Creating your own cowsay messenger

One of the sillier, but still fun, tools available on Linux is called "cowsay". It's used to display a phrase along with an ASCII art image of a cow.The cowsay command allows you to create messages that are less likely to be overlooked and might come across as just a little friendlier than the other thousand or so messages most of us get every day. For example:$ cowsay This is cowsay! _________________ < This is cowsay! > ----------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || Once cowsay is installed on your system, you can create cute little messages – and you're not limited to displaying a cow! In fact, if you wander over to the cowsay's directory –  /usr/share/cowsay/cows – you'll see that there's a fairly large collection of files available. Each includes a different image. You can choose from images as diverse as a snowman and a stegosaurus. If you want to greet your Australian friends using cowsay, you might try using the koala.To read this article in full, please click here

Call for Presentations: Networking in Public Clouds

In early November we organized a 2-day network automation event as part of our Network Automation course and the participants loved the new format… so we decided to use the same approach for the Spring 2021 Networking in Public Clouds course.

This time we’re trying out another bit of the puzzle: while we have plenty of ideas whom to invite, we’d love to get the most relevant speakers with hands-on deployment experience. If you’ve built an interesting public cloud solution, created a networking focused automation or monitoring tool, helped organizations migrate into a public cloud, or experienced a phenomenal failure, we’d like to hear from you. Please check out our Call for Papers and send us your ideas. Thank you!

Opengear Cheat Sheet

Opengear is a terminal server that is commonly used to connect to infrastructure devices via an out of band network or console/serial port. This post covers some of the common commands and operations that I usually undertake with opengear devices. Connecting SSH to an opengear and open...

Tech Bytes: Securing Remote Work For 2021 And Beyond With Zscaler (Sponsored)

On today's Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Zscaler, we explore securing a distributed workforce for 2021 and further, the role of Zero Trust Access, how Zscaler secures access to applications rather than networks, and more. Our guest is Pam Kubiatowski, Sr. Director of Transformation Strategy at Zscaler.

The post Tech Bytes: Securing Remote Work For 2021 And Beyond With Zscaler (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

DNS Oblivion

The problem with both DoH and DoT is that neither is all that satisfactory from a privacy standpoint. It is more of a compromise approach that poses a difficult question to me, as the end user. If I have to compromise my privacy to a third party and expose the combination of my identity and the DNS queries I make, then who should be privy to this information? Which third party DNS provider represents the least risk to me now and in the future? It's a tough question, and the best answer not having to compromise my privacy at all.

Network Break 314: Juniper Buys Apstra For IBN; Aruba Targets The Data Center With Fabric Software

Today's Network Break analyzes Juniper's acquisition of Intent-Based Networking startup Apstra, HPE's Aruba targets the data center with new switches and fabric software, and the US FTC sues Facebook for violating anti-trust laws. We also cover new products from Arista, Aryaka, and Gluware, a trio of Cisco acquisitions, and more tech news.

Network Break 314: Juniper Buys Apstra For IBN; Aruba Targets The Data Center With Fabric Software

Today's Network Break analyzes Juniper's acquisition of Intent-Based Networking startup Apstra, HPE's Aruba targets the data center with new switches and fabric software, and the US FTC sues Facebook for violating anti-trust laws. We also cover new products from Arista, Aryaka, and Gluware, a trio of Cisco acquisitions, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 314: Juniper Buys Apstra For IBN; Aruba Targets The Data Center With Fabric Software appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Pulling Back the Curtains

One of the major sources of complexity in modern systems is the simple failure to pull back the curtains. From a recent blog post over at the ACM—

The Wizard of Oz was a charlatan. You’d be surprised, too, how many programmers don’t understand what’s going on behind the curtain either. Some years ago, I was talking with the CTO of a company, and he asked me to explain what happens when you type a URL into your browser and hit enter. Do you actually know what happens? Think about it for a moment.

Yegor describes three different reactions when a coder faces something unexpected when solving a problem.

Throw in the towel. Just give up on solving the problem. This is fairly uncommon in the networking and programming fields, so I don’t have much to say here.

Muddle through. Just figure out how to make it work by whatever means necessary.

Open the curtains and build an excellent solution. Learn how the underlying systems work, understand how to interact with them, and create a solution that best takes advantage of them.

The first and third options are rare indeed; it is the second solution that seems to dominate our Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Facebook Faces U.S. Antitrust Lawsuits

"In the news" text on yellow background

Do not pass go: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 46 states have filed antitrust lawsuits, charging the social media giant Facebook of expanding its monopoly position by acquiring potential rivals including WhatsApp and Instagram, The Hill reports. It’s possible that Facebook would be required to sell off those acquisitions. Facebook has noted that both acquisitions were approved by regulators at the time.

Get off my phone: The government of China has ordered several apps, including one from TripAdvisor, to overhaul their products in an alleged crackdown on pornography and other “improper” content, The Associated Press says. In the meantime, China’s National Cyberspace Administration ordered the removal of 105 apps including TripAdvisor from app stores. The agency said there were public complaints about obscene, pornographic, and violent information as well as fraud, gambling, and prostitution.

Cookie spies: The government of France’s data privacy agency has fined Google US$121 million and Amazon $42 million for breaking the country’s rules on tracking cookies, Reuters says. The Google fine was the largest ever from the French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés. The CNIL said the companies’ French websites didn’t seek the prior consent of visitors before advertising Continue reading

Wide-open spaces: Big spectrum gains to boost Wi-Fi capability in 2021

Two recent FCC decisions will dramatically increase the capabilities of new Wi-Fi systems in the coming year, providing badly needed breathing room to the unlicensed wireless world.The first allocation, announced in April, will throw open the entirety of the 6GHz spectrum range for unlicensed use, and the second, rolled out late last month, adds a small but critical amount of spectrum to the 5GHz band.Both of these decisions are important to future Wi-Fi deployments because they directly affect the amount of spectrum available for Wi-Fi to operate in. More bandwidth means larger channels, which translates directly into improved throughput for users.To read this article in full, please click here

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time
Improving Cloudflare’s products and services, one feature request at a time

I started at Cloudflare in April 2018. I was excited to join an innovative company that operates with integrity and takes customer needs into account when planning product roadmaps. After 2.5 years at Cloudflare, this excitement has only grown, as it has become even clearer that our customers’ feedback is essential to our business. At an all-hands meeting this November, Michelle Zatlyn, our co-founder and COO, said that “every time we see things and approach problems from the lens of a customer, we make better decisions.” One of the ways we make these decisions is through Customer Success Managers funneling our customers’ feedback to our product and engineering teams.

As a Strategic Customer Success Manager, I meet regularly with my customers to better understand their experience with Cloudflare and work cross-functionally with our internal teams to continually improve it. One thing my customers often mention to me, regardless of industry or size, is their appreciation that their feedback is not only heard but understood and actioned. We are an engineering-driven company that remains agile enough to Continue reading

An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data

An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data, Christophides et al., ACM Computing Surveys, Dec. 2020, Article No. 127

The ACM Computing Surveys are always a great way to get a quick orientation in a new subject area, and hot off the press is this survey on the entity resolution (aka record linking) problem. It’s an important part of many modern data workflows, and an area I’ve been wrestling with in one of my own projects.

Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify different descriptions that refer to the same real-world entity appearing either within or across data sources, when unique entity identifiers are not available.

When ER is applied to records from the same data source it can be used for deduplication, when used to join records across data sources we call it record linking. Doing this well at scale is non-trivial; at its core, the problem requires comparing each entity to every other, i.e. it is quadratic in input size.An individual record/document for an entity is called an entity description. A set of such descriptions is an entity collection. Two descriptions that correspond to the same real world entity are called matches or  Continue reading

HP Enterprise expands GreenLake program to cover HPC systems

When it bought Cray back in May 2019, HP Enterprise hinted at offering HPC systems as a service. Now it is delivering on that with the introduction of HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC.HPE has made a lot of headway with its GreenLake program, the pay-per-use model created in response to the popularity of cloud service providers. It lets customers pay as if they are buying a cloud service, but it’s provisioned using infrastructure deployed at customer sites or in colocation facilities. Up to now it’s been used in standard IT applications, like app and Web serving or databases.To read this article in full, please click here

HP Enterprise expands GreenLake program to cover HPC systems

When it bought Cray back in May 2019, HP Enterprise hinted at offering HPC systems as a service. Now it is delivering on that with the introduction of HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC.HPE has made a lot of headway with its GreenLake program, the pay-per-use model created in response to the popularity of cloud service providers. It lets customers pay as if they are buying a cloud service, but it’s provisioned using infrastructure deployed at customer sites or in colocation facilities. Up to now it’s been used in standard IT applications, like app and Web serving or databases.To read this article in full, please click here

Business without labour, Automation without workers

First posted in Human Infrastructure Magazine in March 2020 Its fashionable in Enterprise IT is to reduce headcount. This reflects a wider business fashion of ‘business without labour’ that chases the dream of ‘profits without cost’. You see, investors watch ‘revenue per employee’ or ‘profit per employee’ and IT managers feel  pressure to ditch people […]

Multicloud management: Challenges for technology, people, processes

When it comes to managing hybrid and multicloud environments there are many options but no easy path nor lack of challenges. Tech Spotlight: Multicloud Are you ready for multicloud? A checklist (InfoWorld) 5 challenges every multicloud strategy must address (CIO) How to manage multiple cloud collaboration tools in a WFH world (Computerworld) Building stronger multicloud security: 3 key elements (CSO) While cloud computing has been around in some form for more than a decade, tools to manage its current enterprise iterations from private, on-premises, or public locations are still evolving at a rapid rate. Gartner says that more than 90 vendors—including IBM/Red Hat, VMware, CloudBolt, Flexera, Scalr, Cisco, and Nutanix—offer varying degrees of cloud-management capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here

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