5 years with home NAS/RAID

I have lots of data-sets (packet-caps, internet-scans), so I need a large RAID system to hole it all. As I described in 2012, I bought a home "NAS" system. I thought I'd give the 5 year perspective.


Reliability. I had two drives fail, which is about to be expected. Buying a new drive, swapping it in, and rebuilding the RAID went painless, though that's because I used RAID6 (two drive redundancy). RAID5 (one drive redundancy) is for chumps.

Speed. I've been unhappy with the speed, but there's not much I can do about it. Mechanical drives access times are slow, and I don't see any way of fixing that.

Cost. It's been $3000 over 5 years (including the two replacement drives). That comes out to $50/month. Amazon's "Glacier" service is $108/month. Since we all have the same hardware costs, it's unlikely that any online cloud storage can do better than doing it yourself.

Moore's Law. For the same price as I spent 5 years ago, I can now get three times the storage, including faster processors in the NAS box. From that perspective, I've only spent $33/month on storage, as the remaining third still has value.

Ease-of-use: The Continue reading

Netcat Quick Reference

Netcat is a utility for checking open ports. It has more flexibility than using the telnet command and can be used with scripts more easily. This is not a comprehensive tutorial, only a quick reference source. Consult the man pages and/or documentation for indepth explanation of commands. I...

Post Equifax, We Need to Reconsider How to Identify People 

Victims of identity theft will tell you the experience is like having your personal life broken into, tossed around, and thrown out onto the street. It is a violation that is indescribable. Then, you could discover that strangers are impersonating you, carrying out crimes under your name, and destroying your reputation. Unraveling the mess that follows is a long, painful and never-ending process – all this because someone else was careless or willfully negligent with your data.

Even if your data was not exposed in the Equifax breach, you should be both concerned and angry. This is a potentially catastrophic breach: roughly 143 million individuals (approximately 45% of the US population) now face the prospect of identity theft.

As a society, we need to seriously rethink why and how we identify people. How did the social security number become the default identifier, especially for non-governmental functions such as credit reporting? When the Social Security Administration first issued SSNs in 1936, their “sole purpose” was to track the earning history of workers for benefits. In fact, Kaya Yurieff points out that until 1972, the bottom of the card read: “FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES — NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.”

Social security numbers Continue reading

A networking expert on how to experiment with containers using Mesosphere and Cumulus Linux

With the rising popularity of containers, it seems that containers and networking interact more and more frequently. Amongst all the excitement, there is also terminology and technical complexity. And because of this, I’m super grateful for Cumulus in the Cloud. As a Sr. Consulting Engineer, part of my job is ensuring I am deeply familiar with the technologies and methodologies our customers are using. I’ve recently been playing with Cumulus in the Cloud to better learn how Mesos’s Marathon and Mesosphere interoperate with Cumulus Linux and NetQ.

Let me start off by saying that if you’re interested in container networking but want more information on how to do it right, we’re hosting a webinar with Mesosphere that you should most definitely check out. Our co-founder, JR Rivers, will also be hosting, and, I promise you, he’s always an engaging speaker. Of course if you’re already familiar with container networking, or you would like to learn about it in a more hands-on atmosphere, then please read on!

I’m a networking veteran, but working at Cumulus has pushed the boundaries of my networking knowledge as I’ve had to learn more about integrating networking solutions with application functionality. When I have to talk Continue reading

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing?

High performance computing, long the domain of research centers and academia, is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream IT infrastructure and being opened up to a broader range of enterprise workloads, and in recent years, that includes big data analytics and machine learning. At the forefront of this expanded use is MasterCard, a financial services giant that is looking to drive the real-time business benefits of HPC.

As MasterCard has learned, however, alongside business value come additional needs around data protection. As HPC systems are more likely to hold customer-facing and other compliance related data, such infrastructure has the potential …

With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pluribus Networks… Wait, where are we again?


I was privileged to visit Pluribus Networks as a delegate at Network Field Day 16 a couple of weeks ago. Somebody else paid for the trip. Details here.

Much has changed at Pluribus, I hardly recognized the place!

I quite like Pluribus (their use of Solaris under their Netvisor switching OS got me right in the feels early on) so I'm happy to report that most of what's new looks like changes for the better.

When we arrived at Pluribus HQ we were greeted by some new faces, a new logo, color scheme... Even new accent lighting in the demo area!

Gone also are the Server Switches with their monstrous control planes (though still listed on the website, they weren't mentioned in the presentation), Solaris, and a partnership with Supermicro.

In their place we found:

  • The new logo and colors
  • New faces in management and marketing
  • Netvisor running on Linux
  • Whitebox and OCP-friendly switches
  • A partnership with D-Link
  • Some Netvisor improvements

Linux

This was probably inevitable, and likely matters little to Netvisor users. When Pluribus was first getting off the ground, I was waiting for an OpenSolaris release that never happened. That Pluribus stuck with Solaris for as long Continue reading

A lack of cloud skills could cost companies money

A poll from Europe finds two in three IT decision makers say their organization is losing out on revenue because their firm lacks specific cloud expertise.The report, compiled by cloud hosting provider Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found nearly three quarters of IT decision makers (71 percent) believed their organizations have lost revenue due to a lack of cloud expertise. On average, this accounts for 5 percent of total global revenue, no small amount of money. + Also on Network World: 10 most in-demand tech skills + Also, the survey found 65 percent believed they could bring greater innovation to their company with “the right cloud insight.” And 85 percent said greater expertise within their organization would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A lack of cloud skills could cost companies money

A poll from Europe finds two in three IT decision makers say their organization is losing out on revenue because their firm lacks specific cloud expertise.The report, compiled by cloud hosting provider Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found nearly three quarters of IT decision makers (71 percent) believed their organizations have lost revenue due to a lack of cloud expertise. On average, this accounts for 5 percent of total global revenue, no small amount of money. + Also on Network World: 10 most in-demand tech skills + Also, the survey found 65 percent believed they could bring greater innovation to their company with “the right cloud insight.” And 85 percent said greater expertise within their organization would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 Reasons Why Attending the Transform Security Track at vForum Online is a Must

If you’ve been working in IT for the past few years, you know how much the security landscape has changed recently. Application infrastructures — once hosted in on-premises data centers — now sit in highly dynamic public and private multicloud environments. With the rise of mobile devices, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and Internet of Things (IoT), end-user environments are no longer primarily about corporately managed desktops. And attackers are growing more sophisticated by the day.

In such an atmosphere, traditional network perimeter security ceases to provide adequate protection.

That’s where the VMware solutions come in. At the heart of the solutions is a ubiquitous software layer across application infrastructure and endpoints that’s independent of the underlying physical infrastructure or location. To really understand how it works, you need to experience it for yourself. And the Transform Security track at vForum Online Fall 2017 on October 18th is the perfect opportunity. As our largest virtual conference, vForum Online gives IT professionals like yourself the chance to take a deep dive into VMware products with breakout sessions, chats with experts, and hands-on labs — all from the comfort of your own desk.

With this free half-day event just weeks away, it’s time to Continue reading

Familiarizing Africans with Internet of Things

About 70 years ago, the world was introduced to the digital computers revolution which made the computation of millions of operations as fast and easy as 1+2. This simplified so many time-consuming activities and brought about new applications that amazed the world. Then, about 40 years ago the advent of networks and inter-networks (or the Internet) revolutionized the way we work and live by connecting the hundreds of millions of computing devices that have invaded our homes and offices.

Today, we are at the beginning of a new revolution, that of the Internet of Things (IoT), the extent of which might only be limited by our imagination. Internet of Things refers to the rapidly growing network of objects connected through the Internet. The objects can be sensors such as a thermostat or a speed meter, or actuators that open a valve or that turn on/off a light or a motor. These devices are embedded in our everyday home and workplace equipment (refrigerators, machines, cars, road infrastructure, etc.) or even the human body. These devices connected to powerful computers in the “cloud” might change our world in a way that few of us can imagine today. It is estimated that Continue reading

Response: The Worm Has Turned Against Tech Companies

For the past decade, the loudest arguments waged regarding the Four (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) were about which CEO was more Jesus-like or should run for president. These platforms brought down autocrats, were going to cure death and put a man on Mars, because they are just so awesome. Media outlets were coopted into […]

The post Response: The Worm Has Turned Against Tech Companies appeared first on EtherealMind.

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  • .NET developers dealing with Errors in Production: You know the pain of troubleshooting errors with limited time, limited information, and limited tools. Managers want to know what’s wrong right away, users don’t want to provide log data, and Continue reading
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