IBM announced Friday it is launching its own framework for running blockchain networks along with new services on the IBM Cloud designed to meet security and regulatory compliance.
Blockchain, best known as the technology behind bitcoin, is a distributed, encrypted database architecture that is considered immune from tampering. In a nutshell, a blockchain logs all transactions on a bitcoin network and stores them in blocks that update a balance and data such as payments, confirmations and orders.
At first blush, Conky is a system monitor that will display pertinent information on your desktop. When you peel past the top layer, you will see Conky is actually much more than that. Not only can Conky display information about your CPU, memory, swap, disk space, temperature, top, upload, download, system messages… it can display things like world time, calendars, email notifications, weather, battery status… the list goes on and on.
Conky works in conjunction with themes. A theme instructs Conky what to display and how to display it. If you look around the Internet (e.g., Deviant Art), you’ll find tons of Conky themes to display just about any bit of information you need with many variations on the look and feel.
I will show you how to install Conky and then how to make use of one of the many themes to configure Conky to suit your needs. I’ll be installing Conky on Ubuntu GNOME.
Installation
Because we’re working with a Ubuntu-based distribution, the installation of Conky couldn’t be easier. Here are the steps for installation:
Open up a terminal window ([Ctrl]+[Alt]+[t] does the trick nicely)
Issue the command sudo apt-get install conky-all
Type your sudo password and hit Enter
When prompted, accepted the installation by typing y
Allow the installation to complete
Figure 1: Out of the box Conky theme.
Conky relies on the .conkyrc file for configuration options. Out of the box, this file is not created. Because of this, what Conky does is read the/etc/conky/conky.configfile (when no~/.conkyrcfile is present). When you run Conky without a .conkyrc file in your home directory, a standard Conky theme appears (Figure 1).
Adding a Theme
Naturally, you’re not going to want to stick with that generic out-of-the-box theme. I will demonstrate by showing how to add a clock theme to Conky. This isn’t just any old clock theme, however. As a writer, I love words, and this clock theme created by a Deviant Art user, mowgli-writes, displays world time in text. Let’s install that and then configure it to meet our needs.
To install the qlocktwo-conky theme, you need to follow these instructions:
Download the qlocktwo-conky file (from Deviant Art) into your ~/Downloads folder
Open your file manager and navigate to ~/Downloads
Right-click on theqlocktwoconky_mowglimod zip file and select Extract Here
In the ~/Downloads folder, you should now see a file called qlocktwo, right-click that folder, select Rename, and rename it .conkyrc
If you cannot see the .conkyrc file, hit [Ctrl]+[h] to show hidden files
Right-click the .conkyrc file and select Move to…
Select your home folder as the destination for the .conkyrc file
If you’d rather handle the above via the command line, the steps would be (after you’ve downloaded the file to ~/Downloads):
Open a terminal window
Change to your Downloads directory with the command cd Downloads
Unzip the file with the commandunzip qlocktwoconky_mowglimod*.zip
Rename the qlocktwo file with the command mv qlocktwo .conkyrc
Move the .conkyrc file with the command mv .conkyrc ~/
With the .conkyrc file in place, run Conky with the command conky. Because I’m demonstrating on GNOME, you can hit the key combination [Alt]+[F2] and then enter conky in the run dialog. Conky will start up with the currently installed Theme (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Conky running with the Qlocktwo-Conky theme.
Configuring Conky
Let’s continue with our usage of the Clocktwo-Conky theme (for simplicity’s sake). Out of the box, that theme is pretty sweet, but maybe you want to, for example, move the theme to the right-hand side of your screen. With Conky, you cannot simply click and drag a theme where you want it. Instead, you have to configure the placement of the theme on your desktop. Fortunately, Conky includes some standard variables that allow you to make various and sundry configuration changes to a theme.
With placement, Conky uses the alignment variable with the following options:
Top left: tl
Top right: tr
Top middle:tm
Bottom left: bl
Bottom right: br
Bottom middle: bm
Middle left: ml
Middle middle: mm
Middle right: mr
If you want to get more refined with your theme positioning, you can use the following variables:
gap_x: Gap, in pixels, from the left or right side of the screen
gap_y: Gay, in pixels, from the bottom or top of the screen
So, if you want the Qlocktwo Conky theme to reside on the right-hand side of your screen, open up the .conkyrc file, located the alignment mm line and change it to alignment mr. Save and close the file and restart Conky to place the theme on the right-hand side of your screen (Figure 3).Figure 3: Our Conky theme, placed where we want it.
Get GUI
If you don’t much care for working from the command line, there is a GUI tool, called Conky Manager, that you can install and use. Here’s how to install this handy app:
Open up a terminal window
Add the necessary repository with the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teejee2008/ppa
Update apt with the command sudo apt-get update
Install Conky Manager by issuing the command sudo apt-get install conky-manager
Run Conky Manager with the command conky-manager. When the app opens, you’ll see a simple-to-use window (Figure 4) that allows you to easily import theme packs, customize themes, and more. When you install the Conky Manager app, it will install several predefined themes that you can select from.
Figure 4: The new background thanks to selecting a theme from Conky Manager.
If you’ve installed a theme, prior to installing Conky Manager, you’ll need to move the ~/.conkyrc file into the newly created ~/.conkyfolder. When you do this, Conky Manager will recognize the theme and allow you to load it and work with it (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Our Qlocktwo theme loaded into Conky Manager.
Once you select a theme, from within Conky Manager, you can then click the edit button and that theme’s configuration file will open up in your default text editor, so you can configure the file to suit your needs.
Conky Rocks
At this point, you’re ready to dive deeper into the waters of Conky. Do a search for Conky Themes, and you’ll find plenty to choose from. Play around with the various options, and you’ll soon have Conky rocking on your desktop, doing exactly what you need. Although some Conky configuration files can get a bit complex, with a little effort, you’ll soon be a master of Conky.
If you’ve never received a message like this from your cloud provider, consider yourself lucky, because you will eventually:
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
One or more of your Amazon EC2 instances is scheduled for maintenance on 2016–01–01 for 2 hours starting at 05:00 UTC. During this time, the following instances in the us-east-1 region will be unavailable and then rebooted:
i-abcd1234
Your instance will return to normal operations after maintenance is complete.
This is essentially saying the node in question will be completely useless for two hours. Worse, AWS will sometimes notify us that our machine will be retired completely. Or, worst of all, a node might encounter an unscheduled issue. Our team maintains an infrastructure of over 500 AWS EC2 nodes, so events like this are not irregular.
The project follows guidelines laid down by the Docker Remote API and uses the Docker Engine REST interface to execute commands. In other words, there’s no magic or unorthodox extension of Docker; it interfaces with the Docker Engine in precisely the same manner as the native client.
Emily Ratliff, Sr. Director of Infrastructure Security at The Linux Foundation, writes that the use of encryption over the Internet is growing. Fueled by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the extent of NSA and GCHQ content monitoring, encryption is now increasingly provided by the big tech companies as part of their standard product offerings. It’s effectiveness can be seen in the continuing demands by different governments for these same tech companies to provide government backdoors for that encryption. Encryption works: it safeguards privacy.
Against this background, the use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt network traffic is likely to grow dramatically. …
A10 Networks‘ Rene Paap, who expects 67% of all network traffic to be encrypted by the end of this year, thinks this will place an intolerable demand on existing firewalls – effectively reducing the performance of the average firewall by 81%.
Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) initiatives in the telecommunication industry require specific OpenStack functionalities enabled. Without entering into the details of the NFV specifications, the goal in OpenStack is to optimise network, memory and CPU performance on the running instances.
In this article we’ll see Single Root I/O Virtualisation (SR-IOV) and PCI-Passthrough, which are commonly required by some Virtual Network Functions (VNF) running as instances on top of OpenStack.
This tutorial shows how to prepare a Debian Jessie server (with Apache2, BIND, Dovecot) for the installation of ISPConfig 3.1. The web hosting control panel ISPConfig 3 allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.
In the third part of the Awk command series, we shall take a look at filtering text or strings based on specific patterns that a user can define.
Sometimes, when filtering text, you want to indicate certain lines from an input file or lines of strings based on a given condition or using a specific pattern that can be matched. Doing this with Awk is very easy, it is one of the great features of Awk that you will find helpful….
The OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects: An Update as of Brahma/Beryllium
By Dave Neary of Red Hat and SeniorTechnical Marketing Manager of OpenDaylight and OPNFV, Alan Sardella
In discussing our use cases, we’ve noticed that a key domain for OpenDaylight (ODL) is Cloud and NFV. ODL is closely tied to NFV and accordingly works very closely with the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a related project with the Linux Foundation that concentrates on providing a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services.
OpenDaylight an important upstream community and key component of the OPNFV platform.
The OPNFV community is working on establishing focused community groups to describe community engagement practices, identify community leaders, and manage contributions toward those communities.
With regard to OPNFV integration, the OPNFV project creates blueprints for needed OpenDaylight functions, acts in conjunction with community members from OpenDaylight which transitions upstream for community review and discussion. One key example of this is that
OPNFV helps ODL refine and develop features (and fix bugs) as an SDN controller for NFV.
The latest OPNFV release, Brahmaputra, includes the Beryllium release of ODL.
Multiple OPNFV projects, including Doctor, Promise, Multisite, Copper, HA, IPv6, Escalator, are have worked with or are planning blueprints addressing ODL capabilities. Additionally, the CPerf(controller performance) project has active members from both ODL and OPNFV.
In the recent Beryllium release, there were many enhancements focused on Cloud and NFV. We focused on coexistence between multiple controller instances and applications such as SFC and L2VPN. Other enhancements to cloud networking include Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR), which avoids a single point of failure by including Layer 3 routing information on each node. We also added clustering support for an end-to-end, highly available SDN controller for OpenStack.
Relevant applications include traffic engineering, cloud network virtualization, L2/L3 VPNs with DC interconnectivity, SFC, network QoS, monitoring and analytics. Larger use cases include virtual CPE.
In the upcoming Boron release, we will be continue to enhance our coexistence support. We will also be enabling Layer 2 gateways with hardware-based VXLAN tunnel endpoints (HW-VTEP) for Layer 2 segment bridging in either the physical or virtual domains–this will permit end to end Layer 2 VPNs. Other key areas of focus will be on policy and on vector packet processing (VPP) and honeycomb enablement, enabling high performance flow management.
And the future is bright–as OpenDaylight continues to capture the imagination of a growing user base, the next step will be to see increased adoption for production workloads.
A note about authors:
Dave Neary works on SDN and NFV community strategy as a member of Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. He is an active participant in OPNFV, a project whose goal is to promote NFV as a core use-case to upstream projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight. He is also an active community participant in the OpenDaylight project.
Alan Sardella runs product and technical marketing for the OpenDaylight and OPNFV projects.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) was founded in 2001. This non-profit organization seeks to educate and inform developers on secure development practices, and provides developers with tools to create web applications securely. One of their flagship projects is the Top 10 list of web application security flaws. The goal of the Top 10 list is to raise awareness about problems that exist with vulnerabilities in web applications and to educate developers about how to find and avoid the vulnerabilities.
The OWASP Top 10 list is extremely well known; it is impossible to walk through the show floor at a security conference without encountering at least some mention of the top 10 list. The Top 10 list is cited several times by the PCI Security Standards Council Penetration Testing Guidance and has been used as an acceptance test criteria for contract fulfillment for public procurement.
