If you’re in data center or cloud IT circles, you’ve been hearing about containers in general and Docker in particular non-stop for a few years now. With the release of Docker 1.0in June 2014, the buzz became a roar.
Three years later, Docker is bigger than ever. Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti thinks only 10 percent of enterprises currently use containers in production now, but up to a third are testing them. 451 Research agrees. By 451’s count, container technologies, most of it Docker, generated $762 million in revenue in 2016. In 2020, 451 forecasts revenue will reach $2.7 billion, for a 40 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
So why does everyone love containers and Docker? James Bottomley, fomerly Parallels‘ CTO of server virtualization and a leading Linux kernel developer, explained VM hypervisors, such as Hyper-V, KVM, and Xen, all are “based on emulating virtual hardware. That means they’re fat in terms of system requirements.”
If you either work on a Linux desktop, or administer a Linux server, there might be times when frustration sets in over networking issues. Although Linux has made significant advances over the years, there are still instances where the standard troubleshooting or optimizations won’t work. To that end, you need to have some tricks and tips up your sleeve to make your life easier.
As an update to my original 10 quick tips to make Linux networking easier, I happen to have a few different tricks that I wanted to share with you. Hopefully one or more of these will assist you in either configuring, optimizing, or troubleshooting you Linux network woes.
While the original idea behind open-source software was to make licenses easier to share, it quickly developed into a new way of teaching individuals and organizations how to collaborate, forming common communities. Today, most innovation that occurs is happening via open-source communities.
“Now, [open source] is permeating almost every human endeavor to solve new challenges,” said Tim Yeaton, executive vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat Inc.
In almost every field — including healthcare, education and agriculture — open source has moved from a basic collaboration mechanism to build better software to the front of innovation for technology, Yeaton stated.
At the moment everyone seems to be so concerned with recruiting DevOps Engineers but I feel the process of on-boarding them is still very hit and miss especially in busy organisations.
Making it easy to get work done from day one
Reduce the time spent learning the peculiarities of certain environments rather than improving or iterating them,
Here are some easy tips on how to make your environment easy to onboard:
UML (Unified Modeling Language)6 is the de facto standard for representing object-oriented designs. It does a fine job of recording designs, but it has a severe problem: its diagrams don’t convey what humans need to know, making them hard to understand. This is why most software developers use UML only when forced to.1
For example, the UML diagrams in figures 1 and 2 portray the embedded software in a fax machine. While these diagrams are attractive, they don’t even tell you which objects control which others. Which object is the topmost controller over this fax machine? You don’t know. Which object(s) control the Modem object? You don’t know.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced his intention to gut net neutrality. His goal is clear: to overturn the 2015 order and create an Internet that’s more centralized. The FCC will vote to move his proposal forward on May 18 — just 10 days from today.
Net neutrality is about more than packets and data — it’s about upholding free speech, competition, innovation and user choice. To be clear:
Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.”
Net neutrality is fundamental to competition. Without net neutrality, big Internet service providers can choose which services and content load quickly, and which move at a glacial pace. That means the big guys can afford to buy their way in, while the little guys are muscled out.
This week in open source and Linux news, EdgeX Foundry is picking up attention among “cloud players,” recently published study finds many security issues in OSS & more! Keep reading, stay in the know.
1) Cloud players are getting serious about Edge Computing and efforts like EdgeX Foundry are a “step in the right direction.”
3) New research comparing acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an OSS community finds women’s contributions accepted more often than men’s — except when gender is identifiable.
Chance are, you have a database or two, running on one or more Linux systems, that has become crucial to your business or job. If you happen to be a Linux administrator, the likelihood of those databases being of the MySQL sort is pretty high. With such a priority placed on information, what are you doing to ensure those databases are backed up? You could be running bare metal backups (which is always smart). But what if you need to have a separate, automated backup of your databases? If that sounds like your situation, you only need turn to Backupninja.
Backupninja is a very handy tool that allows for coordinated system backups by simply adding simple configuration files into the /etc/backup.d/ directory. Backupninja can work with:
MySQL
maildir
Makecd
PostgreSQL
rdiff
rsync
I want to demonstrate to you how easy it is to install Backupninja and configure an automated MySQL database backup. I’ll be demonstrating this process on a Ubuntu 16.04 Server platform, but know that the software can be installed from source or from Git. It should be noted that Backupninja has not been updated for some time now; however, the tool works exactly as expected (even on the latest releases of your favorite distribution).
With that said, let’s get Backupninja up and running on Ubuntu.
Installation
The installation of Backupninja, on Ubuntu (and other Debian-based distributions), is very simple. Open up a terminal window and issue the following commands:
You could also run sudo apt-get upgradebefore running the installation command. I tend to like upgrading a system before installing. However, if your machine is a production server, and you tend to schedule upgrades, hold off on that command. The installation command for Backupninja will install a few dependencies, including:
bsd-mailx
dialog
liblockfile-bin
liblockfile1
postfix
Allow those dependencies; otherwise, the installation will fail. During the installation you will be required to select the mail server configuration type. This is for the delivery of Backupninja reports. If you don’t want this server to function as an SMTP server, select either No configuration or Local only, when prompted (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The configuration of Postfix during installation.
With the software installed, you’re ready to configure.
Configuring Backupninja
Remember, earlier, when I mentioned all you had to do was drop a configuration file into the/etc/backup.d directory? That seems to imply you would have to manually create that configuration file. You don’t. Backupninja includes a very handy setup wizard that will walk you through the configuration of your automated backup.
To start the Backupninja wizard, issue the command sudo ninjahelper. The wizard is an ncurses tool that will ask you a few simple questions. The first question (Figure 2), is straightforward; select new and tab down to OK. Hit Enter on your keyboard and you’re ready to configure your backup.
Figure 2: Creating a new backup action.
Since we’re going to be backing up MySQL database(s), select mysql in the next window (Figure 3), tab down to OK, and hit Enter on your keyboard.
Figure 3: Select mysql to backup your databases.
In the next window, enter the directory that will store the backups. By default, these will be in /var/backups/mysql. You can place these backups anywhere on your system (even an externally attached drive). Type the full path to house the backups, tab down to OK, and hit Enter on your keyboard.
Now you have to decide if you want to backup all of your databases or choose individual databases. This is important. If you have multiple large databases, your best bet is to create backup jobs for individual databases. If your databases aren’t all that large (or you only have one database to backup), select Yes and hit Enter on your keyboard. If you choose to backup individual databases, you will have to enter the names of each database to be backed up in the next screen (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Backing up individual databases.
Once you’ve typed out all the names of the databases to be backed up, tab down to OK and hit Enter on your keyboard.
The next window requires you to select a MySQL authentication method (Figure 5). The simplest method is password. Select that, tab down to OK, and hit Enter on your keyboard.
Figure 5: Selecting an authentication method for your database backup.
In the resulting window, enter your MySQL admin password, tab down to OK, and hit Enter. You will have to verify the password in the same manner.
Now you can select one of three options for your backup:
sqldump – Create the backup using mysqldump
hotcopy – Create the backup using mysqlhotcopy
compress – Compress the backup files
I would suggest enabling both sqldump and compress (especially if you’re databases are large). Select those two options by using the cursor keys to highlight the option and tapping the spacebar to enable. Tab down to OK and hit Enter on your keyboard.
Finally, you must select an action for the backup. By default, backupninja will assign a number to the backup you are creating (lowest executed first). If you already have a backup in place, it will select the next number (e.g., 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.) and apply it to the backup. Select the default (Figure 6), tab down to OK, and hit Enter on your keyboard (this action serves to save your backup).
Figure 6: Saving your backup.
Your backup is saved and will begin running.
In the next window, you can opt to return to the main menu or view/edit/run/test/disable the configuration of the backup you just created. To make sure the backup you created is good to go, select either test or run (Figure 7) and await the results.
Figure 7: Your backup is ready to run or test.
Quick and easy database backups
You’d be hard pressed to find an easier way to setup an automated database backup than with Backupninja. Yes, you could always script a more flexible backup; but if you don’t want to bother with manually creating a Bash script/cron job to handle this task, Backupninja is an outstanding alternative.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Ours is a world enamored with the possibilities unlocked by technological advances. And if we ever update our organizational thinking to account for those advances, we might actually follow through on those possibilities.
That issue is at the forefront of Joe Beda’s mind these days. Beda is the co-founder of Heptio, a company that makes tools for developers interested in bringing containers into their development environment. He’s worked at large companies (he helped create Kubernetes and Google Cloud Engine at the search giant) and small (Heptio is up for Startup of the Year at Thursday’s GeekWire Awards), and understands why so many companies struggle with the shift to cloud computing.
Perpetrators are shifting to more specific targets. This means companies must strengthen their defenses, and these strategies can help.
Ransomware can be a highly lucrative system for extracting money from a customer. Victims are faced with an unpleasant choice: either pay the ransom or lose access to the encrypted files forever. Until now, ransomware has appeared to be opportunistic and driven through random phishing campaigns. These campaigns often, but not always, rely on large numbers of emails that are harvested without a singular focus on a company or individual.
As ransomware perpetrators continue to hone their skills, we’re seeing a shift to more specific targets.
