Best open source management tools

Open source holds up to commercial productsOpen source software provides an attractive alternative to more costly commercial products, but can open source products deliver enterprise-grade results? To answer this question we tested four open source products: OpenNMS, Pandora FMS, NetXMS and Zabbix. All four products were surprisingly good. We liked Pandora FMS for its ease of installation and modern user interface. In general, we found configuration to be easier and more intuitive with Pandora than the other contenders. NetXMS came in a close second with a nice user interface, easy to configure rules and a solid user manual. Overall, we found all four products suitable for enterprise use, particularly in small-to-midsize environments. (Read the full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What we talk about when we talk about 5G wireless

So what is 5G, exactly, anyway? Well, if you’re asking about “exactly,” it doesn’t exist yet. Oh, that helps me a lot. Sorry. But the best answer to your question is probably that 5G is sort of a catch-all name to describe the next generation of carrier wireless technology that’s going to be slinging tweets and videos and connected home signals from the internet to your smartphone or your smartwatch or, really, any smart object you’ve got handy. So why’s it better than 4G? Haven’t we had enough Gs? Oh, not hardly. You see, 5G – like 4G, and the rest of the Gs, in fact – is entirely a marketing term, meant to give an overview of a certain generation of carrier wireless tech. Most of what we’ve got in this country that we refer to as 4G is called LTE, although regular LTE isn’t quite 4G, according to standards groups, and LTE Advanced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2016 – the year 5G wireless testing really took off

The concept of 5G wireless has been around for a long time, but only recently have meaningful moves taken place to bring the new technology to customers.5G stakeholders – which include silicon giants such as Qualcomm and Intel, infrastructure players like Ericsson and Nokia, and, of course the major wireless carriers – have been unsurprisingly bullish on the technology’s rapid advance, announcing numerous breakthroughs and field trials over the past several months. We’ve constructed a timeline of these 5G trials, embedded below, to give you a visual sense of how much action has been taking place.+ MORE: Read our 5G FAQ +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pandora FMS wins open-source management shootout

Doing more with less remains an ongoing challenge for IT execs. Making sure everything keeps humming along to meet service-level agreements can be challenging for resource-stretched IT departments. For all but the smallest shops, effective monitoring requires tools that provide a meta view of the entire infrastructure with drill-down capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

2016 – the year 5G wireless testing really took off

The concept of 5G wireless has been around for a long time, but only recently have meaningful moves taken place to bring the new technology to customers.5G stakeholders – which include silicon giants such as Qualcomm and Intel, infrastructure players like Ericsson and Nokia, and, of course the major wireless carriers – have been unsurprisingly bullish on the technology’s rapid advance, announcing numerous breakthroughs and field trials over the past several months. We’ve constructed a timeline of these 5G trials, embedded below, to give you a visual sense of how much action has been taking place.+ MORE: Read our 5G FAQ +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple offers new battery for iPhone 6s phones that suddenly shut down

Apple has said that a few iPhone 6s smartphones are unexpectedly shutting down, confirming a problem reported last week by a Chinese consumer protection group.The company said the problem is restricted to a small number of phones within a limited serial number range that were manufactured between September and October last year.Apple said it was not a safety issue, and appeared to suggest that the problem would be resolved by a replacement battery which the company offered free. It did not say how many iPhone 6s phones were affected and in which markets.The China Consumers Association asked Apple to investigate problems with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s phones that were automatically shutting off. The unexpected shutdowns were said to happen when the phone’s battery charge dropped to between 60 and 50 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Symantec will acquire identity protection firm LifeLock in $2.3B deal

Aiming to boost its consumer security business, Symantec is acquiring LifeLock, a vendor of identity protection services, for US$2.3 billion in enterprise value. The deal will create what the two companies described as the world’s largest consumer security business with over $2.3 billion in annual revenue based on last fiscal year revenue for both companies. The immediate opportunity for Symantec comes from the large number of consumers worldwide that have been victims of cybercrime, generating as a result greater user concern in digital safety. The companies estimate the market at $10 billion, and growing in the high single digits. In the U.S. alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be about 80 million people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Symantec will acquire identity protection firm LifeLock in $2.3B deal

Aiming to boost its consumer security business, Symantec is acquiring LifeLock, a vendor of identity protection services, for US$2.3 billion in enterprise value. The deal will create what the two companies described as the world’s largest consumer security business with over $2.3 billion in annual revenue based on last fiscal year revenue for both companies. The immediate opportunity for Symantec comes from the large number of consumers worldwide that have been victims of cybercrime, generating as a result greater user concern in digital safety. The companies estimate the market at $10 billion, and growing in the high single digits. In the U.S. alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be about 80 million people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel Declares War on GPUs at Disputed HPC, AI Border

In Supercomputing Conference (SC) years past, chipmaker Intel has always come forth with a strong story, either as an enabling processor or co-processor force, or more recently, as a prime contractor for a leading-class national lab supercomputer.

But outside of a few announcements at this year’s SC related to beefed-up SKUs for high performance computing and Skylake plans, the real emphasis back in Portland seemed to ring far fainter for HPC and much louder for the newest server tech darlings, deep learning and machine learning. Far from the HPC crowd last week was Intel’s AI Day, an event in …

Intel Declares War on GPUs at Disputed HPC, AI Border was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer

The future “Summit” pre-exascale supercomputer that is being built out in late 2017 and early 2018 for the US Department of Energy for its Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks like a giant cluster of systems that might be used for training neural networks. And that is an extremely convenient development.

More than once during the SC16 supercomputing conference this week in Salt Lake City, the Summit system and its companion “Sierra” system that will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, were referred to as “AI supercomputers.” This is a reflection of the fact that the national labs around the …

Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Networks Drive HPC Harder Than Compute

It is hard to tell which part of the HPC market is more competitive: compute, networking, or storage. From where we sit, there is an increasing level of competition on all three fronts and the pressure to perform, both financially and technically, has never been higher. This is great for customers, of course, who are being presented with lots of technology to choose from. But HPC customers tend to pick architectures for several generations, so there is also pressure on them to make the right choices – whatever that means.

In a sense, enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders, who …

Networks Drive HPC Harder Than Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Using GNOME Keyring as Git Credential Helper

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use the GNOME Keyring on Ubuntu 16.04 as a credential helper for Git. This post stems from my work in transitioning to Linux as my primary OS, an effort I’ve ratcheted up significantly in the last few weeks. What I’m including here isn’t new or ground-breaking information; I’m posting it primarily to make the information easier to find for others.

On Ubuntu 16.04, the basis for integrating GNOME Keyring into Git as a credential helper is already installed into the /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring directory. However, if you try to simply run sudo make in that directory, it will fail. In order to make it work, you must first install some additional development libraries:

sudo apt install libgnome-keyring-dev

Once you’ve installed this additional package, running sudo make in that directory will quickly compile a binary named git-credential-gnome-keyring. Once you have that binary, then you can configure Git to use GNOME Keyring as a credential helper. You can do this a couple of different ways:

  1. You can use the git config command, like this:

     git config --global credential.helper /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring/git-credential-gnome-keyring

  2. You can edit ~/.gitconfig directly, using the text editor of your Continue reading

50-plus jaw-dropping Black Friday 2016 tech deals

Some have begun referring to this month as Black November since pre-Black Friday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales have all blended together. Not all the supposed deals are actually deals at all – in many cases, the retailers are just trying to offload stuff – but there are plenty of bargains to be had on the hottest smartphones, tablets, PCs and gaming systems. Here’s a look at some of the best deals.Websites such as BFads.net, BlackFriday.com and BestBlackFriday.com have all been helpful in collecting this information. MORE: Best Black Friday Apple Watch dealsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stacking Up Software To Drive FPGAs Into The Datacenter

Every new hardware device that offers some kind of benefit compared to legacy devices faces the task of overcoming the immense inertia that is imparted to a platform by the software that runs upon it. While FPGAs have so many benefits compared to general purpose CPUs and even GPUs because of their malleability, the inertia seems even heavier.

Any substantial change requires a big payoff to be implemented because change is inherently risky. It doesn’t help that the method of programming FPGAs efficiently using VHDL and Verilog are so alien to Java and C programmers, and that the tools for …

Stacking Up Software To Drive FPGAs Into The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

iPhone 8 launch will see Apple release 3 brand-new devices

Given that the overall design of the iPhone hasn't changed much since the release of the iPhone 6 back in 2014, there's a lot of pressure on Apple to deliver a home run when the company launches the iPhone 8 later next year.Though next year's iPhone would ordinarily be called the iPhone 7s, it's widely believed that Apple's next-gen iPhone will represent such a compelling upgrade that Apple will opt to call it the iPhone 8 instead.Now, as for what Apple has in store for us with the iPhone 8, the company's plans are beginning to crystalize slowly but surely. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via Apple Insider), Apple next year will introduce three distinct iPhone models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 8 launch will see Apple release 3 brand new devices

Given that the overall design of the iPhone hasn't changed much since the release of the iPhone 6 back in 2014, there's a lot of pressure on Apple to deliver a home run when the company launches the iPhone 8 later next year.Though next year's iPhone would ordinarily be called the iPhone 7s, it's widely believed that Apple's next-gen iPhone will represent such a compelling upgrade that Apple will opt to call it the iPhone 8 instead.Now as for what Apple has in store for us with the iPhone 8, the company's plans are beginning to crystalize slowly but surely. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via Apple Insider), Apple next year will introduce three distinct iPhone models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT security camera infected within 98 seconds of plugging it in

One and a half minutes is all it took after plugging in an internet-connected security camera for the camera be infected with malware.Unlike the average Jane or Joe Doe who would not want their security camera to be immediately infected with malware, Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, called it “fun” to watch the infection happen. He tweet-documented his experience.Graham purchased an inexpensive device – this $55 IoT security camera made by JideTech.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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