IDC: With possible recession looming, IT pros plan spending adjustments

Facing what they perceive as an inevitable recession, IT planners are moving ahead with infrastructure investment but also calculating how to shift priorities if spending cuts become unavoidable, according to monthly surveys by IDC.Roughly 81% of respondents expect their spending to stay the same or increase for 2023, despite anticipating economic “storms of disruption." The results are based on surveys conducted in November and December 2022 of more than 800 IT decision makers in North America, Asia/Pacific, and Europe.Cloud spending is increasing, and an IDC Quick poll of 69 CIOs from its global CIO Executive Council conducted in December found two-thirds of them are already spending more on cloud services than they budgeted. The two studies are cited in the IDC report “Early 2023 Cloud Budget Outlook: Aligning IT Spending with the Business Conditions” published this month.To read this article in full, please click here

Working with image files on the Linux command line

While the best way to view or manipulate image files on Linux is to open them on your desktop for viewing or manipulating with tools like Gimp, there are quite a few ways to get important details on the command line.Identifying image type by file extension In general, image files can be identified on the command line by listing their names. Clearly ".jpg" represents a jpeg file, ".png" a portable network graphics file, ".gif" a graphics interchange format file, ".tiff" a tagged image file and so on.$ ls -l images -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 256093 Jul 15 2018 mycats.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 784238 Jul 15 2018 mycats.png -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 6760 Jul 15 2018 arrow.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 8853 Jul 15 2018 arrow.png Nearly all of the time you can rely on file extensions accurately reporting the file type, but there's more you can do with additional commands.To read this article in full, please click here

Working with image files on the Linux command line

While the best way to view or manipulate image files on Linux is to open them on your desktop for viewing or manipulating with tools like Gimp, there are quite a few ways to get important details on the command line.Identifying image type by file extension In general, image files can be identified on the command line by listing their names. Clearly ".jpg" represents a jpeg file, ".png" a portable network graphics file, ".gif" a graphics interchange format file, ".tiff" a tagged image file and so on.$ ls -l images -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 256093 Jul 15 2018 mycats.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 784238 Jul 15 2018 mycats.png -rw-rw-r--. 1 shs shs 6760 Jul 15 2018 arrow.jpg -rw-r-----. 1 shs shs 8853 Jul 15 2018 arrow.png Nearly all of the time you can rely on file extensions accurately reporting the file type, but there's more you can do with additional commands.To read this article in full, please click here

Ansible Wisdom and ChatGPT: Putting it to the test

Image: DALL-E

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how we work and play in exciting ways. At first glance, AI tools, such as ChatGPT, seem to provide all the correct answers. But once we delve deeper and implement the suggestions, it often isn’t as effortless as it appears. This is especially true when generating code.

In this blog, we wanted to put ChatGPT to the test and see how it fares with developing  Ansible Playbooks and share our results. We’ll also cover the experience and feedback from developers across domains.

We’ll also provide more information on our upcoming automation AI superpower, Project Wisdom.

First, let’s briefly discuss what ChatGPT is and how it works.

 

What is ChatGPT?

“We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

OpenAI ChatGPT release announcement

 

ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and built on top of their GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) 3.5 large language model.

Large language models (LLM) are trained on massive amounts of data to predict the next word in a sentence. GPT 3. Continue reading

AWS pledges $35 billion of additional investment for Virginia data centers

Amazon Web Services has confirmed it plans to invest a further $35 billion by 2040 in Virginia, expanding its US-EAST-1 region by establishing multiple data center campuses across the state and creating 1,000 new jobs.Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin announced the news on January 20, saying he was excited that AWS has chosen to continue its growth in the region.“Virginia will continue to encourage the development of this new generation of data center campuses across multiple regions of the Commonwealth,” he said in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here

A new role for network pros: application-flow architect

There are a lot of issues that network-management people worry about. We all have heard about faults, failures, breaches. But want to know what long-term problem is keeping the smart members of the network leadership of enterprises up at night? It’s an empty chair. Their chair, at the table that makes the plans that set network requirements and directions today and for years to come. These leaders used to sit in that chair, but now they say there’s no place for them.Application designs determine network requirements We used to build networks from primitive pieces, like digital trunks and routers. Then we built them from services, like IP VPNs. That transformation was jarring to many who’d cut their teeth on real private-network technology, but they were still a big part of the game. Today, we’re still building networks from services, but the services of today are application services that include implicit network features. The really new network is built from connectivity services that are included in cloud and even data-center hosting packages. Application planners design these services, and the decisions they make frame the building-blocks of the network. One chief network officer said he’d gone from building technology to stocking Continue reading

netlab: Building a Layer-2 Fabric

A friend of mine decided to use netlab to build a simple traditional data center fabric, and asked me a question along these lines:

How do I make all the ports be L2 by default i.e. not have IP address assigned to them?

Trying to answer his question way too late in the evening (I know, I shouldn’t be doing that), I focused on the “no IP addresses” part. To get there, you have to use the l2only pool or disable IPv4 prefixes in the built-in address pools, for example:

Read more …

netlab: Building a Layer-2 Fabric

A friend of mine decided to use netlab to build a simple traditional data center fabric, and asked me a question along these lines:

How do I make all the ports be L2 by default i.e. not have IP address assigned to them?

Trying to answer his question way too late in the evening (I know, I shouldn’t be doing that), I focused on the “no IP addresses” part. To get there, you have to use the l2only pool or disable IPv4 prefixes in the built-in address pools, for example:

Read more …

Worth Reading: Do We Need Network Automation

A long, long time ago, Mircea Ulinic (the author of Salt networking modules) wrote a long and thoughtful blog post on whether we need network automation (TL&DR spoiler: yes).

After reading the article, you might want to listen to the Salt and SaltStack podcast we did with Mircea a long while ago, and watch his presentation in Building Network Automation Solutions online course (also accessible with Expert Subscription).

Worth Reading: Do We Need Network Automation

A long, long time ago, Mircea Ulinic (the author of Salt networking modules) wrote a long and thoughtful blog post on whether we need network automation (TL&DR spoiler: yes).

After reading the article, you might want to listen to the Salt and SaltStack podcast we did with Mircea a long while ago, and watch his presentation in Building Network Automation Solutions online course (also accessible with Expert Subscription).

IP Addresses through 2022

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

IP Addresses through 2022

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

Controversial Reads 012023


As this technology is perfected, AI writing may render most of the English composition curriculum and other writing skills irrelevant. Like penmanship being displaced by word processors, and memorization by books or databases, writing itself may soon be seen as an archaic novelty.


How to properly balance the commercial rights of a complainant with the free speech rights of a respondent has challenged a generation of Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) panelists.


New York City Mayor Eric Adams responded to criticism over increasing the use of facial recognition technology by declaring, Big Brother is protecting you!


Whether someone will get a loan for buying a house is dependent on the opaque policy instantiated in some black box algorithm. Ditto whether someone’s parole application will get approved, some startup entrepreneur will get capital for his venture, or someone on an organ donation waitlist will get his life-saving treatment.


Blaise Arcas, the head of Google’s AI group in Seattle, recently argued that although large language models (LLMs) may be driven by statistics, statistics do amount to understanding.


Crypto bros still blather on about how their Bitcoin, Ethereum or what have you will go to the Moon. They also insist that Continue reading

Weekend Reads 012023


However, since growing online content consumption put networks under increasing pressure during the peaks of the Coronavirus lockdowns, some political support in Europe seems to have been garnered (e.g. France, Italy, and Spain).


On the other hand, the digital sphere has become a dangerous space. The Ukrainian war pulled cyber into real military fighting.


The recent adoption at the end of December of the new EU Directive for a high level of cybersecurity across the Union—commonly referred to as “NIS2”—paved the way for important updates to the domain name system (DNS).


Domain names are associated with the full spectrum of internet content, from legitimate use by brands or individuals, to infringing or criminal activity. CSC has observed that certain TLDs get used more for egregious content.


Heata has developed a novel way to use the waste heat generated by servers: mounting them on domestic hot water tanks to cut energy bills for homeowners.


It’s time for you and your colleagues to become more skeptical about what you read. That’s a takeaway from a series of experiments undertaken using GPT-3 AI text-generating interfaces to create malicious messages designed to spear-phish, scam, harrass, and spread fake news.


Randy Anders is VP Continue reading

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