Research plays a crucial role in the AI movement, and tech giants have to do everything in their power to seem viable to the AI community. AI is mostly based on research advances and state-of-the-art technology, which is advancing very quickly. Therefore, there is no business need to make closed infrastructure solutions, because within a few months everything will be totally different.
In such a situation, the only winning strategy for tech giants is to offer open source solutions to attract members of the AI community and eventually become part of the AI community themselves. This is a relatively new model in the tech industry.
Even though Nagios Exchange has thousands of available plugins to freely download, sometimes the status needed to be checked is very specific for your scenario.
Considerations
It is assumed that:
You have Nagios installed and running (You can follow this Tutorial if not).
You know the basics on Nagios administration.
Nagios server in this example is hosted on 192.168.0.150 and an example client is hosted on IP 192.168.0.200
Jack Wallen takes a look into the wayback machine to view some of the highlights open source and Linux enjoyed throughout 2017.
Ah, 2017, it was a good year for Linux—one that continued the solidification of the open source platform on so many levels. From the consumer mobile space to supercomputers, Linux dominated certain sectors in a way no other platform could.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the year—both the highs and lows—and hopefully draw a conclusion that 2017 was a banner year for Linux.
I’ve been reading Grokking Algorithms, which I recommend to anyone new to algorithms. It’s basically the introduction I wish I had a few months ago! The examples in the book are written in Python, so I’d like to share a JavaScript version of Dijkstra’s algorithm. This algorithm uses a directed, weighted graph to determine the “cheapest” path to reach a node.
I’ll be breaking each part into a few steps, with some background information. If you’d prefer to just look at the code, here is the link to the gist.
Background: What is a graph?
A graph is an abstract data type used to model a set of connections. For example, say Bob follows Sarah and Lou on Twitter. Sarah follows Lin. Lou follows Lin and Mark. We can represent these connections using a graph.
Here we look at the “State of AGL: Plumbing and Services,” from Konsulko Group’s CTO Matt Porter and senior staff software engineer Scott Murray. Porter and Murray ran through the components of the current UCB 4.0 “Daring Dab” and detailed major upstream components and API bindings, many of which will be appear in the Electric Eel release due in Jan. 2018.
Despite the automotive focus of the AGL stack, most of the components are already familiar to Linux developers. “It looks a lot like a desktop distro,” Porter told the ELCE attendees in Prague. “All these familiar friends.”
Some of those friends include the underlying Yocto Project “Poky” with OpenEmbedded foundation, which is topped with layers like oe-core, meta-openembedded, and metanetworking. Other components are based on familiar open source software like systemd (application control), Wayland and Weston (graphics), BlueZ (Bluetooth), oFono (telephony), PulseAudio and ALSA (audio), gpsd (location), ConnMan (Internet), and wpa-supplicant (WiFi), among others.
UCB’s application framework is controlled through a WebSocket interface to the API bindings, thereby enabling apps to talk to each other. There’s also a new W3C widget for an alternative application packaging scheme, as well as support for SmartDeviceLink, a technology developed at Ford that automatically syncs up IVI systems with mobile phones.
AGL UCB’s Wayland/Weston graphics layer is augmented with an “IVI shell” that works with the layer manager. “One of the unique requirements of automotive is the ability to separate aspects of the application in the layers,” said Porter. “For example, in a navigation app, the graphics rendering for the map may be completely different than the engine used for the UI decorations. One engine layers to a surface in Wayland to expose the map while the decorations and controls are handled by another layer.”
For audio, ALSA and PulseAudio are joined by GENIVI AudioManager, which works together with PulseAudio. “We use AudioManager for policy driven audio routing,” explained Porter. “It allows you to write a very complex XML-based policy using a rules engine with audio routing.”
UCB leans primarily on the well-known Smack Project for security, and also incorporates Tizen’s Cynara safe policy-checker service. A Cynara-enabled D-Bus daemon is used to control Cynara security policies.
Porter and Murray went on to explain AGL’s API binding mechanism, which according to Murray “abstracts the UI from its back-end logic so you can replace it with your own custom UI.” You can re-use application logic with different UI implementations, such as moving from the default Qt to HTML5 or a native toolkit. Application binding requests and responses use JSON via HTTP or WebSocket. Binding calls can be made from applications or from other bindings, thereby enabling “stacking” of bindings.
Porter and Murray concluded with a detailed description of each binding. These include upstream bindings currently in various stages of development. The first is a Master binding that manages the application lifecycle, including tasks such as install, uninstall, start, and terminate. Other upstream bindings include the WiFi binding and the BlueZ-based Bluetooth binding, which in the future will be upgraded with Bluetooth PBAP (Phone Book Access Profile). PBAP can connect with contacts databases on your phone, and links to the Telephony binding to replicate caller ID.
The oFono-based Telephony binding also makes calls to the Bluetooth binding for Bluetooth Hands-Free-Profile (HFP) support. In the future, Telephony binding will add support for sent dial tones, call waiting, call forwarding, and voice modem support.
Support for AM/FM radio is not well developed in the Linux world, so for its Radio binding, AGL started by supporting RTL-SDR code for low-end radio dongles. Future plans call for supporting specific automotive tuner devices.
The MediaPlayer binding is in very early development, and is currently limited to GStreamer based audio playback and control. Future plans call for adding playlist controls, as well as one of the most actively sought features among manufacturers: video playback support.
Location bindings include the gpsd based GPS binding, as well as GeoClue and GeoFence. GeoClue, which is built around the GeoClue D-Bus geolocation service, “overlaps a little with GPS, which uses the same location data,” says Porter. GeoClue also gathers location data from WiFi AP databases, 3G/4G tower info, and the GeoIP database — sources that are useful “if you’re inside or don’t have a good fix,” he added.
GeoFence depends on the GPS binding, as well. It lets you establish a bounding box, and then track ingress and egress events. GeoFence also tracks “dwell” status, which is determined by arriving at home and staying for 10 minutes. “It then triggers some behavior based on a timeout,” said Porter. Future plans call for a customizable dwell transition time.
While most of these Upstream bindings are well established, there are also Work in Progress (WIP) bindings that are still in the early stages, including CAN, HomeScreen, and WindowManager bindings. Farther out, there are plans to add speech recognition and text-to-speech bindings, as well as a WWAN modem binding.
In conclusion, Porter noted: “Like any open source project, we desperately need more developers.” The Automotive Grade Linux project may seem peripheral to some developers, but it offers a nice mix of familiarity — grounded in many widely used open source projects — along with the excitement of expanding into a new and potentially game changing computing form factor: your automobile. AGL has also demonstrated success — you can now check out AGL in action in the 2018 Toyota Camry, followed in the coming month by most Toyota and Lexus vehicles sold in North America.
There are four steps you should take if you are running Tiller (Helm’s server-side component) in a cluster that has untrusted users or pods. These steps are done at installation time, and will substantially improve Helm’s security.
The easiest way to install Tiller is with the helm init command. Run just like that, it will install a version of Tiller into the cluster. But the version it installs has permissions equivalent to root (if the cluster does not have RBAC enabled). To configure Tiller with higher security, you will need to add some additional command line flags to the helm init call, and you will need to create some roles and role bindings.
Update: Since the original version, the official documentation on RBAC was revised, and the link changed. This post has been updated accordingly.
1. Enable RBAC on Your Cluster, and Create Roles, SericeAccounts, and Role Bindings
Many Kubernetes clusters still do not have Role Based Access Control (RBAC) enabled. For security reasons, you should enable this. Each Kubernetes distribution has its own mechanism for enabling RBAC. Consult your distribution’s documentation.
I’ve spent most of my professional life helping organizations be more open to their stakeholders. I’m a partner in a consulting company in Chile, whose typical customer is a for-profit organization wishing to develop some kind of public works project (for example, an electricity generation station, a transmission line, a mine, a road, an airport, or something similar). Projects like these typically aim to fill a social need—but they’re often intended for locations where development and operation can have negative impacts (or, in economic terms, “externalities”).
Old school development theory, based on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, is willing to sacrifice local good for overall benefit to society. Recently, however, a number of factors (including improved communications and the growth of interest in rural tourism, as well as the non-essential “needs” that many of us hope to satisfy) have created a situation in which local interests are not at all willing to sacrifice any more of their immediate neighborhood to provide benefits to people who live and work far away. Today, we see a growing amount of well-coordinated and very visible resistance to this kind of development.
Malware and viruses on a Linux system? You weren’t operating under the illusion that using Linux meant you don’t have to worry about that, were you? Fake news!
We’ve pulled together this roundup of some of the best malware protection and antivirus programs to help keep your Linux box firmly in the safe zone.
Set up a wireless access point with a Raspberry Pi 3, Ubuntu Core, and snaps.
Router coverage gaps often have different causes, which repeaters and access points (APs) can remedy. A repeater usually connects to the router over WiFi and amplifies the signal into areas where the router alone is not sufficient, whereas an AP wired to the router by cable sets up a private WiFi network with its own network identifier (SSID). The AP therefore provides additional access to the local network.
A highly portable Raspberry Pi is ideal for setting up a small and cheap WiFi AP suitable for many applications. For example, you could stretch a network into the back garden or provide Internet to an awkwardly located conference room.
The easiest route is to use a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3), which already has a WiFi module. Previous models can be prepared for the new task with a dongle, available for just a few dollars. Even the Rasp Pi 3 could benefit from a WiFi stick, because the internal connections of the installed module do not deliver the performance of a good dongle.
I had this itching feeling that a better, cleaner approach to developing software had to exist. I had heard whispers about functional programming, and how it allows developers to write more concise and elegant code. I was unknowingly exposed to functional paradigms and patterns for the first time while working with React and Redux. They both incorporated some of the principles, and I liked them. I read about FP — to my initial dismay I saw its paradigms were based on abstract mathematical concepts and that it was very prevalent in academia. Being that my goal is to ship products as fast as possible, this seemed like a counterintuitive approach to what I was trying to achieve. After 4 years in engineering school, I was pretty set on the opinion that academia only tackled theoretical problems, and was unlikely to ever help me in my day-to-day of building things.
But FP kept haunting me. Elegant solutions and paradigms were sprinkled online in all my favorite open source projects, blog posts and tutorials. I put my skeptecism aside and started delving into FP.
