Well, the cat is out of the bag and now "California", now called the Unified Computing System, is public knowledge. I recently joined the professional services team that will be supporting UCS. Services will be a key aspect of the success of UCS, so it will be pretty exciting and telling in the coming months. More to come later.
Here is the announcement.
Very interesting article, Why virtualization is shaking up IT data center, that begins to hint at how data centers will change as virtualization and more importantly unified computing gain predominance. In particular, I was struck by one passage:
Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.
By moving data and applications to the cloud, an organization will not need to maintain network admin skillsets, rather what will be more in demand will be the ability to interact with and extract data from the cloud using programmatic interfaces. Increasingly, the choice of the interface is REST based as is witnessed by Amazon Web Services. So the question arises, if an organization is 100% cloud-based for all of its IT services, is their a role for a network admin? Increasingly, the answer appears to be "no".
Apparently, the bonding driver needs to be loaded multiple times if you want to bond more than one pair of interfaces. For example, eth0 and eth1 would be bonded to bond0 and eth2 and eth3 would be bonded to bond1. This is the line that needs to be added to /etc/modules.conf:
options bond1 -o bonding1 miimon=100
Useful article can be found here:
Last night, the account manager for the client that I’m working with took the client and myself out to dinner. We went to a restaurant called Meat and Wine in Darling Harbour. As the name implies, it primarily focuses on steaks and wine. Like most decent steak places, it wasn’t cheap. I had a pumpkin soup, which wasn’t very good at all. It was just pureed pumpkin with some cream. For my main dish, I had a filet cooked Medium. I am no steak expert, but it was jusk okay. What is interesting here is that they also give you side sauces (I chose a creamy garlic) to go with your steak. This would be sacrilege at a US steak house. We also went through 3 bottles of various Australian Shiraz’. These were all very heavy and thick wines that had a lot of character and depth. These certainly were not sipping wines. The bill for the six of us must have been close to $1000. Oh well, I guess that is the cost of doing business.
Today was my first day meeting with the client. Like many engagements where I come onsite, not everything was set up, so it was slow going. Since the AXG is an integration product, it obviously has a lot of dependencies on other systems. Therefore, to test AXG, it is required that other systems also be configured correctly.
For lunch, we went to a German brewery. This was the first business luncheon where everyone was drinking. In the US, that would simply never happen. The day lasted longer than I would have liked. By 6:30, I was getting tired. I got back to the hotel and was famished, but the weather was cold and wet, but eating over-priced hotel food didn’t appeal to me. I remembered that there was a decent looking pizza joint on George St. Luckily, I was able to get a table quickly and ordered a half bottle of red. I ate my pizza and drank my wine and was sufficiently buzzed. By the time, I got to the hotel, I simply just crashed for 2 hours with the lights and TV on. At around 10:30, I managed to turn the lights off and crash until 6:00 am.
This is a very informative article describing the differences between a hash, MAC, and signature. Specifically, I was a little bit unclear about the meaning of a MAC. Basically, a MAC is calculated by first generating a hash value and then applying a symmetric/session key to encrypt the hash. This will insure that the hash value has not been modified. Because, even if there were a man-in-the-middle attack where the content and hash were modified, the MAC would prevent this from happening. I’m quoting this at length for future reference:
One of the problems with hashing is its wide open to man in the middle attacks. Without doubt hashing has its uses but in terms of sending data there is nothing stopping someone from intercepting the data, modifying it, and then resending the new message with a new hash. What the receiver gets is a message where the hash code matches the data, even though the data has been modified.
Message Authentication Codes are a way to prevent this. MACs use symmetric encryption methods to protect the sent hash. Symmetric encryption uses one private session key and both the sender and receiver require to have a copy of this key.
The process is as follows. Bob sends Alice some data. He generates a hash of the data and encrypts the hash using the symmetric key. Both the data and the encrypted hash are sent to Alice.
Alice, who also has the session key, generates her own hash from the data and encrypts it using the session key. She then checks her encrypted hash against the encrypted hash Bob sent. If they match the data is unchanged. Any man in the middle attacks no longer work as the middle man does not have the session key and therefore cannot generate a valid encrypted hash for the message.
Essentially a MAC is just an encrypted hash. It’s a combination of an encryption session key and a hashing algorithm.
Some example methods available in .NET include HMACMD5 a MAC algorithm based on MD5 hashing, and HMACSHA1 a MAC algorithm based on SHA1 hashing.
Example code for generating a random session key, this key is required to encrypt the hash code.
Attended CiscoLive 2008 this week in Orlando. I delivered a talk about the Java SDK for the ACE XML Gateway. There were about 10 attendees. It went reasonably well, especially given the fact that most of them had little background knowledge about AXG.
Last night was the "Customer Appreciation Event" at Universal Studios. For a while, it looked like it would be washed out because of the the afternoon rain showers, but luckily it cleared up. Unfortunately, the tickets for Bare Naked Ladies sold out pretty quickly, so we mostly rode rides, ate food, and drank copious amounts of beer.
Today, I’m planning on attending a presentation about PCI Compliance. Once that is done, I’m off to the airport and back to Chicago. Luckily, I don’t have any travel next week.
Powered by Qumana