What’s In My Bag (Hint: not much)

Recently @BobMcCouch posted a photo of the contents of his bags. He’s got a lot of gear, including a hammer, and a dent-puller. He assures us that it’s for lifting tiles, but I’m not so sure. Sounds to me like he’s worried about a few dings in the supermarket carpark.

It all sounded a bit scary. I want to provide a different perspective, that of someone who tries to minimise what they carry. I don’t want young engineers to think that they have to build up a huge toolbox, and the physical strength to lug it around. You might choose to do that, but it’s not the only path.

Note: I am not saying that what Bob is doing is wrong. Bob’s a smart guy, and if he’s carrying all that stuff, you can be sure it’s for a reason. What I’m trying to say is that there are different paths in network engineering.

The Bag Itself

My general rules for a laptop bag are that it should be as small as I can get away with, and it should not look too much like a laptop bag. So pretty much anything from Targus is inappropriate.

Today I use the “ Continue reading

Power up, baby! Cyntur JumpStart Mini: A monster backup battery in a tiny package

The market for portable battery packs to keep your digital life going on the road has become a huge business over the last couple of years and I just got my hands on one of the more versatile and powerful products in this market: The Cyntur JumperPack mini. This is a small (6.0” by 3.3” by 1.3”), weatherproof device that weighs just 0.9 pounds but despite its diminutive size contains a whopping 12,000 mAh lithium-ion battery, enough to jumpstart an eight-cylinder engine. Not only that but it's powerful enough, the company claims, to jumpstart 25 engines in a row (a problem I hope to never have).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Break 34 – Fixed

Excerpt: Coffee, virtual doughnuts and networking. A perfect combination.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Network Break 34 – Fixed appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Network Break 34

Excerpt: Coffee, virtual doughnuts and networking. A perfect combination.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedIn

The post Network Break 34 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Connecting VIRL, CML networks to outside world

This is a continuation of my VIRL, CML blog series. VIRL/CML overview is covered here. It will be good to connect VIRL, CML networks to outside world. Following are some use cases. If management interface of VIRL routers are accessible from outside machines, we can run management application in the client machine and connect directly … Continue reading Connecting VIRL, CML networks to outside world →

US gains in mobile patents as IBM passes Samsung

The U.S. widened its lead in mobile patents last year and IBM took the top spot in new patents granted in that space, according to a report this week that analyzed data from both the U.S. and Europe.While the number of mobile patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) jumped by 17 percent between 2013 and 2014, the total fell by 4 percent at the European Patent Office (EPO), according to Chetan Sharma Consulting. The U.S. continued to gain on Europe as the place where mobile inventions are devised, a trend driven by software development in Silicon Valley and Americans’ heavy use of mobile data, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The .onion address

A draft RFC for Tor's .onion address is finally being written. This is a proper thing. Like the old days of the Internet, people just did things, then documented them later. Tor's .onion addresses have been in use for quite a while (I just setup another one yesterday). It's time that we documented this for the rest of the community, to forestall problems like somebody registering .onion as a DNS TLD.

One quibble I have with the document is section 2.1, which says:

1. Users: human users are expected to recognize .onion names as having different security properties, and also being only available through software that is aware of onion addresses.

This certain documents current usage, where Tor is a special system run separately from the rest of the Internet. However, it appears to deny a hypothetical future were Tor is more integrated.

For example, imagine a world where Chrome simply integrates Tor libraries, and that whenever anybody clicks on an .onion link, that it automatically activates the Tor software, establishes a circuit, and grabs the indicated page -- all without the user having to be aware of Tor. This could do much to increase the usability of the Continue reading

DockerCon CFP Summary

Our DockerCon 2015 call for papers closed last week, and we’d like to sincerely thank the 338 individuals who submitted talks. These submissions are further proof of a bright, witty and extremely talented community that surrounds Docker. We are very … Continued

Your Docker agenda in April

March has been an incredibly busy month for the Docker Community with all of the birthday celebrations and open-source-a-thons, and it’s not over yet. You have until April 19th to make a contribution that counts toward Docker’s donation to the … Continued

Benchmark scores show performance gap between Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3, iPad Air 2

A handful of benchmark scores for Microsoft's not-yet-released Surface 3 tablet hint that it's between a third and half as fast as the company's older 2-in-1, the more powerful Surface Pro 3.The scores also show that Apple's iPad Air -- which starts at the same $499 price of the Surface 3 -- is between 36% and 93% faster than Microsoft's latest device.Five Surface 3 benchmark scores posted on Primate Labs' Geekbench in the last two days have ranged from 949 to 1009 for single-core, and from 3200 to 3430 for multi-core.The tests may have been run by people who have a review unit; like other hardware makers, Microsoft often seeds media outlets and influential blogs with machines prior to bringing them to retail, giving reviewers hands-on time so that they can publish their takes on or before the sale or ship date.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senator wants bomb-making information removed from the Internet

After two U.S. women were charged this week with conspiring to build bombs in support of terrorist groups, a U.S. senator wants two publications that include bomb-making instructions deleted from the Internet.Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, called for the 44-year-old Anarchist Cookbook and al-Qaeda’s Inspire Magazine to be banished from the Web, notwithstanding the difficulty of removing material from the entire Internet or the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. It’s not the first time that Feinstein has tried to ban publications that instruct would-be bomb-makers.“I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bomb-making guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine,” Feinstein, a veteran member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Use software license optimization tools to get your money’s worth out of SaaS

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.

Software as a Service (SaaS) breaks the shackles of traditional software licensing approaches, but savvy users still optimize their SaaS environments to avoid undue costs.

SaaS subscription models typically require a one to three year commitment. Customers are invoiced, usually on a monthly basis, and the license typically uses some sort of billing metric based on resource usage, such as the number of end users that can access the product. The flexibility of SaaS licensing models enables organizations to expand the use of the product according to their needs during the term of the subscription.

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

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