Coworking tips to increase your productivity and privacy

The coworking and open-workspace revolutions are upon us.Many modern offices have already switched to open-plan concepts, and dedicated coworking spaces continue to become more and more popular. The general idea is to move office workers from their fixed cubicles to more open environments, to encourage interaction and collaboration. And coworking spaces let employees work from their locations of choice.Today, the sight of workers moving around throughout the day with their laptops is common, and they often huddle with different groups. But how can employees remain both productive and secure in such environments? Here are some basics for anyone who's new to an open office or cowork space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Lean IT impacts business outcomes

In the years since Lean first revolutionized the manufacturing sector, the basic principles have also shown benefits in other industries and other departments, most notably within technology. But new research emphasizes the major impact Lean can have not just in your IT departments, but across your entire organization.The ultimate goal and guiding principle of Lean is creating perfect value for customers through a perfect value creation process with zero waste. In the day-to-day implementations of Lean, that translates to creating more value with fewer resources and inefficiencies.Perfect value Organizations that have implemented Lean are seeing this principle become a reality, according to the Lean Business Report 2016 research from visual product delivery solutions company LeanKit, which surveyed 3,000 executives, consultants and team members between September and November 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 Ways Flash Storage Is Gaining Momentum

35% off Fitbit Alta Fitness Tracker – Deal Alert

Motivation is your best accessory with Fitbit Alta-a customizable fitness tracker designed to fit your personal style . Stay motivated by tracking all-day activity like steps, distance, calories burned and active minutes, and get credit for your workouts with Smart Track automatic exercise recognition. At night, track your sleep and set a silent alarm to wake better and get your best rest. No matter where you're headed, the easy-to-read OLED screen keeps your goals in focus with stats, time, and call or text notifications on display. And with accessory wristbands in metal, leather and sport, help you find the right style for every occasion. Wear fitness your way with Fitbit Alta.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kenna Security Raises $15M in Series B

Some of its customers include TransUnion, Starbucks, Hanes, and Hilton.

L3 fabric DC -The underlay Network -Part1

In the previous posts we have discussed the classic DC designs and the M-LAG solution. In this post we will cover the basic L3 fabric DC, you might never heard of it or you think that’s a solution for massive scale DC, yes the massive DC in the world would be running L3 fabric but nowadays more and more customers are moving …

The post L3 fabric DC -The underlay Network -Part1 appeared first on Networkers-online.com.

Q&A: Building a Layer-2 Data Center Fabric in 2016

One of my readers designing a new data center fabric that has to provide L2 transport across the data center sent me this observation:

While we don’t have plans to seek an open solution in our DC we are considering ACI or VXLAN with EVPN. Our systems integrator partner expressed a view that VXLAN is still very new. Would you share that view?

Assuming he wants to stay with Cisco, what are the other options?

US Supreme Court leaves gap in Samsung-Apple patent ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Samsung Electronics and its backers in the industry in a design patent dispute with Apple, when in a 8-0 decision it said that “the term 'article of manufacture' is broad enough to embrace both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product, whether sold separately or not.”But the top court has left a lot unsaid, including by not providing guidance to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on how the damages Samsung has to pay Apple for the infringement of smartphone design patents will have to be calculated. That could also delay for a long time the resolution of the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung, which has already dragged on for a number of years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook, Google, World Wide Technology near top of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work 2017 list

Depending up on how loosely I define "enterprise technology vendor," I'd say about a third of the 2017 Glassdoor Best Places to Work in the U.S. list consists of companies that supply IT professionals and those they support.Facebook (hey, they sell Workplace collaboration tools) is all the way up to #2, rising from #5 last year, and Google (#4), system integrator World Wide Technology (#5) and Adobe (#9) are all among the top 10. Consulting firm Bain & Co., is #1 for the third time since 2012, and replaces Airbnb as top dog this time around in the 9th annual rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Malicious online ads expose millions to possible hack

Since October, millions of internet users have been exposed to malicious code served from the pixels in tainted banner ads meant to install Trojans and spyware, according to security firm ESET.The attack campaign, called Stegano, has been spreading from malicious ads in a “number of reputable news websites,” ESET said in a Tuesday blog post. It’s been preying on Internet Explorer users by scanning for vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and then exploiting them.The attack is designed to infect victims with malware that can steal email password credentials through its keylogging and screenshot grabbing features, among others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Malicious online ads expose millions to possible hack

Since October, millions of internet users have been exposed to malicious code served from the pixels in tainted banner ads meant to install Trojans and spyware, according to security firm ESET.The attack campaign, called Stegano, has been spreading from malicious ads in a “number of reputable news websites,” ESET said in a Tuesday blog post. It’s been preying on Internet Explorer users by scanning for vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and then exploiting them.The attack is designed to infect victims with malware that can steal email password credentials through its keylogging and screenshot grabbing features, among others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Learning Environments for OVN

Over the last few days, I’ve added two new Vagrant-based learning environments to my GitHub “learning-tools” repository, both of them focused on Open Virtual Network (OVN). OVN, if you aren’t aware, is part of the Open vSwitch (OVS) project aimed at adding open source network virtualization functionality to OVS. If you’re interested in learning more about OVN, you may want to check out these new learning environments.

Here’s more details on the two new learning environments:

1. The first one, found in the “ovn” folder of the repository, just builds out a simple three-node OVN 2.6.0 environment running Ubuntu 16.04. This would allow you to run OVN commands like ovn-nbctl, ovn-sbctl, ovs-vsctl, and other related commands to better understand how the components interact with each other and how OVN works.

2. The second environment, found in the “ovn-docker-ansible” folder, builds on the first one by adding Docker Engine to each node in the environment and adding the OVN driver for Docker networking. In addition to being able to run various OVS and OVN commands, this environment allows you to build OVN-backed overlay networks between Docker containers running on any node in the environment. Continue reading

Verizon CEO Says 5G Pre-Commercial Trials Likely in 1Q

Final 5G standards could be available in 2019, not 2020.

Nokia Publishes a Templating System to Manage VNFs

It leverages the former Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand.

59% off Kangora 300 Lumens LED Tactical Mini Flashlight, Pack of 5 – Deal Alert

Heavy duty, compact and tough as nails makes the Kangora tactical torch perfect for hunting, camping or your next search and rescue mission. An ultra Bright zoomable 300 Lumens LED illuminates up to 600 feet. Features high, low, and strobe modes and a sturdy belt clip. Operates off a single AA battery. Right now Amazon is selling a pack of 5 for the discounted price of $23.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Switch adds security perimeter around SDN data center

Big Switch Networks today unraveled a wide-ranging group of products aimed at mitigating security attacks, scrutinizing cloud and container environments and improving its existing SDN-based monitoring software. In the security realm Big Switch rolled out its BigSecure Architecture, a high-performance cyber-defense platform that the company says will help enterprises protect against Terabit-speed attack. +More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+ “What we are seeing is network attack by thousands of IoT devices [like the recent Dyn DNS attack that hit 1.2Tbps] using massive speed and bandwidth to take down resources. To mitigate against that kind of attack can be cost prohibitive but what we have implemented in BigSecure can help mitigate those attacks,” said Prashant Gandhi, vice president and chief product officer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Switch adds security perimeter around SDN data center

Big Switch Networks today unraveled a wide-ranging group of products aimed at mitigating security attacks, scrutinizing cloud and container environments and improving its existing SDN-based monitoring software. In the security realm Big Switch rolled out its BigSecure Architecture, a high-performance cyber-defense platform that the company says will help enterprises protect against Terabit-speed attack. +More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+ “What we are seeing is network attack by thousands of IoT devices [like the recent Dyn DNS attack that hit 1.2Tbps] using massive speed and bandwidth to take down resources. To mitigate against that kind of attack can be cost prohibitive but what we have implemented in BigSecure can help mitigate those attacks,” said Prashant Gandhi, vice president and chief product officer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: SF Subway Hacked

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) was hit with a ransomware attack on Friday, causing fare station terminals to carry the message, “You are Hacked. ALL Data Encrypted.” Turns out, the miscreant behind this extortion attempt got hacked himself this past weekend, revealing details about other victims as well as tantalizing clues about his identity and location. —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: SF Subway Hacked appeared first on 'net work.

New oVirt Project Underway

As oVirt continues to grow, the many projects within the broader oVirt community are thriving as well. Today, the oVirt community is pleased to announce the addition of a new incubator subproject, Vagrant Provider, as well as the graduation of another subproject, moVirt, from incubator to full project status!

According to maintainer Marc Young, Vagrant Provider is a provider plugin for the Vagrant suite that enables command-line ease of virtual machine provisioning and lifecycle management.

More on Vagrant Provider

The Vagrant provider plugin will interface with the oVirt REST API (version 4 and higher) using the oVirt provided ruby SDK 'ovirt-engine-sdk-ruby'. This allows users to abstract the user interface and experience into a set of command-line abilities to create, provision, destroy and manage the complete lifecycle of virtual machines. It also allows the use of external configuration management and configuration files themselves to be committed into code.

As Young explains in his project proposal, the "trend in configuration management, operations, and devops has been to maintain as much of the development process as possible in terms of the virtual machines and hosts that they run on. With software like Terraform the tasks of creating the underlying infrastructure such as Continue reading

Say goodbye to MS-DOS command prompt

My very first technology article, back in 1987, was about MS-DOS 3.30. Almost 30 years later, I’m still writing, but the last bit of MS-DOS, cmd.exe — the command prompt — is on its way out the door. It’s quite possible that you have been using Microsoft Windows for years — decades, even — without realizing that there’s a direct line to Microsoft’s earliest operating system or that an MS-DOS underpinning has carried over from one Windows version to another — less extensive with every revision, but still there nonetheless. Now we’re about to say goodbye to all of that. Interestingly, though, there was not always an MS-DOS from Microsoft, and it wasn’t even dubbed that at birth. The history is worth reviewing now that the end is nigh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here