Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Beyond Natty: The next version of Ubuntu Linux

Well, we dodged a bullet. Instead of Octopoid Octopus, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, has chosen Oneiric Ocelot for Ubuntu’s November 2011 version name.

Unless you’re a film maven, your first question is probably: “What’s Oneiric!?” I know it as a film criticism term for dream sequences in a movie. Or as Shuttleworth explained, “Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.” I’ll buy that. But, let’s get down to brass tacks: What does this mean? What can we expect from this version?

For starters, you should keep in mind that the next version of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, is going to be quite different from the current version of Ubuntu. The most striking difference is that starting with Ubuntu 11.04, Ubuntu will be using the Unity desktop instead of GNOME 3. In addition, it will the April Ubuntu will be using several new default applications, including Banshee to play music, and its windowing system will be based on Wayland instead of the X Window System.

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March 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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Things grow worse in Libya and the Internet is switched off

Two weeks ago, as unrest grew in Libya, the Libyan government turned off the Internet, and began to kill off its rebellious citizens. Afterwards, the Internet slowly came back on, but now, according to Arbor Networks, Libya’s Internet has been shut down as if a switch has been flipped.

Which, all things considered, might have been exactly what happened. You see Libya’s Internet is owned and controlled by the government through a telecommunication company Libya Telecom & Technology. Even its site is down now.

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March 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Security: Holes Found, Holes Fixed

Oh my God! There are security holes in Ubuntu 10.04! The sky is falling! Bill Gates is the maker of the one true operating system; forgive us Bill for we have worshiped at the feet of false Penguin idols. Oh please, give me a break!

Linux, like all other operating systems and software, has security holes. Always has, always will. No one ever said Linux was perfect. It’s not. It never will be.

What makes Ubuntu and Linux better than most of their competitors aren’t that they are flawless. It’s that when bugs are found, they fixed as fast as possible and then the fixes are pushed out to users immediately. There is no monthly Patch Tuesday. If there’s a significant problem, its tracked down and fixed. Period. End of statement.

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March 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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WordPress Distressed by Massive DDoS Attack

Color me confused. I don’t know why anyone would attack WordPress, the popular home of almost 18-million blogs, but they did, and for several hours on March 3rd, WordPress was out of commission.

According to Sara Rosso, VIP Services Engineer at Automattic, WordPress.com’s owner,” WordPress.com is currently being targeted by an extremely large Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”

She added, “We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.”

The attack began at approximately 6 AM Eastern time. WordPress started recovering by noon, and by about 3:30 PM the system was back to normal.

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March 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Juniper Networks Introduces new Internet Service and Content Provider Architecture

Juniper Networks announced today, March 3, that the networking company was releasing a new suite of products and services that delivers what its calls the “first Converged Supercore” for service and content providers: Juniper’s Converged Supercore This is an integrated end-to-end packet transport solution optimized to deliver the switching and transport technology.

There’s no question that there’s a need for a next generation of core networking technologies for Internet Service Providers (ISP)s and content delivery networks (CDN)s. We have the basic technology now in IEEE 802.3ba, which sets down the technical guidelines for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100GigE Ethernet and we also have the customer demand for that kind of speed.

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