IoT security tips and a cautionary tale

You will have more connected devices than ever on your network in 2021, especially if you’re in healthcare, retail, or logistics, industries that are among the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll have devices on your network edge, in your headquarters, on vehicles, in machinery, in your stores, in employees’ homes, and on public property.And there’s a good chance that some or many of these IoT devices have built-in security vulnerabilities that can endanger your network. In trying to capitalize on the voracious global appetite for connected commercial devices, many IoT manufacturers and developers are shoveling out enterprise IoT devices with, shall we say, varying levels of regard for security.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux server certifications becoming a must-have for IT pros

Linux certification is increasingly significant for tech workers as the public cloud and software-defined networking become ever more important. A Linux cert can set IT professionals apart from the herd and potentially put a lot more money in their bank accounts.Once these certifications were a gauge of reliability, according to CompTIA chief tech evangelist James Stanger. “Twenty years ago, Linux tended to attract people who were a little edgier,” he said. “So certification was traditionally used in the Linux side just to find people you can work with—will they show up on time?”Now, these certifications are a demonstration not only of proficiency but also dedication to self-improvement. “You can’t go wrong with a certification,” said Joe Faletra, director of infrastructure services at Modis, a technology staffing and consulting firm. “I’ll lean towards certs over experience [in hiring], because this person has put the effort into learning and passing the exam.”To read this article in full, please click here

IoT security tips and a cautionary tale

You will have more connected devices than ever on your network in 2021, especially if you’re in healthcare, retail, or logistics, industries that are among the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll have devices on your network edge, in your headquarters, on vehicles, in machinery, in your stores, in employees’ homes, and on public property.And there’s a good chance that some or many of these IoT devices have built-in security vulnerabilities that can endanger your network. In trying to capitalize on the voracious global appetite for connected commercial devices, many IoT manufacturers and developers are shoveling out enterprise IoT devices with, shall we say, varying levels of regard for security.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux server certifications becoming a must-have for IT pros

Linux certification is increasingly significant for tech workers as the public cloud and software-defined networking become ever more important. A Linux cert can set IT professionals apart from the herd and potentially put a lot more money in their bank accounts.Once these certifications were a gauge of reliability, according to CompTIA chief tech evangelist James Stanger. “Twenty years ago, Linux tended to attract people who were a little edgier,” he said. “So certification was traditionally used in the Linux side just to find people you can work with—will they show up on time?”Now, these certifications are a demonstration not only of proficiency but also dedication to self-improvement. “You can’t go wrong with a certification,” said Joe Faletra, director of infrastructure services at Modis, a technology staffing and consulting firm. “I’ll lean towards certs over experience [in hiring], because this person has put the effort into learning and passing the exam.”To read this article in full, please click here

IT Salary Survey 2021: Over half of IT pros are satisfied at work – but nearly half are job hunting

Happy at work? Maybe you are not alone. Our 2021 salary survey of IT professionals reveals current attitudes to pay, responsibilities and what matters most in their current jobs.

Routing in Stretched VLAN Designs

One of my readers was “blessed” with the stretched VLANs requirement combined with the need for inter-VLAN routing and sub-par equipment from a vendor not exactly known for their data center switching products. Before going on, you might want to read his description of the challenge he’s facing and what I had to say about the idea of building stackable switches across multiple locations.

Here’s an overview diagram of what my reader was facing. The core switches in each location work as a single device (virtual chassis), and there’s MLAG between core and edge switches. The early 2000s just called and they were proud of the design (but to be honest, sometimes one has to work with the tools his boss bought, so…).

Routing in Stretched VLAN Designs

One of my readers was “blessed” with the stretched VLANs requirement combined with the need for inter-VLAN routing and sub-par equipment from a vendor not exactly known for their data center switching products. Before going on, you might want to read his description of the challenge he’s facing and what I had to say about the idea of building stackable switches across multiple locations.

Here’s an overview diagram of what my reader was facing. The core switches in each location work as a single device (virtual chassis), and there’s MLAG between core and edge switches. The early 2000s just called and they were proud of the design (but to be honest, sometimes one has to work with the tools his boss bought, so…).

Giving SmartNICs Bigger FPGA And CPU Brains

The lines between a server, a SmartNIC, and a Data Processing Unit, or DPU, are getting fuzzier, and the good news is that definitions do not matter nearly as much as use cases. …

Giving SmartNICs Bigger FPGA And CPU Brains was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Solo.io Launches Gloo Mesh Enterprise to General Availability

After a couple of years in development and just released Gloo Mesh Enterprise service mesh to general availability this month, marking API stability and a slate of new features, built in response to customer feedback during the beta period. Gloo Mesh Enterprise is the company’s enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native solution to help organizations install and manage Istio service mesh deployments. While Gloo Mesh Enterprise may just now be reaching this milestone, Idit Levine speaks of massive, unnamed customers already using the product in production, in deployments spanning more than 40 data centers, and 1,200 clusters and Istio service mesh instances. “When you’re running with that scale, there are a lot of things that you need to do. This is exactly what Gloo Mesh is for. Gloo Mesh is basically saying, ‘crawl, walk, run, fly.'” said Levine, referring to the product’s ability to help not only with the initial steps of service mesh adoption and installation but also the day two operations and added capabilities to handle complex multicluster, multicloud, multiregion deployments. To start (or “crawl”), Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance and long-term support for Istio Continue reading

Getting Started with Intent-Based Networking

Technologies that Didn’t: Directory Services

One of the most important features of the Network Operating Systems, like Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, available in the middle of the 1980’s was their integrated directory system. These directory systems allowed for the automatic discovery of many different kinds of devices attached to a network, such as printers, servers, and computers. Printers, of course, were the important item in this list, because printers have always been the bane of the network administrator’s existence. An example of one such system, an early version of Active Directory, is shown in the illustration below.

Users, devices and resources, such as file mounts, were stored in a tree. The root of the tree was (generally) the organization. There were Organizational Units (OUs) under this root. Users and devices could belong to an OU, and be given access to devices and services in other OUs through a fairly simple drag and drop, or GUI based checkbox style interface. These systems were highly developed, making it fairly easy to find any sort of resource, including email addresses of other uses in the organization, services such as shared filers, and—yes—even printers.

The original system of this kind was Banyan’s Streetalk, which did not have the Continue reading

Compiling Qt with Docker Using Caching

This is a guest post from Viktor Petersson, CEO of Screenly.io. Screenly is the most popular digital signage product for the Raspberry Pi. Find Viktor on Twitter @vpetersson.

In the previous blog post, we talked about how we compile Qt for Screenly OSE using Docker’s nifty multi-stage and multi-platform features. In this article, we build on this topic further and zoom in on caching. 

Docker does a great job with caching using layers. Each command (e.g., RUN, ADD, etc.) generates a layer, which Docker then reuses in future builds unless something changes. As always, there are exceptions to this process, but this is generally speaking true. Another type of caching is caching for a particular operation, such as compiling source code, inside a container.

At Screenly, we created a Qt build environment inside a Docker container. We created this Qt build to ensure that the build process was reproducible and easy to share among developers. Since the Qt compilation process takes a long time, we leveraged ccache to speed up our Qt compilation. Implementing ccache requires volume mounting a folder from outside of the Docker environment. 

The above steps work well if you Continue reading

BrandPost: The Era of Private Wireless Has Begun

Over the last decade, a number of technological trends have come together that will transform our industrial society and introduce a high level of automation to many of our processes. Robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the cloud, and digital twins technology are ushering in the era of Industry 4.0. Asset-intensive industries are moving quickly to take advantage of these technologies, including manufacturing, ports, mines, utilities, railways, airports, logistics, intelligent highways, and smart cities. The list is long and growing quickly.To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme CEO Meyercord sketches 2021 enterprise networking trends

Fresh off a solid quarterly earnings report, Extreme Networks is set for an active 2021, according to Ed Meyercord, president and CEO of the networking company. Extreme plans to roll out a range of new products to expand its universal networking family, which offers customers standardized hardware products that can be deployed across edge, aggregation, and wiring-closet environments. Also on tap are upgrades to the company's core ExtremeCloud IQ cloud management platform, which has seen six straight quarters of customer growth and currently manages about 1.5 million networking elements.To read this article in full, please click here

Know an Innovator Who’s Made Groundbreaking Contributions to the Internet? Nominate Them to the Internet Hall of Fame

Adiel Akplogan expanded Internet access across Africa. Jean Armour Polly redefined the role of the librarian as a digital educator and Internet advocate. Suguru Yamaguchi led cybersecurity research and helped found organizations to make the Internet more secure.

All three have been recognized with many others by the Internet Hall of Fame for their groundbreaking contributions to the Internet. Their extraordinary work has made the Internet, its global availability and use, and its transformative nature possible.

Do you know of an exceptional individual who has done the same? Perhaps a pioneer who expanded the Internet. A trailblazer who made a major technical innovation to make the Internet faster or better. Or a passionate advocate who made the Internet more inclusive and accessible.

If you answered yes, nominate them to the Internet Hall of Fame!

Nominations for the 2021 class of inductees open today – the deadline is April 23, 2021. Individuals worldwide who have played an extraordinary role in the conceptualization, building, and development of the Internet globally will be considered for induction.

This global pandemic has shown us how critical the Internet is. It is our lifeline, where we communicate, create, connect, and collaborate – and we cannot imagine Continue reading

Selectively reusing commands on Linux

The Linux command line allows your system to remember commands that you use—up to a limit set by your HISTSIZE variable. Since each user’s HISTSIZE is generally set to 1000, that means Linux can remember the last 1000 commands you entered and make it easy to reuse them without retyping them.Unless you configure your history settings differently, all of your commands will be remembered. You can put some restrictions on that behavior if you like. For example, you might not want to save every command you use to read a man page or every time you type pwd to ask where you’re currently sitting in the file system. How to restrict the commands that are remembered and which are not is covered here.To read this article in full, please click here

Objections mount to Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm

It was probably inevitable, but companies are urging federal regulators to intervene or even block Nvidia’s planned $40 billion purchase of Arm Holdings.Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are among a number of companies concerned about whether they will continue to have equal access to Arm technology after the acquisition closes, according to both Bloomberg and CNBC. And CNBC goes so far as to ask regulators around the world to scuttle the deal altogether.Earlier this month, UK-based AI chip start-up Graphcore asked the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to block the acquisition. Graphcore isn’t even an Arm licensee, just an Nvidia competitor in the AI-processor space.To read this article in full, please click here

Selectively reusing commands on Linux

The Linux command line allows your system to remember commands that you use—up to a limit set by your HISTSIZE variable. Since each user’s HISTSIZE is generally set to 1000, that means Linux can remember the last 1000 commands you entered and make it easy to reuse them without retyping them.Unless you configure your history settings differently, all of your commands will be remembered. You can put some restrictions on that behavior if you like. For example, you might not want to save every command you use to read a man page or every time you type pwd to ask where you’re currently sitting in the file system. How to restrict the commands that are remembered and which are not is covered here.To read this article in full, please click here

IT Salary Survey 2021: Hiring rate expected to increase but priorities will shift

Our survey of 1,172 IT professionals finds that demand for some IT skills is strong but the pandemic has influenced the rate of hiring and roles that are being prioritized.

Virtual Networks and Subnets in AWS, Azure, and GCP

Now that we know what regions and availability zones are, let’s go back to Daniel Dib’s question:

As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?

Wait, what? A subnet is stretched across multiple failure domains? Didn’t Ivan claim that’s ridiculous?

TL&DR: What I claimed was that a single layer-2 network is a single failure domain. Things are a bit more complex in public clouds. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.