Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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A VPN to call your own

With Firesheep potentially looking over your Web-browsing shoulder and password management becoming essential, wouldn’t be nice if you could easily keep all your Internet traffic really secure? As it happens, there’s long been a way to keep your online wandering secret: Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

If you’re lucky, your company, school, or some other organization provides you with a VPN service. Most of the time you may have used this just to work on office matters from the road or home. You can, and should, also use it anytime you’re on the Internet. Far more so than many Wi-Fi security measures, application proxies, or the Web-based security measures such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TLS/SSL over HTTP (HTTPS), a VPN can keep your information safe all the way from your laptop to servers and back again.

Even if your company doesn’t provide a VPN though you can also use VPN firmware on your home router, such as DD-WRT, or on a computer working as a VPN server with a program like OpenVPN. All these require at least some technical expertise to set up. But, what if you’re all thumbs when it comes to technology? Well you still have an answer: a VPN provider.

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February 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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The new Debian Linux: Irrelevant?

Once upon a time, a new Debian Linux release was a big deal in Linux circles. It still is, but its child, Ubuntu Linux, is the Linux distribution that gets all the headlines. There’s a reason for that. Over the years, Debian has become more and more a Linux just for Linux fanatics while the rest of the Linux family has become more end-user friendly.

As I look over the features in the latest Debian, I can see why Debian, while still popular as a building block for other Linux distributions, is no longer as important as it once was. For example, the default Debian distributions won’t include any proprietary firmware binary files. While that will be popular with die-hard free software fans, users who just want to use their Wi-Fi hardware and to get the most from their graphics cards won’t be happy.

If, as is likely if you’re using a laptop or a PC with high-end graphics and you find you’re running into hardware problems, the Debian installation program should alert you the problem. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the installation routine won’t automatically download the missing firmware from the Web. Instead, you’ll need to pause the installation while you fetch the missing in action firmware from either the Debian non-free firmware ftp site or the vendor’s site.

OK, that’s doable if you’re a power user. If you’re not, it’s a confusing pain-in-the-rump.

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February 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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What makes IBM’s Watson run?

It’s looking pretty good for Watson, IBM’s Linux-powered computer cluster, as IBM engineers get it ready for its mid-February showdown with Jeopardy’s all-time champs, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In a practice round, Watson already won a practice round and Bodog, the online gambling company and odds-maker has made Watson the favorite at 5/6. Even if Watson doesn’t win, the mere fact that it can compete at this level is amazing.

How can Watson do it? Here’s what I’ve learned about Watson’s hardware and software in the last few days.

According to David Davidian, an IBM Senior System Architect, “Watson is a massively parallel system based on the IBM POWER7 750 in a standard rack mounted configuration.” It can run AIX, IBM’s house-brand Unix; IBM I; and Linux. To compete on Jeopardy Watson is running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

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February 3, 2011
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Canonical brings Ubuntu to the OpenStack Cloud

Believe it or not, OpenStack, the extremely popular open-source software cloud stack is just over six-months old. Someone new to cloud-computing might find that hard to believe since today, February 3rd, Cisco, the 800-pound gorilla of networking, and Canonical, parent of Ubuntu Linux, have both joined forces with OpenStack.

Historically, Canonical has been allied with the other popular open-source cloud stack, Eucalyptus since it began working in clouds. Indeed, Canonical, in partnership with Dell, has just launched a private cloud server package using the Eucalyptus cloud platform.

Be that as it may, Canonical’s Cloud Solutions Lead, Nick Barcet, announced that Canonical was including the latest OpenStack software release, Bexar “in the repositories for Ubuntu 11.04 as well as officially joining the community. We have been engaged with the OpenStack community informally for some time. Some Canonical alumni have been key to driving the OpenStack initiative over in Rackspace and there has been a very healthy dialogue between the two projects with strong attendance at UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) and at the OpenStack conferences by engineers in both camps.”

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February 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Painless password management: The best free and paid tools

Once upon a time, you might have thought you could get away with a single user ID and password for all your favorite Web sites. Then, the popular gossip Web site Gawker was hacked, and more than a million user IDs and passwords were revealed. Would it surprise you to know that many people used those same user IDs and passwords on many other far more important sites such as their bank accounts?

Ow!

I could lecture you about how dumb that is, about how you need to use different passwords for different sites; that you need to pick passwords other than those old favorites, “123456” and “password; and how you should change your passwords every month for every site, but what’s the point?

Leaving aside that most people are lousy at security, can anyone really keep in their heads the dozens of passwords you need for your bank, Facebook, Twitter, office e-mail server, Gmail, phone, electric, 401(k), LinkedIn, ITworld and countless other accounts? Who can manage to remember dozens of IDs and passwords for dozens of sites outside of savants such as the fictional Raymond Babbitt? I’ll tell you who: No one.

So what can you do to use safe passwords on the Internet without driving yourself crazy trying to remember all of them? There are several ways to try to do it and here’s my list.

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February 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Don’t Panic! It’s only the Internet running out of Addresses

The various Internet management groups made it official this morning. We’re now out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) Internet address blocks. The final five blocks of IPv4 addresses were given out to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR), which, in turn, will distribute these IP addresses to ISPs. That puts about 80-million more IPv4 addresses in play, but once they’re gone, they gone: IPv4 game over.

There was nothing unexpected about the Internet running out of IPv4 addresses, except for quickly the last few address blocks have been used up. As Rod Beckstrom, Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s President and CEO said in the announcement “This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet. Nobody was caught off guard by this, the Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for quite some time. But it means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global innovation we’ve all come to expect.”

What does that mean for you? Well, in the short run, nothing if you’re an ordinary user. If you’re a CIO, network engineer or administrator, you’ve got to start getting to switch over to IPv6. IPv6, with its 128-bit addresses, won’t be running out of addresses any time this century.

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