Archive for March, 2007
March 30, 2007 at 1:16 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6509865.stm
The software giant is investigating reports that the way Windows handles alternatives to the traditional arrow cursor can leave PCs open to attack.
By booby-trapping a website or e-mail attachment with code that exploits the flaw, malicious hackers could hijack a Windows PC.
There appears to be another Windows vulnerability, I believe Microsoft have acknowledged it, so there may be security patches for the second week in April. These issues remain the cost of doing business with the windows platform, let’s move on, no criticism/debate is required.
March 30, 2007 at 1:14 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6508983.stm
Hackers have stolen information from at least 45.7 million payment cards used by customers of US retailer TJX, which owns TJ Maxx, and UK outlet TKMaxx.
In a statement to US watchdogs the firm said it did not know the full extent of the theft and its effect on customers.
TJX added that the security breach may also have involved TKMaxx customers in the UK and Ireland.
This not only exposes the firm to risk from a liability standpoint, these kind of things can undermine your brand, and lead customers to be less inclined to shop/use you. These things will happen, focus on your security, how it works and what processes/procedures you have technically and non-technically to limit your risk exposure.
March 30, 2007 at 1:12 pm · Filed under Other things, datacenter
http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/servers-data-centre/infrastructure-management/news/index.cfm?newsid=2413
An air conditioning breakdown forced a shut-down of government computers in Florida earlier this week, amid fears that overheating could permanently damage datacentre servers.
The critical air conditioning service has now been restored to a Florida state government datacentre, after staff scrambled to replace a failed chiller with a back-up delivered by police escort from outside the state.
The crisis began on Monday at 5.15pm local time, when a water leak was discovered in cooler at the 1,200-server datacentre that provides computing power to the office of the state governor, the department of revenue and other government agencies.
If your datacenter air conditioning fails, all being well the servers should continue, most are rated to about 40 degrees celcius, and then the thermal sensors will tell the server to shut itself down, dependent therefore on the volume and density of your datacenter will drive how long you can stay online. Check out the article it’s an interesting read. How would your infrastructure cope?
March 30, 2007 at 1:09 pm · Filed under Other things, rackmounts
http://www.mcsolutions.co.uk/article/9163/Fujitsu-Siemens-Computers-launches-two-more-servers-for-SMEs-.aspx
Fujitsu Siemens Computers has launched two new Primergy Dual Socket servers based on AMD Opteron CPU 2000 Series CPUs and offering better performance for SMEs.
RX330 S1 and Econel 230R S1 rack servers are the new machines, complemented by the Primergy Server Management tool, which enables organisations to monitor and control servers more simply.
Excellent, Fujitsu offering their new servers to the small business market has to be a good thing offering new choice for the customers and market. Interesting they’re using the AMD processors, wonder if there is an Intel equivalent?
March 30, 2007 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Other things, rackmounts
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,81485.shtml
IRVINE, Calif., March 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Gateway, Inc. today announced that its new E-9722R server won the Best of FOSE 2007 Award for the Enterprise Hardware category.
Held in Washington DC this week, FOSE is the government’s largest gathering of information technology professionals. More than 100 high technology companies submitted new products in the annual GCN Best of FOSE Awards program, with only 16 companies receiving the distinguished award across a wide range of technology categories.
Very cool, well done Gateway for getting the award, the server looks quite good, I confess to not playing with the Gateway server range, will need to check them out.
March 30, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://www.apacs.org.uk/media_centre/press/Salarypaymentproblems.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6506439.stm
We are aware of a problem with the processing of a number of salary payments. This will unfortunately mean that up to 400,000 customers will not receive their monthly salary as expected, tomorrow, 30 March 2007. This represents about 1.6% of the total payments which will be processed through BACS for tomorrow.
The entire banking and payments industry is extremely sorry that this has happened and we are working to resolve the issue and limit the impact on individual customers.
The banks have to earn money, that’s fine, they charge me interest on my credit cards, the mortgage and my overdraft, I’ve got nothing against this but this news coupled with the ‘over charging’ accusations is not earning the banks any bonus points in customer satisfaction, trust or loyalty.
Yes technical issues will happen, 1.6% on the grand scale of things isn’t that bad, but many of us have been in the position where you can’t take money out and it’s not pleasant. It’s little comfort to those affected to say any charges will be refunded and if you need money take it out at a branch.
Apologies, will at this point state:
- Is this at the same branches that close at the weekend?
- Yes they might be open Saturday morning, but they’re closed Sunday right?
- The money wont be in the account until Monday right?Â
- That’s because its in the big money transferring system:
- The one that’s turned off on weekends?
- The one where it takes three to five days to transfer money?
March 30, 2007 at 11:53 am · Filed under How IT works, blades, rackmounts
In the olden days, say I had a critical web server, a Compaq Proliant 1850r, and I wanted lights out functionality, or the server was ‘beyond the firewall’ (that is customer facing), I might use the lights out function to manage the application. As part of this, I would therefore buy a Compaq RIB card. There’s a picture of the RIB2 here: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/riloe2/index.html (they look similar)
HP then released the RIB2 which had some extra features and also brought support for some of the new server models as well as the DL range servers which can use the existing RIB card.
In the last few years, HP started putting the RIB card on the system board, making it a standard part of the server, so any DL360/380/580 G2 and above typically came with an ILO, and integrated RIB card. (The 760G2 and I think the early Compaq 360G2/380G2s were an exception)
On a blade therefore your lights out card is an ILO, an integrated RIB card, exactly the same functionally as a RIB but with enhanced functionality. More recently, the new boxes have been getting ILO2, which has some features for power, as well as support for bootable dvd images.
On the IBM bladecenter what you get is a management port giving you access to the bladecenter enclosure, from their you can configure the enclosure and launch a lights out connection to each of the blades within that enclosure.
March 29, 2007 at 11:46 pm · Filed under How IT works, vmware
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2007/03/bad_benchmark_r.html
There are some good reasons that VMware wants pre-publishing review of benchmarks using our software. There are also good reasons not to like this policy, and my personal view is that it probably should be phased out at some point. However, we see problems with virtual performance testing over and over again. Virtualization benchmarking is hard, and virtualization is still so new that people love to take ancedotes and generalize to the usefulness of virtualization technologies, for all time.
Case in point: this recent benchmark got picked up by Slashdot today: Load Testing a Virtual Web Application. It really isn’t a good test: they use VMware Server 1.0.1 (we don’t recommend using Server for high-throughput production uses!) instead of ESX Server, they don’t tune anything, etc.
This is a very fair point, the problem with these benchmarks is that they can be finger in the air type tests. Ultimately anyone wishing to compare virtualization products should be doing the due diligence part, downloading it/buying it and comparing the two products on their server, their network setting it up as per their documentation/standards and configuring it with the vendors recommendations.
Virtualization remains for many as the post suggests is a great tool for server consolidation, the ability to get rid of my legacy proliants and consolidate them on to one or two DL585s, freeing up power and datacenter space. Would I use it in production? Sure, but as with any technology, I’d use it for what I thought was appropriate to the task at hand, if it’s a real time market data feed and it’s working on a physical platform, then maybe not, but if it’s an infrastructure server and it’s not doing much, then it’s the ideal candidate.
March 29, 2007 at 11:34 pm · Filed under Other things, vmware
http://pcidss.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/virtualization-and-security-by-james-deluccia/
Ever since the day I setup VMWARE and other equivalents in a lab I was amazed at the potential to sandbox systems for testing and usage. In these environments I built honeynets, tested software exploits, analyzed virii and other malware, and deployed hundreds of enterprise applications (using legit keys mind you) to test and evaluate unique architecture deployments. As time progressed these virtual sandboxes became a critical tool that I began to run on my home labs, and my laptops as I traveled around the world.
Check out this interesting blog about vmware and security, it looks like a good read, looking forward to checking it out. Security of the virtual infrastructure is importance particularly with the legislation in the finance sector, identity theft and due diligence.
March 29, 2007 at 11:31 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/sun_grid_developer/
Three years into its grand supercomputer rental experiment, Sun Microsystems has found that developers, developers, developers have more interest in the program than big spending businesses.
Sun indicated as much two weeks ago by announcing so-called “click and run†support for its Network.com service. Customers can select applications such as BLAST, FreeMAT and Impact and fire up the software across a desired number of Sun hosted processors. Ideally, this provides developers with a cost-effective way of testing their code across a large number of machines at a low cost.
Sun first talked up this grid computing service back in late 2004, touting it as the answer for large companies in need of extra horsepower. Got some oil exploration problems that just won’t fit on your in-house servers? No problem. Fork over $1 per CPU per hour and crank away on Sun’s hardware.
I think it’s a good thing, Sun are removing some of the challenges with grid, the initial start up costs, and making it easier, revenue? Well I suspect that it’s a good way of gaining exposure, proving the platform, the Sun infrastructure for grid and everything else, the cost isn’t really that high, I pay more for my mobile phone for a 1hr phone call. Let’s recognize they’re offering an alternative, it might not be everyone’s choice, regardless it’s there, fantastic.
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