Can IT Certifications Become a Liability?

I’ve been asking myself an uncomfortable question lately: “Can IT certifications become a liability? Have I reached a point where my IT certifications have become a liability to me?“

I earned my first certification in 2001, the next in 2002, and just kept going from there. My background and work focus since 2001 has been networking so that’s where I’ve focused my certification efforts. I’ve been fortunate enough to have multiple employers who supported my certification journey. This certainly made the journey easier by taking care of (at least some of) the financial burden and providing an environment that supported taking time to study.

Of the certifications I obtained, some required taking just a single multiple choice exam. Others required passing up to four individual exams (within a certain time window) to achieve certification. One certification in particular required passing a multiple choice exam in order to qualify for an 8-hour hands-on lab exam (which I had to take twice).

Prep time for these exams has varied from a few weeks of reading/note taking to close to two years of intense reading, notes, flashcards, and lab work.

All but 2 certifications I hold (or have held) require regularly Continue reading

UK’s ARCHER2 Supercomputer Aims Squarely At The CPU Bullseye

The government of the United Kingdom is plunking down £79 million to purchase and operate ARCHER2, the country’s soon-to-be national supercomputer on track to be installed at the University of Edinburgh next year. … “UK’s ARCHER2 Supercomputer Aims Squarely At The CPU Bullseye”

UK’s ARCHER2 Supercomputer Aims Squarely At The CPU Bullseye was written by Michael Feldman at .

How to hack your own Wi-Fi network

One way to bolster your understanding of Wi-Fi security is to do some hacking yourself. That doesn’t mean you should infiltrate a company’s network or snoop on a neighbor’s setup. Rather, ethical hacking and legitimate Wi-Fi penetration testing – done in cooperation with the network owner – can help you learn more about the strengths and limitations of wireless security. Understanding potential Wi-Fi vulnerabilities can help you to better protect the networks you manage and ensure safer connections when you access other wireless networks.Start with a Wi-Fi stumbler General purpose Wi-Fi stumblers are the simplest and most innocent tools to add to your pen testing kit. Though typically passive tools, they serve an important purpose. They allow you to see what access points (AP) are nearby and their details, such as the signal level, security/encryption type, and media access control (MAC) address. It’s a tool even a hacker would utilize to find the next victim.To read this article in full, please click here

How to hack your own Wi-Fi network

One way to bolster your understanding of Wi-Fi security is to do some hacking yourself. That doesn’t mean you should infiltrate a company’s network or snoop on a neighbor’s setup. Rather, ethical hacking and legitimate Wi-Fi penetration testing – done in cooperation with the network owner – can help you learn more about the strengths and limitations of wireless security. Understanding potential Wi-Fi vulnerabilities can help you to better protect the networks you manage and ensure safer connections when you access other wireless networks.Start with a Wi-Fi stumbler General purpose Wi-Fi stumblers are the simplest and most innocent tools to add to your pen testing kit. Though typically passive tools, they serve an important purpose. They allow you to see what access points (AP) are nearby and their details, such as the signal level, security/encryption type, and media access control (MAC) address. It’s a tool even a hacker would utilize to find the next victim.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Neighborhood – Meet Denise “Fish” Fishburne

Denise "Fish" Fishburne chats with Ethan Banks. The conversation covers being arrested at 19 for DUI, being gay in the corporate world of the 80's and 90's, overcoming the challenge of being easily bored, teaching without ego, struggling with a distrust of others, the myth of the self-made person, and becoming an active member of the "Network Neighborhood." For Denise, it's all about community. "All for one, and one for all." Want more Fish? https://networkingwithfish.com https://twitter.com/denisefishburne https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-fishburne-b50b7277/

Network Neighborhood – Meet Denise “Fish” Fishburne

Denise "Fish" Fishburne chats with Ethan Banks. The conversation covers being arrested at 19 for DUI, being gay in the corporate world of the 80's and 90's, overcoming the challenge of being easily bored, teaching without ego, struggling with a distrust of others, the myth of the self-made person, and becoming an active member of the "Network Neighborhood."

For Denise, it's all about community. "All for one, and one for all."

Want more Fish?
https://networkingwithfish.com
https://twitter.com/denisefishburne
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-fishburne-b50b7277/

The post Network Neighborhood – Meet Denise “Fish” Fishburne appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Advancing Windows Containers with Docker and Kubernetes

Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced Kubernetes 1.14,  which includes support for Windows nodes. Kubernetes supporting Windows is a monumental step for the industry and it further confirms the work Docker has been doing with Microsoft to develop Windows containers over the past five years. It is evidence that containers are not just for Linux; Windows and .NET applications represent an important and sizeable footprint of applications that can benefit from both the Docker platform and Kubernetes.

Docker’s collaboration with Microsoft started five years ago. Today, every version of Windows Server 2016 and later ships with the Docker Engine – Enterprise. In addition, to facilitate a great user experience with Windows containers, Microsoft publishes more than 129 Windows container images of its popular software on Docker Hub. Many Docker Enterprise customers are already running mixed Windows and Linux containers with Swarm, and an upcoming release of Docker Enterprise will allow our customers to expand their Windows options to Kubernetes as well. Today both Docker Enterprise and Docker Desktop users have found that the easiest way to use and manage Kubernetes is with Docker and now these users will have the same benefits with Windows containers as well.

gMSA Continue reading

Try out this powerful online meeting solution for free

The conundrum of business meetings: as much as they allow for dispersed teams to connect and hammer out issues and propose solutions in real-time, it can be equally difficult to find an easy-to-use solution that works for everyone. We’ve all been there: getting booted off a call, only to find it impossible to join later, or dealing with frustrating limits to the number of people who can join the conference — the list of issues goes on. Now is the time to get an easy-to-use online meeting solution that’s made to scale for businesses of all types: RingCentral Meetings™. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Top 4 Edge Computing Challenges that IT Solution Providers Can Solve

The global edge computing market size is projected to reach $3.24 billion US by 2025 (according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc.). While this research underscores the speed and volume at which edge computing installations are growing, it masks the idea that many organizations still consider themselves in the early adoption phases of this technology. Before companies plan the move to widespread rollouts, they are seeking answers to significant deployment questions.To read this article in full, please click here

Tips for using the Ip command to print from Linux systems

The lp command on Linux systems offers a range of printing options that allow you to print documents using a variety of options. In this post, we take a look at some that offer interesting possibilities.The recent Printing from the Linux command line post covers printing in double-sided and portrait mode. In this post, we'll look at printing: Multiple pages per sheet Specific pages or page ranges Pages with borders Multiple copies [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ] How to print multiple pages per sheet With lp, you can print as many as 16 pages of a document on one side of a single sheet of paper. To specify the number of pages to print on a page, use the  lp -o number-up=# command (e.g.,  lp -o number-up=16 mydoc). If your document doesn't contain as many pages as you've requested in the layout, that's OK. The page will simply have an empty area.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Digital Transformation Update: Challenges & the Road Ahead

Fast, faster, fastest. The pace for digital transformation has escalated such that, if your company hasn’t started, it will be left behind in a legacy bubble, according to participants in a recent IDG TechTalk Twitter chat. A1) I hate to be mean-spirited, but #DigitalDarwinism will take hold at some point if it hasn't already. Regardless of whether your org has been disrupted, your org's sector is a red ocean, or they're just not getting it; the time for lagging is over. #idgtechtalkTo read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: Nubeva Enhances Cloud Packet Broker With New Processing Capabilities (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes episode explores new features in sponsor Nubeva's cloud packet broker, including packet processing capabilities, integration with open-source tools such as ntop and Zeek, and its ability to work with cloud-native taps such as Azure VTAPs.

The post Tech Bytes: Nubeva Enhances Cloud Packet Broker With New Processing Capabilities (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Grey Failure Lessons Learne

Grey Failures in the Real World

Most “smaller scale” operators probably believe they are not impacted by grey failures, but this is probably not true. Given the law of large numbers, there must be some number of grey failures in some percentage of smaller networks simply because there are so many of them. What is interesting about grey failures is there is so little study in this area; since these errors can exist in a network for years without being discovered, they are difficult to track down and repair, and they are often “fixed” by someone randomly doing things in surrounding systems that end up performing an “unintentional repair” (for instance by resetting some software state through a reboot). It is interesting, then, to see a group of operators collating the grey failures they have seen across a number of larger scale networks.

Gunawi, Haryadi S., Riza O. Suminto, Russell Sears, Casey Golliher, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Xing Lin, Tim Emami, et al. “Fail-Slow at Scale: Evidence of Hardware Performance Faults in Large Production Systems,” 1–14, 2018. https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast18/presentation/gunawi.

Some interesting results of the compilation are covered in a table early in the document. One of these is that grey Continue reading

How Facebook Might Find Nervana For Machine Learning Training

There is a rumor going around that a certain hyperscaler is going to be augmenting its GPU-based machine learning training and will be adopting Intel’s Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP) for at least some of its workloads. … “How Facebook Might Find Nervana For Machine Learning Training”

How Facebook Might Find Nervana For Machine Learning Training was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

1 … 1,291 1,292 1,293 1,294 1,295 … 3,856