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The Sun sets on Solaris and Sparc

After years of struggle and fading recognition, it seems the end is finally here for Solaris and Sparc, the Unix operating system and RISC processor designed and championed by Sun Microsystems and inherited by Oracle in 2010.In a move that will win it no PR points, Oracle sent out recorded telephone messages to employees who were let go on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. Yes, firing by voice mail. Classy.The exact number is being debated, but talk on one message board puts it at 2,500. That’s both Solaris and Sparc engineers. The workers affected are primarily in the Santa Clara area, in a former Sun office not even a mile from Intel’s headquarters, but they are in three other states and India as well. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Connecting the car

It’s an interesting paradox: the more connected the car, the less connected the driver.As a gearhead, that frightens me. I’ve always gravitated toward muscle cars, both new and old, because I like to feel connected to the car. I like the feeling of being pushed back in the seat when I press the long, skinny pedal. I love the experience of going through the gears and the throaty roar of a finely-tuned V8, like the one in my “TrackPack” optioned Mustang GT.But as a techie, I also appreciate connected and autonomous cars – so long as they don’t look like inflated characters from classic video game, Dig Dug.You Googlers know exactly what I mean!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Apple Watch / Red Sox cheating scandal points toward larger issues

Newsflash: Someone just found a viable use case for the Apple Watch. Too bad it turned out to be cheating at baseball!Wearable technology such as fitness trackers and smart watches have long been seen as aids for athletes to improve their performance and help them win. And that’s great. But now that the Boston Red Sox have been caught red handed using Apple Watches to communicate and transfer signs stolen from the Yankees, it seems there may also be an unanticipated dark side to the Internet of Things (IoT) in sports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Using Keybase with GPG on macOS

During my too-brief stint using Fedora Linux as my primary laptop OS (see here for some details), I became attached to using GPG (GNU Privacy Guard)—in conjunction with Keybase—for signing Git commits and signing e-mail messages. Upon moving back to macOS, I found that I needed to set this configuration back up again, and so I thought I’d document it here in case others find it useful.

I’m making a couple assumptions here:

1. First, I’m assuming you’ve already signed up for Keybase, generated your proofs, installed the app (this provides the keybase CLI tool), and created a PGP key using Keybase. (Hard-core PGP/GPG users will probably prefer to create their key outside of Keybase and import it, but then again they aren’t necessarily the target audience for this article either.)

2. Second, I’m assuming you’ve already installed GPG on your Mac, typically via something like GPG Tools.

With those assumptions in mind, let’s assume that you’d like to be able to use the PGP key generated by/stored in Keybase with something like GPGMail. Here are the steps you’d need to follow to do that:

1. First, you’ll need to export the PGP public key out of Keybase and into Continue reading

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Location-Based Tech: NFC, WiFi, and BLE

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When the Network Knows All

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New in Ansible for Networking Engineers Online Course

Plenty of new stuff was added to the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course and webinar since the last update.

Fun things first: I needed adjustable check mode behavior and change tracking in some playbooks, and documented these features in two new videos (online course and webinar).

Read more ...

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U.S. Cyber Command gains status | Salted Hash Ep 1, Pt 2

Reporters Steve Ragan and Fahmida Rashid discuss the implications of the U.S. Cyber Command's recent elevation in status, putting it on the same level as the military’s other functional combatant commands.

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Ransomware: What you need to know now | Salted Hash Ep 1, Pt 4

Reporters Fahmida Rashid and Steve Ragan talk about the latest ransomware threats, the holes in IT security and the burdens on enterprises.

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Salted Hash: Kaspersky Lab, U.S. Cyber Command, Hollywood hacking and ransomware

Reporters Steve Ragan and Fahmida Rashid unpack the hottest topics in the security realm: Kaspersky Lab's Russia connection, the new status for the U.S. Cyber Command, Hollywood's hacking woes and ransomware.

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Hollywood’s hacking woes | Salted Hash Ep 1, Pt 3

Reporters Fahmida Rashid and Steve Ragan talk about hacks of Sony and more recently, HBO, and what lessons enterprises can learn from the entertainment industry's mistakes.

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Kaspersky Lab and the Russia connection | Salted Hash Ep 1, Pt 1

Reporters Fahmida Rashid and Steve Ragan talk about antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab, a Russian-based company that various U.S. agencies have flagged as untrustworthy. Should you use it?

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Troubleshooting connectivity problems in leaf and spine fabrics

Introducing data center fabric, the next-generation Facebook data center network describes the benefits of moving to a leaf and spine network architecture. The diagram shows how the leaf and spine architecture creates many paths between each pair of hosts. Multiple paths increase available bandwidth and resilience against the loss of a link or a switch. While most networks don't have the scale requirements of Facebook, smaller scale leaf and spine designs deliver high bandwidth, low latency, networking to support cloud workloads (e.g. vSphere, OpenStack, Docker, Hadoop, etc.).

Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.

Fortunately, industry standard sFlow monitoring technology is built into the commodity switch hardware used to build leaf and spine networks. Enabling sFlow telemetry on all the switches in the network provides centralized, real-time, visibility into network traffic.
Fabric View Continue reading

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Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible

The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?

This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.

Intent isn’t New

One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.

If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?

These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading

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Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible

The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?

This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.

Intent isn’t New

One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.

If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?

These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading

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Intent-based Networking: What’s Real and What’s Hype?

 “Better to be onboard than be left behind.”

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Docker in the Enterprise Showcased at VMworld 2017

Last week, in the blistering heat of Las Vegas, Docker had a chance to interact with thousands of VMworld attendees to talk about containers. The message we heard again and again was that those in charge of infrastructure and virtualization are now being asked to manage containers. Sometimes it is being driven by developer teams that are already using Docker, but sometimes it is the infrastructure teams who recognize the benefits of moving applications to containers for easier maintenance and operations as well as cost savings. With Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), we have a solution that is designed to let IT secure and manage containerized applications.

Learn More About Docker for VMware Admins

If you’re interested in learning more about how Docker EE allows IT to improve operations, move workloads to the cloud and increase application agility all while saving costs, we’re happy to be partnering with the VMware User Group (VMUG) to deliver a webcast tomorrow. Register now to see how Docker EE is being used by some of the world’s largest container deployments, how Docker works with Windows applications or to clarify any confusion you may have about how Docker containers and VMs work together.

Docker + vSphere: Two Continue reading

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Survey: Enterprise IoT faces skills shortage, security challenges

A survey of technology decision-makers at mid- to large-scale enterprises found that IoT adoption is coming to the vast majority of businesses within the next two years, but many of those businesses aren’t yet ready to cope with the change.A major part of the problem is a perceived skills gap. Of the 500 IoT-involved technology pros surveyed, just 20% said that they “had all the skills they needed” to successfully implement their organization’s planned IoT projects.The other four out of five respondents to the survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and backed by UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat said that they had some degree of need for additional IoT skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Anuta Networks Brings Orchestration to Tata’s SD-WAN

Anuta’s NCX has helped Tata configure, deploy, and manage more than 10,000 instances of its SD-WAN.

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Tech Talk: Pricey iPhones, intent-based networks, GPS spoofing and smartwatches

Our panel looks at whether smartwatch makers blew it by not focusing on the enterprise, why intent-based networking is the next big thing, whether GPS spoofing is real, and how high is too high when it comes to iPhone prices.