What the Dell, EMC merger really means

Despite its whopping price tag, the $67 billion Dell acquisition of EMC doesn't radically reshape the technology market. The acquisition, announced today, is not as disruptive to the tech market as, say, Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, or Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp., companies with competitive platforms and technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fake LinkedIn profiles lure unsuspecting users

No doubt you've received a LinkedIn invition from someone you don't know -- or you're not sure you know. Next time, you might want to think a little harder before accepting. Researchers from Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit have identified a network of at least 25 well-developed LinkedIn profiles as part of a targeted social engineering campaign against individuals in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. The fake profiles were linked to 204 legitimate profiles belonging to individuals working in defense, telecommunications, government, and utility sectors. A quarter of the victims worked in the telecommunications sector in the Middle East and North Africa. Fortunately, the fake profiles have already been removed from LinkedIn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCNA – Operation of IP Data Networks 1.1

We kick off the CCNA series from the beginning. Operation of IP data networks is weighted as 5% in the CCNA RS blueprint. The first topic is:

1.1 Recognize the purpose and functions of various network devices such as routers, switches, bridges and hubs

Router

A router is a device that routes between different networks, meaning that it looks at the IP header and more specifically the destination IP of a packet to do forwarding. It uses a routing table which is populated by static routes and routes from dynamic protocols such as RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, ISIS and BGP. These routes are inserted into the Routing Information Base (RIB). The routes from different sources compete against each other and the best route gets inserted into the RIB. To define how trustworthy a route is, there is a metric called Administrative Distance (AD). These are some of the common AD values:

0          Connected route
1          Static route
20         External BGP
90         EIGRP
110        OSPF
115        ISIS
120        RIP
200        Internal BGP
255        Don't install

If a value of 255 is used, the route will not installed in the RIB as the route is deemed not trustworthy at all.

The goal Continue reading

Judge does not order Apple to disable security on encrypted device

Well, well, well…a federal magistrate of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has so far refused to order Apple to disable security on a customer’s encrypted mobile device even though the government assured the judge that doing so “is not likely to place any unreasonable burden on Apple.”According to the court document (pdf), available on Cryptome which recently admitted to a leaking users’ IP addresses in a separate tech drama, the government filed a sealed application on Oct. 8; it asked the court “to issue an order pursuant to the All Writs Act,” and thereby force Apple “to assist in the execution of a federal search warrant by disabling the security of an Apple device that the government has lawfully seized pursuant to a warrant issued by this court. Law enforcement agents have discovered the device to be locked, and have tried and failed to bypass the lock.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP and SanDisk join forces to create storage 1000x faster than NAND flash

HP and SanDisk are plotting new storage technology that could be 1,000 times faster than flash memory, though they’ll face some competition along the way.Details on the new technology are scarce, but the goal is to create a “universal memory” that serves as both long-term storage and RAM, the Wall Street Journal reports. The goal is to commercialize this technology some time between 2018 and 2020.Why this matters: Today’s computers offer RAM and storage separately, because the former is much more expensive and purges its data when the machine powers down. Programs and files are stored on flash memory, but during use they’ll load some data into RAM for faster short-term access. A single type of memory for both short- and long-term storage could boost a PC’s performance dramatically.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As a private company, Dell-EMC will enjoy a freedom HP can only dream of

Dell's US$67 billion acquisition of EMC will give it access to a sales force notorious for its ability to "sell ice to eskimos," while EMC will gain a new foothold among mid-market customers. As a private entity, the combined result will face a freedom from market pressures that competitors such as HP can only dream of.Those are just some of the benefits that could follow from the deal announced early on Monday."This industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation," said Crawford del Prete, an executive vice president with IDC. "You can't navigate it with short-term business decisions."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

California governor vetoes bill punishing irresponsible drone users

After several incidents where irresponsible drone users interfered with firefighting planes, California looked poised to pass harsher penalties for the idiots who were endangering the planes. It seemed a no-brainer. Well, Governor Jerry Brown doesn't seem to have a brain.In three days, he signed a climate change bill, a gender pay equity law, a bill to combat racial profiling, and one legalizing assisted suicide. But he vetoed three bills that would have prohibited civilians from flying aerial drones over wildfires, schools, prisons, and jails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS re:Invent re:cap

rePlay

What a week. Some tech conferences I like, and others I love. Falling solidly in my "love" category, the Amazon team pulled off another great event with re:Invent 2015. Of course, the AWS product folks didn’t disappoint, either. (And neither did surprise re:Play party guest Zedd.)

We welcomed many hundreds of visitors to our booth during the three days. Over 200 shirts, many more Ansibulls, and every single sticker, luggage tag, and business card were gobbled up by excited Ansible users and Tower customers.

Perhaps the most entertaining part was to learn what people had to say:

“We heart Ansible.”
“Ansible is the only predictable thing about our environment.”
“DevOps? More like AnsibleOps.”
“You guys changed our lives.”
“I keep getting told I need to look at Ansible.”
“Thank you… just thank you.” (My personal favorite)

Certainly all bold statements for an IT orchestration tool. Even Network World joined in on the fun by naming Ansible one of the hottest products at re:Invent, thanks in part to our new IAM modules that simplify the setup and maintenance of IAM users, groups, keys, and policies.

The sentiments got me thinking. Seemingly, AWS is Continue reading

Making the Case for Building Scalable Stateful Services in the Modern Era

For a long time now stateless services have been the royal road to scalability. Nearly every treatise on scalability declares statelessness as the best practices approved method for building scalable systems. A stateless architecture is easy to scale horizontally and only requires simple round-robin load balancing.

What’s not to love? Perhaps the increased latency from the roundtrips to the database. Or maybe the complexity of the caching layer required to hide database latency problems. Or even the troublesome consistency issues.

But what of stateful services? Isn’t preserving identity by shipping functions to data instead of shipping data to functions a better approach? It often is, but we don’t hear much about how to build stateful services. In fact, do a search and there’s very little in the way of a systematic approach to building stateful services. Wikipedia doesn’t even have an entry for stateful service.

Caitie McCaffrey, Tech Lead for Observability at Twitter, is fixing all that with a refreshing talk she gave at the Strange Loop conference on Building Scalable Stateful Services (slides).

Refreshing because I’ve never quite heard of building stateful services in the way Caitie talks about building them. You’ll recognize most of the Continue reading

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