IT Blog I got an interesting article in my inbox today in regards to using extended attributes to create checksums. While I don't know if this will pick up to be a de facto standard way of distributing checksums, this is definitely a step in the right direction. The article I got in regards to this uses P...
Checksum, bash scripting, linux IT Blog I was faced with the decision to implement an additional system on the RHEL 4.x series, or make our first jump to the version 5 releases. I decided to have this additional system to stay on RHEL 4.x because of our support situation. As admins are aware, there are many factors that affect a decision ...
support, Enterprise applications for Linux, Rick Vanover IT Blog Last week, fellow SEL blogger Rick Vanover discussed how RHEL 4 is still getting releases from Red Hat, despite the availability of RHEL 5. Considering that Red Hat still requires RHEL 4 for some of their own major products, such as Red Hat Proxy and Satellite servers, it makes sense that they would...
IT Blog Ubuntu's popularity has both spurred and belittled concerns about there being too many enterprise-level Linux distributions. On the one hand, freedom of choice is a cornerstone of the Linux/open source philosophy. On the other, too many distros making operating system choices difficult for businesse...
IT Blog Linux can match and outshine Windows in data center -- thanks to its strong security, reliability, and long term usability -- but it has upsides and downsides on the virtualization side, according to software engineer and Linux and VMware Server technologist Chris Berg. In this excerpt of our Q&...
Microsoft, Virtualization platforms, Xen IT Blog SAN replication is a very power tool which will let you get real time (or near real time) backups of your database on another location on your storage array, to another storage array at the local site, or to a remote storage array at another site. However like all technologies there are some things...
IT Blog Hadoop Database for Big Data - Part I The Apache Hadoop project - sometimes dubbed as "Bigtable clone" - is open-source software framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Hadoop is the only NoSQL implementation that has the most adoption today. IBM uses as well as distributes Hadoop....
Hadoop, IBM, Apache IT Blog There have been a number of articles written recently talking about Windows 7 being a Linux killer. Windows 7 as "Linux killer"? How times have changed! Windows 7: Microsoft's Linux killer? Windows 7 The Linux killer and Ubuntu Going Mainstream Linux was thought to be a player in the netbook bu...
IT Blog CentOS released version 5.1 of its increasingly popular distribution, which is celebrating its fourth birthday this month. Version 5.1 includes 70 new packages native to the distribution including 17 in the series of the Yellow dog Updater, Modified (yum) package updater tools, 11 in the Standards ...
IT Blog I spend a lot of time working with networks that are very large, very small and in-between. I recently visited a group of IT support experts discussing technology who support very small networks (1-10 users). I was a little shocked actually; I had thought the days of the independent cowboy were ...
Modern Network Architecture, IT Consulting IT Blog Red Hat released version 5.3 of its Enterprise Linux distribution on Tuesday, about eight months after version 5.2. We gave an overview of the new features of the beta version of RHEL 5.3 in November. Now, it's here. The new version offers enhanced virtualization scalability, OpenJDK functionality a...
IT Blog Data Replication - the key to distributed applications Data Replication, copying of data in databases to multiple locations, is an essential tool to support distributed applications (where the applications are closer to the line of business). As distributed data storage become more prevalent in lar...
Replication, NoSQL, distributed data storage IT Blog ATLANTA -- Thoughts collected while going up and down seven or eight escalators to get from one TechEd session to another VMM 2012: The beginning of the end for Virtual Server? According to various reports around the blog- and Twittersphere from Microsoft users and partners, System Center Vir...
IT Blog Last Friday saw the release of the Linux Kernel version 2.6.24. This new version does not include anything spectacular (Linus' words, not mine), but does include some updates to network drivers. Theseimprovements will assuredly make some users experiencing network issues happy. You can go to http:...
IT Blog Apache Cassandra- Distributed Database - Part I The Apache Cassandra is highly available, incrementally scalable, eventually consistent, distributed database, bringing together Amazon Dynamo's fully distributed design and Google Bigtable's Column Family-based data model. Schemaless and Rich Data...
Apache, Cassandra, NoSQL IT Blog Mainframe Overview with focus on Cost Savings Recently one of our Unix experts - focusing on IT optimization - came to me to get an understanding of Mainframe and like most IT people who have not worked in Mainframe had quite a fewobsolete notions. So I created a set of documents on Mainframe ove...
Mainframe, cost saving, mainframe cost IT Blog Fedora 7 went live today and I forgot to buy it a cake. Next year, I swear. Red Hat's press release on the news: The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 7, is now available. ...
IT Blog Apache Cassandra- Distributed Database - Part II Replication As seen in consistency, Cassandra offers the users the choice of synchronous and asynchronous replication. Reducing replication factor is easy as it only requires running cleanup afterwards removing extra replicas. Highly available async...
Apache, Cassandra, Eventual Consistency IT Blog First, there was the great iPhone 1.11 update bricking debacle. Today, it's the great Linux kernel 2.6.23 conspiracy? Admittedly, that doesn't quite roll off the tongue as well as an iPhone story. That said, I think the implications for today's revelations about 2.6.23 are far more important to the...
IT Blog I have the latest ESXi 5 features, check them out! There might be some additions closer to the release date but as of right now, it looks like there is a good number of improvements. Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builde...
ESXi 5, Feature List, iSCSI IT Blog This week I went and picked up two ornaments from my local "Giving Tree," did some shopping, and returned some gifts to be distributed to children in need. This is the third year that I've participated in this community giving project, and this year I noticed that the tree was absolutely covered wit...
Linux, HP, Enterprise applications for Linux IT Blog I had the interesting opportunity to be a third party to a battle of analysts today, and I thought I would share some of the things I learned from that conversation. First, a little background information: On Monday, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com posted a story on Active Directory and Linux authentica...
Windows, authentication, identity management IT Blog Despite blowback from refusing to supply services to whistleblower website WikiLeaks, controversy over congestion, uptime and customer service (or lack thereof), it seems that cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has never seen better days. The cloud provider is making new services and ne...
IT Blog Another post to present a free tool, another post to save your low budget! When building an IT infrastructure, one of the features you HAVE to consider is to provide messaging and collaboration tools to your customers (normally your employer...alsways remeber: the users are your customers!); consid...
IT Blog Last week in San Francisco the Linux developer community met to collaborate on and discuss the future of Linux. I attended, and tried to glean the most important developments that will be affecting Linux server admins and users. 1) Control groups (cgroups): Cgroups was initially developed to limit ...
Linux kernel, embedded Linux, Linux Foundation 
