Practical Technology

for practical people.

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
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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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February 2, 2011
by sjvn01
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Canonical & Dell bring private Ubuntu Clouds to Servers

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux has partnered with Dell to bring its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) to business users on Dell’s PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 rack servers.

UEC is made up of Ubuntu server instances running on the open-source Eucalyptus cloud platform. This Ubuntu cloud system is designed to work as a private cloud, but it can also be used with public Amazon EC2. While Ubuntu is usually though of as the Linux for the masses, UEC is a pure business IT offering.

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February 1, 2011
by sjvn01
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Convirture and Eucalyptus Systems to partner on open-source, cloud management

Later this week, sources tell me that Convirture, maker of open source-based virtualization management software, will announce a very close partnership with Eucalyptus Systems, creators of the eponymous private cloud platform. The agreement will have the two companies working together to integrate ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise with both Eucalyptus’ open-source cloud platform and Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. In addition, the two companies will cooperate on sales, marketing and support activities.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is meant to provide Eucalyptus private cloud users with management capabilities that were previously only available on closed-source products. ConVirt software manages virtual and private-cloud environments based on open platforms such as Linux, Xen and KVM. ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise provides advanced automation and scalability features for use in large and/or mission-critical environments, including high availability, backup and recovery, storage and network automation, and enterprise-grade security. It also includes tools and features for managing hosted and private clouds.

In an as yet unreleased statement, Matt Reid, vice president of sales and marketing at Eucalyptus Systems, says. “Convirture’s software provides sophisticated management capabilities that will help further drive adoption of open source-based private clouds in the enterprise. With the open source Convirture software and Eucalyptus, a wide range of users will be able to deploy and manage powerful on-premise clouds, and we are pleased to include Convirture in the growing Eucalyptus partner ecosystem.”

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