Posted in Events

Network and server monitoring on the cheap

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Carter

Internet Storm Center reached out to its community for suggestions on free and almost-free tools for network management. Free, in our experience, does not necessarily mean lacking in features or utility as compared to the big commercial software offerings (we will have a roundup on those tools in a future post).  Users recommended the following:

  • Secunia PSI for patch status and app versions (apparently the ‘P’ version is only for personal use).
  • RANCID for network device config changes.
  • Nagios for device availability
  • NMAP for port scanning.
  • Nessus for vulnerability scanning.
  • Ngrep for network forensics.
  • Syslog-NG for log aggregation.
  • tcpdump for traffic analysis.
  • IPTABLES for firewalling.
  • Snort for IDS.
  • Zabbix for availability monitoring.
  • Spiceworks for general system monitoring.
  • Cacti for network activity collection and graphing.
  • ZenOSS for network discovery and monitoring.
  • Bactrack4 for penetration testing and forensics.
  • Smokeping for network latency monitoring.
  • OSSEC HIDS for log analysis and other realtime malware detection.
  • Ganglia for performance stats.
  • SNARE for routing windows events to a syslog server.
  • xymon for availability monitoring and everything you used to like about Big Brother.

Additional suggestions are more than welcome in the comments.

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Posted in Events

New storage features in vSphere 4.1

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Carter

Although Search Storage reports that end users are not as enthusiastic as originally hoped, VMware’s flagship offering’s includes a number of new features designed to improve manageability and performance of backing storage.

The new vSphere 4.1 features under VAAIinclude Full Copy Offload; Block Zeroing and Scalable Lock Management, all of which are designed to improve performance. As the name implies, the Full Copy Offload feature offloads the processing of full-volume copies to the disk array instead of using host-CPU cycles and memory; Block Zeroing reduces the number of repetitive commands representing empty blocks that are sent from the host to the array during a copy process; and Scalable Lock Management, which offloads the processing of SCSI reservation locks to the storage array. VMware and partners have also previewed a fourth feature, Thin Provisioning Stun, though this functionality was not included in the official 4.1 release. Reportedly the feature is designed to send a command from the disk array to the host that pauses virtual machines in the event that a thin-provisioned volume runs out of space.

Original post on Search Server Virtualization here.


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Posted in Industry

Seeking Alpha on Cloud Computing, “The Internet’s Latest Boom”

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Carter

Seeking Alpha, the cult Wall Street site, pulls together a number of stats on growth in the server side of the Internet:

Also, an increasing number of businesses are turning to outsourcing companies, which manage computer rooms for customers and in many cases are sharply stepping up purchases of servers to keep up with rising demand.[...]

The market research firm IDC puts spending on cloud-computing, a term that includes delivering computing capacity over the Internet, at $16.5 billion in 2009, and projects spending in the field will increase 27% a year through 2014—with the number of servers deployed in cloud applications expected to triple to 1.35 million over that period.

My one grievance with the piece is that they refer to our esteemed competitor, Rackspace, as “a dog of a performer.” How’s that? As of today, Rackspace is up 60% from its September ’09 low of $12.37 from about a year ago, and up 329% from its all time low in March of ’09. Hosting, as a friend of mine said a while back in the WSJ, continues to be the Rodney Dangerfield of tech.

Original Seeking Alpha post here; original Fund my Mutual Fund article here; and the primary WSJ source, here.

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Posted in Events

Intel settles with FTC, promises to play nice

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Carter

The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday that they’ve settled their inquiry into Intel’s anticompetitive practices which began in January, 2008. The settlement, as detailed on the FTC Website, requires the following of Intel:

Under the settlement, Intel will be prohibited from:

  • conditioning benefits to computer makers in exchange for their promise to buy chips from Intel exclusively or to refuse to buy chips from others; and
  • retaliating against computer makers if they do business with non-Intel suppliers by withholding benefits from them.

In addition, the FTC settlement order will require Intel to:

Continue reading

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Posted in Events

GI Partners acquires SoftLayer; rampant speculation on merger with The Planet (in spite of the fact they hate each other)

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Carter

Long rumored, and now finally closed, GI Partners has secured a controlling stake in SoftLayer, the North Dallas-based dedicated hosting shop. No hosting company on earth can match SoftLayer’s reputation for explosive growth or their insatiable appetite for server hardware.

My Host News has details about the transaction and SoftLayer’s historical performance:

  • GI Partners and the SoftLayer® management team have acquired all equity in SoftLayer Technologies®. Terms of the transaction have not been released. [....]
  • SoftLayer and GI Partners raised a combination of debt and equity to back the acquisition, repay existing obligations, and fund growth.
  • GI Partners has many other hosting, information technology, and related holdings, including Digital Realty Trust, The Planet, The Telx Group, and ViaWest.
    Continue reading

    • |    392 Comments
    Posted in Industry

    Google forgets not to be evil: Close to paying Verizon ‘protection money’ for tiered access

    Posted on August 5, 2010 by Carter

    If you’ve ever bought transport services from a competitive telecommunications provider, it becomes immediately apparent how unlevel the playing field is. A competitive provider will have to pay a landlord hand over fist to provide the same service that Verizon (or the other monopoly AT&T) can just waltz in, citing their exclusive, universal rights of way, and not have to pay anything. How much does Verizon pay us taxpayers for their exclusive Government franchise? Precisely: $0. Even their universal service obligations they get to bill back to all of us.

    The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a sad, unenforced fraud of a law. Anyone who was trying to provide competitive access still had to go through Verizon or whichever other incumbent monopoly owned their territory, giving them ample opportunity to snuff out the sprouts of competition, only incurring absurdly minimal fines as the cost of doing business.

    Where does that leave Verizon now? $3 billion of EBITDA per month. $35 billion per year. (Google, by way of comparison, generates only $10B of EBITDA per year). And how exactly is Verizon improving their network if I, living in lower Manhattan, one of the densest most affluent areas in their LATA, cannot get FiOS? The truth is that FiOS is a ruse intended to distract from the fact that Verizon still generates the majority of their broadband revenues of the copper infrastructure they wrote off decades ago, getting tens of billions of tax deductions in the process.

    So what does Google do? They decide to pay Verizon off. I guess it was simply not worth the time or expense to fight for what is right, and for the principles the Internet was founded on. The rest of us can just fend for ourselves. Larry, Sergei, Eric, we thought we knew ye…

    [Image from Social Machinery.]

    Update: Computerworld now reports Google is denying they are pursuing tiered access with Verizon:

    “The New York Times is quite simply wrong,” wrote Mistique Cano, a Google spokesman, in an e-mail. “We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open Internet.”

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    Posted in Other

    Totally unrelated: Jeremy Clarkson and the Italia 458

    Posted on August 5, 2010 by Carter

    Jeremy Clarkson reviewing the flagship Ferrari is, in and of itself in my opinion, newsworthy. How could you not want one? The Stig takes a lap at the end. Enjoy.

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    Posted in Events

    WordPress 3.0.1 released

    Posted on July 28, 2010 by Carter

    Original post at WordPress in it’s entirety:

    After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

    Three dot oh dot one
    Bug fixes to make you smile
    Update your WordPress

    This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

    Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

    Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.


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