HP sells PCs in a new way as it tries to speed up upgrades

As the PC upgrade cycle slows down, HP is making a new devices-and-services pitch in an effort to revive sales. HP's device-as-a-service program, announced Thursday, gives companies the option of buying PCs, support and services via a monthly charge instead of paying for everything upfront.With many businesses waiting five or six years to upgrade PCs, the new plan could push users to refresh hardware at a faster pace. The offering is similar to the software-as-a-service model popularized by software companies. It's like renting a PC and paying in installments, but with added benefits. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Integration projects that went terribly wrong

Large IT modernization projects often failImage by ThinkstockAccording to the 2011 Institute for Defense Analysis report, business transformation projects are routinely “over budget, behind schedule, and have not met performance expectations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How computer chips can be hacked

Mass implementation of Trojan viruses, introduced in the chip manufacturing process, will be responsible for allowing attackers and others to obtain leaky data and to control processes from IoT devices and beyond, a German security expert says.Christof Parr, who is head of embedded security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, has obtained special grant funding to explore the controversial subject, the university says in a release.Hardware Trojans, or backdoors, could be “integrated into the devices by the manufacturers from the outset, or included during chip manufacturing,” the university says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT Resume Makeover: How to show employers the real you

Joshua Jacobs, a senior security systems administrator, was once told by a hiring manager that when looking at his resume, he assumed Jacobs was "just another sys admin," but after interviewing him, he realized he was much more than that. That's when Jacobs knew it was time to work on his resume. We heard Jacobs plight and teamed him up with Andrew Ysasi, president of Admovio and executive director of Kent Record Management, who took on the task of reformatting Jacobs' resume to reflect his impressive background and skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

HTTP/2 Server Push with multiple assets per Link header

In April we announced that we had added experimental support for HTTP/2 Server Push to all CloudFlare web sites. We did this so that our customers could iterate on this new functionality.

CC BY 2.0 image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/mryipyop/

Our implementation of Server Push made use of the HTTP Link header as detailed in W3C Preload Working Draft.

We also showed how to make Server Push work from within PHP code and many people started testing and using this feature.

However, there was a serious restriction in our initial version: it was not possible to specify more than one asset per Link header for Server Push and many CMS and web development platforms would not allow multiple Link headers.

We have now addressed that problem and it is possible to request that multiple assets be pushed in a single Link header. This change is live and was used to push assets in this blog post to your browser if your browser supports HTTP/2.

When CloudFlare reads a Link header sent by an origin web server it will remove assets that it pushes from the Link header passed on to the web browser. That made it a little difficult Continue reading

Google age-discrimination lawsuit may become a monster

Just over a year ago, two job applicants filed a lawsuit against Google. They claimed they were rejected because of their age. Both were over 40.A federal court in San Jose, Calif., is now being asked to decide whether many others who sought jobs at Google and were also rejected can join this case.On Wednesday, a motion for conditional certification of collective action status was filed. This motion, similar to a class action, seeks to include "all individuals who interviewed in-person for any software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position with Google in the United States during the time period from August 13, 2010 through the present; were age 40 or older at the time of the interview; and were refused employment by Google."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chuck Robbins sets Cisco up to take off

It’s been about a year since Chuck Robbins took over as CEO of Cisco. Following in the footsteps of John Chambers certainly could not have been easy. Chambers was perhaps the most visible, thought-leading CEO in all of technology. Also, he had been at the post for about 20 years, something rare in business today, and had reached quasi celebrity status. When Robbins took the helm, many customers, analysts and investors asked me whether I thought Robbins would maintain the status quo or shake things up. I didn’t know Robbins all that well when he took the job. But Cisco had tremendous success during the Chambers tenure, so the natural assumption was Robbins wouldn’t do anything to disrupt what was already working. I thought he might make a few tweaks here and there, but I wasn’t expecting big changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Forgotten ‘maintenance’ password for Junos Space

The maintenance users password can be reset in Junos Space if you still have access via the CLI:

  • SSH to the Space host
  • Log in as the admin user
  • Choose the debug option on the menu (6 or 7, depending on whether this is a VM or an appliance).  Just press the number, not the number followed by return!
  • Put in the admin user’s password again.  You’re now in the Centos shell.
  • Issue the command ‘htpasswd -sb /var/www/maintenance/maintPW maintenance <newpassword>‘

 

Simple as that…   I was never sure why an additional maintenance password was required as well as the admin user and the GUI super user password.  Makes it a pain to keep a record of, but there you go – presumably there’s a good reason.


Node Africa Deploys Greenfield Data Center Infrastructure, Leads Africa to be Cloud First Continent

Node Africa is a cloud service provider and cloud broker. One of very few hybrid to public cloud providers in Africa, it offers its customers bespoke cloud infrastructure and services including consulting, design, build, and deployment of complex solutions. When the organization launched in Kenya, their challenges included deploying a data center in under two months, and creating a hybrid offering that would reduce bandwidth challenges.

Because of cost constraints, Node Africa chose VMware and the vCloud Air Network program (vCAN) to build its business and data center, so that they would only pay for what they used. Then, using the vCloud Architecture Toolkit—including vSphere, vCloud Director, and NSX—they built a scalable cloud infrastructure in six weeks.

Node Africa CEO Phares Kariuki says, “The amount of money we have saved on networking equipment as a result of using NSX as the basis of our network has been amazing. We saved $10,000 on just our initial network infrastructure investment, that’s big for a green fields start-up.”

Read the complete case study here.

Roger

The post Node Africa Deploys Greenfield Data Center Infrastructure, Leads Africa to be Cloud First Continent appeared first on The Network Virtualization Blog.

Microsoft appears to be building a business app marketplace

Microsoft appears to be building a business app store. The company put online a test version of a service called AppSource that’s designed to help businesses find software that augments the Microsoft products they already use, such as Power BI and Dynamics AX. The AppSource site was available Tuesday night at appsource.microsoft.com), but is down now. A description on its homepage said that users would be able to use the site to find software-as-a-service offerings from Microsoft and selected partners that they could try for free before purchasing them. All of this appears to have come to light after someone developing the site at Microsoft accidentally made a test version of it available on the public Internet, where it was discovered by a prolific Microsoft leaker who goes by Walking Cat on Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OVS Integration with Debian Network Scripts

I had a reader contact me recently with some questions regarding the use of Open vSwitch (OVS) on Debian “Jessie” 8.5 and using the OVS integration with the Debian network scripts. For those of you that might be unfamiliar with this functionality, it’s the ability to configure OVS via instructions and directives found in the /etc/network/interfaces file. As I was helping this reader, I came across a couple potential “gotchas” that I wanted to point out here.

First, I’ll point you to the documentation for the Debian network scripts integration, which is found in this file in the “Debian network scripts integration” section. This documentation provides the complete breakdown of the various commands that can be used in /etc/network/interfaces to configure OVS.

Based on that documentation, you could create an OVS bridge and add a physical port to that bridge by including the following stanzas in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-ovs ovsbr0
iface ovsbr0 inet manual
  ovs_type OVSBridge
  ovs_ports eth1

allow-ovsbr0 eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
  ovs_bridge ovsbr0
  ovs_type OVSPort

Now for the gotchas…

The Debian “Jessie” repos include version 2.3.0 of OVS; the latest release in the 2.3.x train is 2.3.3. As it turns Continue reading

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