IDG Contributor Network: How pumped up is your pumped-up cloud data center?

"Ve are here to Pump You Up." I can't help but think about the old Saturday Night Live routines with bodybuilders Hans and Franz when looking at today's cloud data centers. They are big. They are bulked up. They are, indeed, pumped up. But how strong are they, really? As we would ask in IT terms: Do they scale? Can they perform? Or are they girly-man clouds?Those are hard questions.Knowing the capacity of a data center is next to impossible. The tech specs are easy – so many servers, so many CPUs, so many gigahertz, such-and-such network connectivity, so much storage I/O bandwidth. Those specs are easy, and also meaningless, without actually measuring the complete stack's end-to-end performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Find out if the NSA spied on you and shared it with GCHQ

Curious if the NSA has ever spied on you? Privacy International launched a site so you can find out if Britain’s GCHQ spied on you; put another way, GCHQ can access NSA data so if the NSA gobbled up your communications, then this is how you can find out and get that digital dirt destroyed.Privacy International wrote: Have you ever made a phone call, sent an email, or, you know, used the internet? Of course you have!Chances are, at some point over the past decade, your communications were swept up by the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance program and passed onto Britain's intelligence agency GCHQ. A recent court ruling found that this sharing was unlawful but no one could find out if their records were collected and then illegally shared between these two agencies… until now!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adding Spirent Virtual Test Center traffic generator to Unetlab

Having a traffic generator in a lab is a huge advantage, hands down. As to this moment Unified Networking Lab supports software-based traffic generator called Ostinato. But I had an opportunity to use another traffic generator – Spirent Test Center, virtual edition. Spirent’s images are not officially integrated/supported by UNL, so you will see how to

Why It’s Hard to Deploy SDN-Like Functionality Today

Whenever I talk about the various definitions of SDN (ending with the “SDN provides an abstraction layer”), old-timers sitting quickly realize that the SDN products that you can deploy in real life aren’t that different from what we did in the past – an SDN controller is often just an overhyped glorified network services orchestration system.

OK, so why didn’t we have that same functionality for the last 20 years?

Read more ...

How to hack my Tesla

This post is just for my own notes. I'm buying a new car (arrives in October) and I need to gather up notes on how to hack it.

To start with is the generic car hacking information. One good source I found is the Car Hacker's Handbook, which has a good explanation of the basics.

Another good start is the various papers produced by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, such as their early work and their latest Jeep hack. [1] [2]

Specifically to my car, a Tesla, there is this site that documents all the undocumented bits about the car, such as listing the 56 CPUs found in the car.

Specifically, there is the work by Kevin Mahaffey and Marc Rogers covering their Tesla hacking. I hate them, because they've already done some of the obvious things I would've tried first, such as popping up an X Window on the display.

Anyway, this post is for my own benefit, so when I lose my notes, I can find them again by googling. Maybe other people in similar situation might find it a bit useful, too.

How to use big data to transform IT operations

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Over the past half decade, the big data flame has spread like wildfire throughout the enterprise, and the IT department has not been immune. The promise of data-driven initiatives capable of transforming IT from a support function to a profit center has sparked enormous interest.

After all, datacenter scale, complexity, and dynamism has rapidly outstripped the ability of siloed, infrastructure-focused IT operations management to keep pace. IT big-data analytics has emerged as the new IT operations-management approach of choice, promising to make IT smarter and leaner. Nearly all next-generation operational intelligence products incorporate data analytics to some degree. However, as many enterprises are learning the hard way, big data doesn’t always result in success.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encryption project issues first free SSL/TLS certificate

A project that aims to increase the use of encryption by giving away free SSL/TLS certificates has issued its first one, marking the start of its beta program. The project, called Let's Encrypt, is run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and backed by Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Cisco and Akamai, among others. Let's Encrypt plans to distribute free SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security) certificates, which encrypt data passed between a website and users. The use of SSL/TLS is signified in most browsers by "https" and a padlock appearing in the URL bar.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Secunia acquired by Flexera Software

Secunia, the company specializing in software vulnerability management, has been acquired by software asset management company Flexera Software.The pairing of Flexera's asset discovery and management tools with Secunia's software vulnerability platform will give organizations the ability to thoroughly assess the security of applications discovered on the network, said Mark Bishof, Flexera Software's CEO.[ Deep Dive: How to rethink security for the new world of IT. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security newsletter. ] Flexera's tools, which includes FlexNet Manager Suite and AdminStudio Suite, currently help discover all the hardware and software assets within the organization, how the licenses are used, and how to optimize software use. With the Secunia addition, organizations will be able to scrutinize the discovered applications to uncover unpatched vulnerabilities. This will give IT teams the information they need to update to the latest patch or to create a workaround to temporarily mitigate the issue until a patch is available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sponsored Post: Microsoft, Instrumental, Location Labs, Enova, Librato, Surge, Redis Labs, Jut.io, VoltDB, Datadog, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online team is building the next generation of software development tools in the cloud out in Durham, North Carolina. Come help us build innovative workflows around Git and continuous deployment, help solve the Git scale problem or help us build a best-in-class web experience. Learn more and apply.

  • Are you someone who can efficiently spin up and maintain large production Linux deployments? Can you troubleshoot systems in the middle of the night as well as design them so that you don't have to wake up? If so, and you want to work with some of the best in the business, you will probably love the Infrastructure Group at Location Labs. Please apply here.

  • As a Lead Software Engineer at Enova you’ll be one of Enova’s heavy hitters, overseeing technical components of major projects. We’re going to ask you to build a bridge, and you’ll get it built, no matter what. You’ll balance technical requirements with business needs, while advocating for a high quality codebase when working with full business teams. You’re fluent in ‘technical’ language and ‘business’ language, because you’re the engineer everyone counts on to understand how it works now, how it Continue reading
1 … 3,320 3,321 3,322 3,323 3,324 … 3,841