelled correctly," said Kevin O'Brien, co-founder and CEO at Belmont, Mass.-based GreatHorn. "There are no attachments. There's nothing in the email that's misspelled. My signature line was copied from my real emails."The text of the email was totally something that a CEO might say."Hi Caitlin," the message said, addressing the company's controller, Caitlin McLaughlin. "Are you available to process an outgoing payment today? Let me know and I will send the payment details as soon as I receive it from the consultant shortly; I am traveling and this is urgent."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 tips to get around resume filtering

You've got all the right skills. Your resume shows a clear progression of advancement through your career, with a long list of accolades and accomplishments. You work well with others, but can excel independently. You've solved problems and increased revenue for your last few employers. You interview well -- or at least you would if you could get an interview.So what's the problem? You might be at the mercy of an applicant tracking system (ATS) and resume-filtering module -- technology that scans incoming resumes for job-specific keywords and "grades" them on a scale of 0 to 100. If your resume isn't scoring high enough, you could be excluded before your application ever makes it before human eyes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Debunking the common misconceptions of freelancing

There are a lot of misconceptions about freelancing. Often, people assume the life of a freelancer is filled with boring work without the benefits that accompany traditional employment.Yet this picture doesn’t match reality. Most freelancers enjoy their work and value the autonomy of the freelance life. They see how freelancing offers both quality work and a quality of life not always found in traditional employment.+ Also on Network World: Hiring trends for 2016: Welcome to the gig economy +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Running BGP between Virtual Machine and ToR Switch

One of my readers left this question on the blog post resurfacing the idea of running BGP between servers and ToR switches:

When using BGP on a VM for mobility, what is the best way to establish a peer relationship with a new TOR switch after a live migration? The VM won't inherently know the peer address or the ASN.

As always, the correct answer is it depends.

iPhone 7: Our staff predictions — and printable Bingo cards!

Apple’s annual iPhone event is mere hours away, but the rumor mill has, true to form, been churning busily away for months. So there’s no shortage of information, spurious or otherwise, about the forthcoming announcements from San Francisco. And Apple has been a bit more predictable in recent years, hasn’t it? There’s going to be at least one uplifting video presentation with aspirational music playing in the background, CEO Tim Cook is going to use words like “magical” and “journey” a lot, and he’ll show us some cool new iPhones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPM hack was avoidable, says congressional report

The compromise last year of the personal information of millions of current and former federal employees was entirely preventable, if the U.S. Office of Personnel Management that was attacked had taken the right measures on knowing it was targeted, according to a report set to be released Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.“In our report, we are going to show that once we knew that this was happening, we didn’t make the right moves,” said Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the committee in an interview to CNN.Saying that he thinks that the attack came from overseas, Chaffetz, a Republican representative from Utah, did not name any country, saying it was classified information. After the hack there was speculation that it had been done by the Chinese.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPM hack was avoidable, says congressional report

The compromise last year of the personal information of millions of current and former federal employees was entirely preventable, if the U.S. Office of Personnel Management that was attacked had taken the right measures on knowing it was targeted, according to a report set to be released Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.“In our report, we are going to show that once we knew that this was happening, we didn’t make the right moves,” said Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the committee in an interview to CNN.Saying that he thinks that the attack came from overseas, Chaffetz, a Republican representative from Utah, did not name any country, saying it was classified information. After the hack there was speculation that it had been done by the Chinese.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Rsync to Copy Files From SSH Server

Recently I have come through an interesting problem. I needed to download a raw copy of the HDD image located on a remote server (about 180GB) connected via  1 Mbps link. Network connection dropped frequently so the requirement was to reestablish connection automatically, without my intervention.

Definition of Terms
Server - a remote computer with an IP address 172.17.100.5/16 which contains a raw copy of the HDD image - a file /root/ubuntu.iso.
Client - a local computer that copies a raw copy of the HDD image from the server.

Below is my how-to which helped me to fulfill a task. I hope it might be useful to you.

1. Create Multiple Archive Files
The idea is to create a compressed archive file and to split it to multiple sequential chunks in order to make transfer of files less depended on network outages due to an unreliable link.

$ tar cvf - ubuntu.iso | gzip -9 - | split -b 10M -d - ./disk/ubuntu.tar.gz.

The command tar creates a tar archive from a file ubuntu.iso and send it to a standard output instead to the file. The command gzip compress everything from a standard input using the best compression ratio (parameter -9) and send Continue reading

Oracle will buy cloud warehouse management applications firm LogFire

Oracle will acquire LogFire, a provider of cloud-based warehouse management applications, with the aim of boosting the features of its supply chain management cloud offering.The Redwood Shores, California, software and cloud giant expects that the addition of the LogFire applications will complement the logistics functionality of its Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud by adding warehouse management capabilities.The financial terms of the proposed acquisition of the Atlanta, Georgia, firm were not disclosed. The management and employees of LogFire, which was started in 2007,  will join the Oracle SCM Cloud team.Oracle has been making acquisitions of cloud computing companies to shore up its applications for various industries. In July, it said it would pay US$9.3 billion for NetSuite, a provider of cloud-based applications, such as for financial management, enterprise resource planning, e-commerce and retail management, to over 30,000 customers in a number of industries in more than 100 countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft may finally have its Slack killer

Despite a varied portfolio of collaboration services, Microsoft is still struggling to field a strong competitor to enterprise group messaging apps like Slack and HipChat.It has SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer, but none of them is really a direct competitor to the slickly designed, GIF-stuffed and bot-laden crop of modern messaging applications. That may be about to change, according to a report from MSPoweruser on Tuesday. Microsoft is supposed to be working on Skype Teams, a new service with group chat capabilities that's a more direct competitor to Slack. The service, currently being tested internally at Microsoft, is supposed to let users chat both privately and in groups. It has a number of features now found in Skype, including video and voice calling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 launch may be accompanied by release of AirPods

With just one day before Apple’s iPhone 7 event takes place, the rumors surrounding Apple’s next-gen device are still rolling in. Now of course, it goes without saying that one of the more intriguing aspects of the iPhone 7 is that it will ship without a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. In its place, Apple will likely ship a pair of Lightning headphones along with a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone adapter.Having said that, there’s more to the iPhone 7 audio story than meets the eye. According to reports, Apple will take advantage of the iPhone 7's jack-less design in order to push sales of what will be completely new Bluetooth-based headphone product that will likely be dubbed “Airpods.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

45% off Epica Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Digital Radio, Flashlight, Cell Phone Charger – Deal Alert

Are you ready for a hurricane situation or other emergency weather? Looking for the perfect camping radio that will last for years? Be the prepared one in your group with this no-hassle, sure-fire emergency radio and flashlight. Two minutes of cranking nets you at least 20 minutes of lights on or radio. With its compact design, 3-LED flashlight, and 5-way charging (hand crank, solar, USB, AC and DC), and retractable antennae, you'll never be left in the dark. The high-quality digital tuner (AM/FM/all 7 WeatherBand channels) lets you get all your news. Also, you can charge your cell with it. The rugged body and solar panels are water resistant and will stay strong between uses. The unit averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 800 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $39.95 has been reduced to $21.95. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here