IDG Contributor Network: Is the IT help desk model broken?

There’s no doubt about it – today’s workers have fully embraced the trend toward remote working. In fact, according to last year’s Gallup “State of the American Workplace” survey, roughly 43 percent of employees report they have worked remotely.  It would seem that the genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not likely to go back in without a fight.This mass migration off premises changes the dynamic between users and IT help desk teams. An operator can no longer run down the hall to ask a user “Can you show me what the problem is with your computer?” More importantly, without having total visibility in the cloud, the operator may be completely unable to ‘see’ any problems that users are experiencing as they work remotely.To read this article in full, please click here

Arista Runs Barefoot With Tofino Programmable Switch Chips

If Andy Bechtolsheim, the chief technology officer at datacenter switching upstart Arista Networks, wanted to design ASICs to try to take a bigger piece of the switch pie – or more precisely, thought that this was a good idea at all – rest assured, Arista would be spending money engineering its own chips and fighting for capacity at the four remaining foundries that have advanced processes. …

Arista Runs Barefoot With Tofino Programmable Switch Chips was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Short Take: Practical Career Advice

One problem I’ve heard in the past is that much of the career advice given in the networking world is not practical. In this short take, I take this problem on, explaining why it might be more practical than it initially seems.

Shell Scripts to Ansible

Shell-Scripts-to-Ansible

During a recent client visit, we were asked to help migrate the following script for deploying a centralized sudoers file to RHEL and AIX servers. This is a common scenario which can provide some good examples of leveraging advanced Ansible features. Additionally, we can consider the shift in approach from a script that does a task to describing and enforcing the state of an item idempotently.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/sh
# Desc: Distribute unified copy of /etc/sudoers
#
# $Id: $
#set -x

export ODMDIR=/etc/repos

#
# perform any cleanup actions we need to do, and then exit with the
# passed status/return code
#
clean_exit()
{
cd /
test -f "$tmpfile" && rm $tmpfile
exit $1
}

#Set variables
PROG=`basename $0`
PLAT=`uname -s|awk '{print $1}'`
HOSTNAME=`uname -n | awk -F. '{print $1}'`
HOSTPFX=$(echo $HOSTNAME |cut -c 1-2)
NFSserver="nfs-server"
NFSdir="/NFS/AIXSOFT_NFS"
MOUNTPT="/mnt.$$"
MAILTO="[email protected]"
DSTRING=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M)
LOGFILE="/tmp/${PROG}.dist_sudoers.${DSTRING}.log"
BKUPFILE=/etc/sudoers.${DSTRING}
SRCFILE=${MOUNTPT}/skel/sudoers-uni
MD5FILE="/.sudoers.md5"

echo "Starting ${PROG} on ${HOSTNAME}" >> ${LOGFILE} 2>&1

# Make sure we run as root
runas=`id | awk -F'(' '{print $1}' | awk -F'=' '{print $2}'`
if [ $runas -ne 0 ] ; then
echo "$PROG: you must be root to run  Continue reading

Worth Reading: The old switcharoo

The cost of servers keeps going up and up, thanks in large part to memory, flash, and GPU prices rising as too much demand chases too little supply and also due in part to the rising cost of processors. So the server market is booming. And guess who is actually paying for it? Network vendors, who are being ground down like sacks of wheat in the massive granite grist mill of intense competition. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Next Platform

Data freshness, not speed, most important for IoT

The age of sensor data is more important than how fast it takes that information to travel around Internet- and Location-of-Things environments, say some experts. Scientists are, in fact, rethinking the network because of it.“It’s not enough to transmit data quickly. That data also needs to be fresh,” says MIT in a news release.The university has been working on better ways to ensure that sensors, which distribute readings for analysis, provide the most salient stuff. It’s not easy because you can’t just send everything at the same time (an obvious solution) — there isn't enough bandwidth.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Enterprises evaluate the costs of building versus buying an IoT platform

Almost every week we speak with an enterprise that is curious about building its own IoT application enablement platform (AEP) or IoT device management (DM) platform. The idea is straight-forward – an enterprise wants total control over the technology it deploys, so it chooses to hire developers to build the perfect, inexpensive platform.Then what happens? Sometimes everything goes exceedingly well and the IoT platform delivers as anticipated. Other times, the enterprise determines it takes more time and money to build a platform that anticipated it takes more staff to support the platform on-going than anticipated it is very hard to keep the platform features up-to-date compared to the features offered from best-in-class vendors’ IoT platforms the initial in-house platform was great, but scaling and modifying the platform to meet future requirements is exceedingly difficult due to the chosen platform architecture So, what are the total enterprise costs of building an enterprise-grade IoT platform versus buying IoT platform services from a third-party AEP or DM vendor? It really depends on the IoT solution that the enterprise wants to deploy.To read this article in full, please click here

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