WPA3: How and Why the Wi-Fi Standard Matters

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August 9, 2018

Wi-Fi Protected Access II, or WPA2, is the standard behind wireless security networking. It protects users everywhere, from coffee shops to college campuses to corporate headquarters. WPA2 may be the most widespread security standard in the world that ordinary people encounter.

With all that’s gone on since 2004, when the specification behind WPA2 was adopted, it must be considered a successful standard. But WPA2 does have some important limitations. A new version, WPA3, is a significant improvement. Products to use it are being built now, and certification for them will begin in the third quarter of 2018.

I spoke to Dan Harkins, distinguished technologist at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and author of many of the basic standards behind WPA3 to gain insights on what really matters in WPA3.

Harkins says that most of what matters in WPA3 will affect consumer deployments rather than enterprises. The improvements to consumer Wi-Fi use will be substantial and, importantly, invisible to the user.

However, key new enterprise features will appeal to the federal government and organizations that work with government agencies.

Graduation Day for Prometheus, the Open-Source Container Monitoring System

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Silicon Angle

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August 9, 2018

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation today officially graduated Prometheus from incubation, opening a new chapter in the popular open-source project’s evolution.

Prometheus is one of the most widely used systems for monitoring software container deployments. As such, the project has taken on an important role in the rise of containers, which are increasingly used to deploy applications because they’re lightweight and can easily move between different kinds of infrastructure.

Prometheus is only the second CNCF project to have graduated so far. The first was Kubernetes, the go-to framework for managing container environments. Prometheus integrates with the framework and was ranked as the most popular monitoring tool among users of the technology in a 2017 survey.

Guy Martin: Open Source Strategy at Autodesk

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The Linux Foundation

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August 8, 2018

Companies today can’t get away with not using open source, says Guy Martin, Director, Open@Autodesk, who recently sat down with us for a deep dive into Autodesk’s engagement with and contributions to the open source community.

“Like any company… we consume a lot of open source,” said Martin, “I was brought in to help Autodesk’s open source strategy in terms of how we contribute back more effectively to open source, how we open source code within our environment, which we want to be a standard — code which is non-differentiating and not strategic IP.”

But it’s not easy for a large company like Autodesk to engage with the open source community. Because they also have industry-leading proprietary solutions, they need to be extra careful with consuming and contributing to open source. They need to understand various licenses to avoid legal complexity, and they must be aware that releasing some code may also expose company IP. These are areas where all companies must tread carefully, and developers need to be fully confident that they can use code efficiently without dealing with a heavyweight process to get permissions for using or contributing.

“There needs to be a process around what we are going to open source which involves legal at a very early stage,” Martin said.

How to Be a Stronger DevOps Leader: 9 Tips

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The Enterprisers Project

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August 8, 2018

IT leaders and DevOps experts tell us that key considerations around talent, measurement, vision, and IT culture are the real secrets to taking DevOps to the next level. Here we share nine of their best tips for IT leaders. Dig in, and then share yours in the comments below.

1. Make everyone accountable to shared goals

Steve Burton, CD and DevOps evangelist, Harness: “For one thing, stop giving people ‘DevOps’ titles and expecting that to magically increase your release cycles. It’s about making people aware of the business objectives and giving them accountability for shared goals. Got Developers? Make them responsible for how their own code acts in production. Got Ops? Find a way for them to spend their time other than hunching over a console and overseeing each release.

For both of them, align their compensation to business outcomes. When it comes to DevOps, it’s deeds, not words – and hiring 100 people with ‘DevOps Engineer’ titles without shared goals, accountability, and compensation-based incentives is a lot like putting 100 tires on your car and expecting it to go faster.”

First Round of Keynotes Announced for Open Source Summit and ELC + OpenIoT Summit Europe

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The Linux Foundation

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August 8, 2018

Announcing the first round of keynote speakers for Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference + OpenIoT Summit Europe!

Keynotes include:

Patrick Ball, Director of Research, Human Rights Data Analysis Group
Eric Berlow, Co-Founder, Chief Science Officer, Vibrant Data Inc.
Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Vice President & Chief Open Source Officer, VMware
Ed Cable, President & Chief Executive Officer, Mifos Initiative
Jonathan Corbet, Author, Kernel Developer and Executive Editor, LWN.net
Johanna Koester, Program Director of Developer Technology and Advocacy, IBM
Dr. Alexander Nitz, Gravitational-wave Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
Brenda Romero, Award-Winning Game Designer, Fulbright Scholar & Entrepreneur
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation

The conference schedule will be released on August 14, with additional keynote announcements to follow.

ngrep – A Network Packet Analyzer for Linux

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Tecmint

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August 8, 2018

Ngrep (network grep) is a simple yet powerful network packet analyzer. It is a grep-like tool applied to the network layer – it matches traffic passing over a network interface. It allows you to specify an extended regular or hexadecimal expression to match against data payloads (the actual information or message in transmitted data, but not auto-generated metadata) of packets.

This tool works with various types of protocols, including IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP as well as Raw on a number of interfaces. It operates in the same fashion as tcpdump packet sniffing tool.

The package ngrep is available to install from the default system repositories in mainstream Linux distributions using package management tool as shown.

$ sudo apt install ngrep
$ sudo yum install ngrep
$ sudo dnf install ngrep

Free Resources for Open Source Certification and Training

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Amber Ankerholz

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August 7, 2018

July was a hot month for certification on Linux.com. In case you missed it, we covered the open source certification process in a series of articles examining why certification is important, general tips for success, specific advice for exam prep, and answers to some commonly asked questions. Learn more and check out this year’s LiFT scholarship opportunities as well.

“As open source has become the new normal in everything from startups to Fortune 2000 companies, it is important to start thinking about the career road map, the paths that you can take and how Linux and open source in general can help you reach your career goals,” says Clyde Seepersad, General Manager of Training and Certification at The Linux Foundation.

5 Reasons Open Source Certification Matters More Than Ever

Here, we cover the growing need for certification and some of the benefits of obtaining open source credentials.

Tips for Success with Open Source Certification

We look at the kinds of certifications that are making a difference and what is involved in completing necessary training and passing performance-based exams, with tips from Clyde Seepersad.

Open Source Certification: Preparing for the Exam

In this article, we focus on preparing for exams, what to expect during an exam, and how testing for open source certification differs from traditional types of testing.

Open Source Certification: Questions and Answers

In the final article of the series, Seepersad answers some commonly asked questions pertaining to certification and exam-taking.

Achieving the level of Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator or Engineer is no small feat, so The Linux Foundation also offers this free certification guide to help with preparation. In this guide, you’ll find:

Critical things to keep in mind on test day
An array of both free and paid study resources
Tips and tricks that could make the difference at exam time
A checklist of all the domains and competencies covered in the exam

LiFT Scholarships

For the eighth year in a row, The Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarship Program is also providing training opportunities to developers and sysadmins who may not otherwise have the ability to attend courses. This year’s program will award training scholarships to 16 individuals in eight categories who want to contribute to the advancement of open source software. An additional 15 scholarships will be awarded in the Open Source Newbies category. Learn more about the application process here.

Open Source Summit Features 11 Co-Located Events, Kubernetes Training, Security Summit, LF Deep Learning Workshops & More

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The Linux Foundation

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August 7, 2018

What makes attending Open Source Summit so valuable?

The people who attend, and the sharing of information that transpires when 2,000 open source leaders from around the globe gather to work together to transform technology.

In addition to education opportunities stemming from 250+ conference sessions and a plethora of collaboration opportunities in the hallway track and at networking events, Open Source Summit (previously LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen) offers added learning opportunities with a variety of co-located events: 11 this year to be exact.

The cost of travel can be the biggest hardship of attending an event, so you should make the most of it. Open Source Summit offers a number of ways to gain additional value from your trip.

This year’s co-located events and special events offerings include:

Linux Security Summit North America

mountpoint 2018

LF Deep Learning Workshop

CHAOSScon North America

Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNF) Seminar

Egeria Open Metadata & Governance Workshop

OpenAPI Workshop

OpenChain Mini Summit

OpenHPC Workshop

LFCS & Linux on Azure Training Courses

Cloud & Container Apprentice Linux Engineer Tutorials

Check out additional attendee experiences and read more at The Linux Foundation

Facebook Open Sources Library to Enhance Latest Transport Layer Security Protocol

By

TechCrunch

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August 7, 2018

For several years, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to improve the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which is designed to help developers protect data as it moves around the internet. Facebook created an API library called Fizz to enhance the latest version, TLS 1.3, on Facebook’s networks. Today, it announced it’s open sourcing Fizz and placing it on GitHub for anyone to access and use.

All of this is referring to how traffic moves around the internet and how servers communicate with one another in a secure way. This is particularly important because as Facebook points out, in modern internet server architecture, it’s not uncommon to have different key pieces of the process spread out across the world. This raises challenges around reducing latency as data moves from server to server.

7 Python Libraries for More Maintainable Code

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OpenSource.com

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August 7, 2018

A great way to protect the future maintainability of a project is to use external libraries to check your code health for you. These are a few of our favorite libraries for linting code(checking for PEP 8 and other style errors), enforcing a consistent style, and ensuring acceptable test coverage as a project reaches maturity.

Check your code style

PEP 8 is the Python code style guide, and it sets out rules for things like line length, indentation, multi-line expressions, and naming conventions. Your team might also have your own style rules that differ slightly from PEP 8. The goal of any code style guide is to enforce consistent standards across a codebase to make it more readable, and thus more maintainable. Here are three libraries to help prettify your code.

1. Pylint

Pylint is a library that checks for PEP 8 style violations and common errors. It integrates well with several popular editors and IDEs and can also be run from the command line.