Overworked corporate IT departments are using more contract labor to help take on new initiatives. Is this a positive trend?
Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit
HP and Microsoft in Open Conflict as They Become ‘Outright Competitors’
Hewlett Packard and Microsoft are changing “from partners to outright competitors,” says HP CEO Meg Whitman, as the companies shift into the same hardware and service markets.
Her words came in a speech given before financial analysts in San Jose. Microsoft has made a number of recent decisions contrary to HP’s own interests, including bailing out competitor Dell in an attempt to push Windows 8 to the business sector. Also central to her reclassification is Microsoft’s commitment to Surface, despite previous claims from HP that Surface wasn’t a threat to its own Windows 8 tablet. This echoes earlier complaints from other OEM partners such as Acer, whose CEO warned Microsoft to “think twice” before releasing the Surface tablet.
H…
Read more at The Verge
Acer’s Chromebook C720 Leads With Pseudo-Haswell Core
Mainstream or not, here come the next-gen Chromebooks. Acer’s C7 update claims 8.5 hours of battery life, even with a downgraded Haswell chip. [Read more]
Read more at CNET News
A tiny BASH Script to Demonstrate ‘IP Aliasing’
“The process in which multiple addresses are created on a single network interface, is known as “IP Aliasing”. IP Aliasing will be very much useful when you need multiple IP addresses to set up multiple virtual sites on Apache making the use of only one network adapter. The most important advantage of IP Aliasing is that you do not need one hardware per IP Address, rather you can generate a pool of virtual network interfaces (i.e. Aliases) on a single device.”
Read More at YourOwnLinux.
RHEL 5.9 – 5.10 Risk Report Released
Mark Cox posted his latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux risk report, this time for versions 5.9 through 5.10. In its seventh year, RHEL 5 will be supported through March 31, 2017. RHEL version 6.5 Beta was released yesterday extending “its scalability and manageability to aid in the build-out and control of large, complex IT environments.”
In his report, Cox said Red Hat issued “37 advisories to address 115 vulnerabilities” in RHEL version 5.9 and 5.10 default installs. Of these, nine were critical addressing 25 security vulnerabilities in PHP and Firefox/XULRunner. Other common server systems received important/moderate/low priority security updates as well such as Xen and BIND.
Versions 5.8 to 5.9 received “60 advisories to address 214 vulnerabilities” and versions 5.7 to 5.8 were shipped 42 advisories for 118 vulnerabilities.
Read more at Ostatic
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 Beta Available Now
A new beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for download for subscribing customers, and it is likely that a final release will be available soon. As usual, the release includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements, a few of which showcase just how powerful Linux has become.
It is becoming a favorite hobby of mine to read through the “maximums” in release notes, slowly shaking my head at the numbers. A few of my favorites from ZDNet’s announcement of the RHEL beta:
Administrative level scalability: Kernel dump files on large systems can now scale to multiple terabytes of data, and a new compression algorithm, LZO, speeds the creation of dump files, leading to reduced down time during crash dump generation and faster troubleshooting.
Read more at Ostatic