Review: 4 powerline kits step in when Wi-Fi fails

Are there places in your home or office where your Wi-Fi signal doesn't reach? You're not alone. Because of Wi-Fi's limited range -- and old-school building construction techniques like thick plaster, brick or masonry walls -- even the best Wi-Fi networks have dead zones. If you have that problem, you have several options.You can start drilling holes in your walls so you can run network cabling. You can try a Wi-Fi range extender (which might help, depending on the strength of your Wi-Fi and the efficiency of the extender). Or you can use a powerline kit, which routes data over your electric cables by piggybacking the data on top of the electrical current's 60-hertz wave and then extracting the data at the other end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Walled Gardens and Other Overlay Networks

Russ White wonders if the resurgence of Walled Gardens on the Internet is bad or a good thing. The long-term rise of Facebook, WeChat, Snapchat and other applications seems to be a sustaining trend. Overlay Network Previous walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe have been composting for many years. Their unique value was that they […]

The post Walled Gardens and Other Overlay Networks appeared first on EtherealMind.

How Did You Learn So Much About Networking?

One of my readers sent me a heartfelt email that teleported me 35 years down the memory lane. He wrote:

I only recently stumbled upon your blog and, well, it hurt. It's incredible the amount of topics you are able to talk about extensively and how you can dissect and find interesting stuff in even the most basic concepts.
May I humble ask how on earth can you know all of the things you know, with such attention to detail? Have you been gifted with an excellent memory, magical diet, or is it just magic?

Short answer: hard work and compound interest.

Read more ...

Trump is right about the 14th Amendment

Trump sucks all the intelligence out of the room, converting otherwise intelligent and educated pundits into blithering idiots. Today's example is the claim that Trump said:
"The 14th Amendment is unconstitutional."
Of course he didn't say that. What he did say is that the 14th Amendment doesn't grant "birthright citizenship" aka. "anchor babies". And he's completely correct. The 14th Amendment says:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States"
The complicated bit is in parentheses. If you remove that bit, then of course Trump would be wrong, and anchor babies would be guaranteed by the constitution, since it would clearly say that being born in the U.S. grants citizenship.

But the phrase is there, so obviously some babies born in the U.S. aren't guaranteed (by the constitution) citizenship. Which babies are those?

The immigration law 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a) lists some of them: babies of ambassadors, heads of state, and military prisoners.

It's this law that currently grants anchor babies citizenship, not the constitution. Laws can be changed by Congress. Presumably, "illegal aliens" could easily be added to the list.

This Continue reading

NGINX and Ansible

nginxKevin Jones (@WebOpsX) wrote a nice post over on the NGINX blog about installing NGINX and NGINX Plus with Ansible.

One of my favorite features of Ansible is that it is completely clientless. To manage a system, a connection is made over SSH, using either Paramiko (a Python library) or native OpenSSH. Another attractive feature of Ansible is its extensive selection of modules. These modules can be used to perform some of the common tasks of a system administrator. In particular, they make Ansible a powerful tool for installing and configuring any application across multiple servers, environments, and operating systems, all from one central location.

Here are a few NGINX Ansible Galaxy Roles

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/466

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/551

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/471

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/1580

 

 

 

Read the full post here: Installing NGINX and NGINX Plus With Ansible

IDG Contributor Network: Why every business needs a WISP

If you don't have a written information security program (WISP) in place for your business, then you could be risking data theft, legal action, and punitive fines. The law in many states now dictates that you must take steps to safeguard personal information. They vary in strictness, but there are nearly 50 different regulations you need to cater for if you're doing business across the United States.You can't afford to bury your head in the sand and assume it will never happen to you. Research from the Identity Theft Resource Center (PDF) shows an alarming rise in incidences of personal data theft every year since they started recording. They report 783 breaches last year, compared to just 157 in 2005.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 new threat intelligence products to make you bulletproof

Threat intelligence + big data = real securityImage by ThinkstockThreat Intelligence and the use of data to flag critical security indicators were popular topics in Las Vegas at the Black Hat conference in early in August –and for good reason. As enterprises struggle to understand their network vulnerabilities, they have to consider the many layers of defense needed to secure their most valuable data. Security teams are inundated with threat data and overburdened by the need to allot countless man-hours to the task of weeding out the noise from the real threats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the tech industry is greening its data centers

Data centers don't just suck down energy. They guzzle it. According to the National Resources Defense Council, data centers are one of the largest and fastest growing consumers of electricity in the United States. In 2013, U.S. data centers used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power New York City households twice. The NRDC expects that demand to grow to 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020.While companies like Amazon have been a target of campaigns from nonprofits like Green America, the NRDC says that larger server farms operated by well-known Internet companies are paragons of ultra-efficiency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft issues out-of-band patch for critical Internet Explorer flaw

Wikimedia A dangerous flaw in Internet Explorer has prompted Microsoft to issue a patch outside its regularly scheduled monthly security updates in order to head off a known exploit of the vulnerability.The company has issued a security bulletin that describes how users who are lured to specially crafted webpages could have attackers take over control of their computers with the same rights as the user who logged into the machine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing a Powerful Way to Purge Cache on CloudFlare: Purge by Cache-Tag

Today CloudFlare is introducing a new way to purge the cache using Cache-Tags. Cache-Tags are assigned to cached content via a Cache-Tag response header, and are stored as metadata with cached objects so that global purges take only seconds, targeting a granular, finite set of cached objects.

For example, an e-commerce website can use Cache-Tags to purge all of their catalog images at once, without affecting any of their other assets. A blog can use Cache-Tags to update their JavaScript files in cache, without forcing a cache miss on their CSS. A business can use Cache-Tags to purge cache of all four hundred pages of their blog without purging any of the pages from their core platform.

The CloudFlare Cache

With 42 data centers around the world, web pages served directly from CloudFlare’s cache are guaranteed to be just a few hops away from any visitor, anywhere. With a little bit of fine tuning, many websites succeed in delivering most of their content from cache, saving a majority of bandwidth on their origin servers. One website even managed to reduce their AWS bill by 96% when they started caching assets behind CloudFlare.

CloudFlare’s cache is powerful, but when a Continue reading

From Windows to Linux

I recently moved from Windows to Linux on my personal laptop and thought I might share my experience. This isn’t directly network related, but hopefully of interest to some portion of the large and diverse PP audience, especially considering recent events in the Microsoft realm. Ignoring that, using Linux ‘at home’ is a great way to learn about […]

The post From Windows to Linux appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Microsoft Take on Containers and Docker

This is a guest repost by Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure (and novelist!). We all benefit from a vibrant competitive cloud market and Microsoft is part of that mix. Here's a good container overview along with Microsoft's plan of attack. Do you like their story? Is it interesting? Is it compelling?

You can’t have a discussion on cloud computing lately without talking about containers. Organizations across all business segments, from banks and major financial service firms to e-commerce sites, want to understand what containers are, what they mean for applications in the cloud, and how to best use them for their specific development and IT operations scenarios.

From the basics of what containers are and how they work, to the scenarios they’re being most widely used for today, to emerging trends supporting “containerization”, I thought I’d share my perspectives to better help you understand how to best embrace this important cloud computing development to more seamlessly build, test, deploy and manage your cloud applications.

Containers Overview

In abstract terms, all of computing is based upon running some “function” on a set of “physical” resources, like processor, memory, disk, network, etc., to accomplish a task, whether a Continue reading

Adobe patches important flaw in LiveCycle Data Services

Adobe Systems released a security patch for LiveCycle Data Services, a development tool used by businesses to synchronize data between back-end servers and rich Internet applications built with Adobe Flex or AIR. The hotfix is available for LiveCycle Data Services 3.0.0, 4.5.1, 4.6.2 and 4.7.0 and addresses a vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2015-3269 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database and is rated important by Adobe. The issue is associated with parsing crafted XML entities and falls into a class of vulnerabilities known as XML External Entity (XXE).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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