IDG Contributor Network: Cloud Native Ambassadors and Docker Captains navigate users through the container ecosystem

Navigating the container ecosystem can be confusing. Deciding where to dip your toes is challenging for those stepping into container and microservices waters. Even those who have already ventured knee-deep still wade through many questions as they progress in their cloud native journey. To help them guide them through the ecosystem, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently launched a Cloud Native Ambassadors program at its inaugural CloudNativeDay in Toronto.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4G will not ‘evolve’ into 5G, economics firm says

“If anyone tells you they know the details of what 5G will deliver, walk the other way,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is now famously reported as saying in a June presentation made to the National Press Club. He meant, of course, that 5G is up in the air. No one knows for sure what it will end up being when it appears.Bets are on extremely high frequencies—pretty much what’s vacant in the spectrum—and the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a part in driving 5G.+ Also on Network World: 5 things you need to know about 5G +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT catches on in New England fishing town

Fifty miles south of Boston, the Internet of Things is taking hold in the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts.It isn’t something you’d expect in this fishing and agricultural area. But thanks to INEX IoT Impact Labs, Dell and the companies’ many IoT partners, small and midsize enterprises here are discovering the power of IoT-enabled sensors and monitoring—and the data that comes from them.There’s a type of industrial revival taking place among those types of businesses—taking current infrastructure and renovating it with new technology, says Christopher Rezendes, founder of INEX. They’re recognizing how this technology can help them solve real business problems and do it without having to spend a lot of money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel buys chip maker Movidius to help bring computer vision to drones

Intel's RealSense computer vision platform has been lacking a low-powered way of recognizing what its depth-sensing cameras are seeing -- until now.The chip giant is buying Movidius, the designer of a range of system-on-chip products for accelerating computer vision processing.Movidius supplies chips to drone makers such as DJI and to thermal imaging company FLIR Systems, itself a supplier of DJI.Its chips help computers figure out what they are seeing through cameras like Intel's RealSense by breaking down the processing into a set of smaller tasks that they can execute in parallel.There are systems that already do this using GPUs, but those are relatively power-hungry, often consuming tens of watts. That's not a problem in fixed applications with access to mains electricity, or in cars, which have huge batteries and a way to recharge them. But in drones or other lightweight IoT devices, power consumption needs to be much lower.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Questions about Network Automation Workshop

Marcel Reuter sent me a few questions about my upcoming Network Automation workshop. You might find them interesting, so here they are:

We have a lab with virtual IOS-XE, IOS-XR and Junos (vMX) router. I would like to learn how to provisioning the Lab router.

Covered in the workshop. I’m focusing on vIOS (which is pretty close to IOS Classic and IOS-XE) and Nexus OS because that’s what I can get up and running quickly in VIRL.

Read more ...

New Wi-Fi features in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Last month Microsoft debuted its first major update to Windows 10, technically called version 1607 but generally known as the Anniversary Update. You may have seen stories around the web delving into the update's general improvements including a smarter Cortana, Edge extensions and Windows Ink, but rarely have the Anniversary Update's new Wi-Fi and networking features and interfaces been discussed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Ubuntu 16.04 kisses the cloud, disses the desktop

With Ubuntu 16.04LTS (Xenial Xerus), Canonical has introduced incremental improvements to the popular server and cloud versions of its operating system, but if you were looking for exciting changes to desktop Ubuntu, this version isn’t it. The 16.04 release is an iterative, not necessarily massive improvement. But this is an Long Term Service (LTS) version, which means that there’s a team working on keeping it solid for five years. So, into the next decade, 16.04 gets patched and fixed, as other versions continue to be released on a regular basis. In this new release, Ubuntu further strays from the RedHat/SUSE/CentOS/Oracle school of software packaging by officially supporting an important new tool: Snap, a package manager.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama aims to avoid a ‘cycle of escalation’ in cyberattacks by countries

U.S. President Barack Obama said his country has had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia and other countries in the past, but aims to establish some norms of behavior rather than let the issue escalate as happened in arms races in the past.Obama’s statement on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, did not refer specifically to a recent hack of the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing.Politically embarrassing emails from the breach were leaked ahead of the convention of the party, with many security experts holding that the hack had the backing of Russian intelligence services. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released the emails but did not disclose their source. The U.S. government hasn’t blamed Russia for the incident.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama aims to avoid a ‘cycle of escalation’ in cyberattacks by countries

U.S. President Barack Obama said his country has had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia and other countries in the past, but aims to establish some norms of behavior rather than let the issue escalate as happened in arms races in the past.Obama’s statement on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, did not refer specifically to a recent hack of the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing.Politically embarrassing emails from the breach were leaked ahead of the convention of the party, with many security experts holding that the hack had the backing of Russian intelligence services. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released the emails but did not disclose their source. The U.S. government hasn’t blamed Russia for the incident.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SSH Agent on OS X

There's a lot of information on the intertoobs about getting ssh-agent “working” in OS X and even more articles about when and how the stock behavior of ssh-agent changed (mostly with respect to how ssh-agent interacted with the Keychain).

This article doesn't cover or care about any of that.

This article is concerned with:

  • Enabling ssh-agent in such a way that I can “ssh-add” in one terminal window and that same agent (and the loaded keys) is available in all of my other terminal windows.
  • Enabling use of ssh-agent from MacPorts and/or Homebrew and not the older ssh-agent that OS X ships with in /usr/bin.
  • To avoid having to put my keys in the Keychain (just a matter of preference).

On Definitions: Whatever is Forwarding Information?

After last week’s, a reader left a comment noting “I2RS doesn’t manipulate forwarding data.” If I2RS isn’t “manipulating forwarding data,” then what, precisely, is it doing? I thought it’s worth a post to try and help folks understand the definitions in this space—except, as you’ll soon discover, there are no definitions here. In fact, it’s almost impossible to create a single set of definitions that will clarify the issues involved in understanding the various sorts of state in a network device. The following illustration might be helpful in trying to understand the vagaries of the various kinds of state, and the confusion that results from the various names used in different places.

device-model-definitions

It would be “nice” to say something like: information held in the forwarding table, that’s actually used to forward traffic through the router, is the only real “forwarding data.” This makes for a nice clean definition that clearly separates, say, what the RIB does and what the FIB does in most of the hardware based switching devices produced today. There are two problems with this clean definition, however.

First, there are, and always will be, devices produced that simply don’t have a forwarding table. Instead of Continue reading

OpenOffice coders debate retiring the project

Concerns at the Apache Software Foundation that the Apache OpenOffice project it hosts might be failing have prompted a debate about retiring the project, and triggered the resignation of at least one member of the project's management committee. The office productivity suite was once a key element of efforts to build an open source alternative to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop.Now its remaining developers struggle to keep on top of security issues in the code, and the ASF Board  has asked the project's management committee to explain itself and propose a remedy, committee chair Dennis E. Hamilton said in an email to project contributors last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenOffice coders debate retiring the project

Concerns at the Apache Software Foundation that the Apache OpenOffice project it hosts might be failing have prompted a debate about retiring the project, and triggered the resignation of at least one member of the project's management committee. The office productivity suite was once a key element of efforts to build an open source alternative to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop.Now its remaining developers struggle to keep on top of security issues in the code, and the ASF Board  has asked the project's management committee to explain itself and propose a remedy, committee chair Dennis E. Hamilton said in an email to project contributors last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here