Blogrotate #2: The Weekly Roundup of News for System Administrators

Welcome to week 2 of Blogrotate. It was a short week due to Thanksgiving (Canada) and Columbus Day (US), but the world of IT is always buzzing. So as they say at the race track, pitter-patter, let’s get at ‘er.

Internet

Have you ever wondered how much trouble can be caused by a single typo? This week a single typo in a script to update all zone files for the .se (sweden) TLD (top level domain), dropping the entire .se domain off the internet for almost 2 hours. Royal Pingdom has the full story in “Sweden’s Internet broken by DNS mistake”. This is why we need tight controls on change management. It’s called testing guys. Sweden. Give me a call.

Facebook now has 30,000 servers and produces 25TB (that’s tera-byte kids) of log data per day. The Data Center Knowledge site has some interesting details in “Facebook now has 3000 Servers”.

Cloud

Lot’s of buzz this week about T-Mobile’s service disruption and subsequent loss of users data. Discussion over whether the problem was a cloud failure or not was one hot topic. Data Center Knowledge discussed it here in “The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability”. Ars Technica had some more on the cloud debate with “T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger data loss is bad for the cloud”. It looks like most or all users will have lost their data due to the lack of backups, see “Some Sidekick Users May Recover Data” for more. I am sure there will be more fallout from this one.

Enterprise Storage Forum has an interesting evaluation of the limitations of cloud computing for corporations, specifically due to bandwidth limitations and hardware error rates. See Henry Newman’s article titled “Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises”.

Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica has an interesting read about fear mongers who say our beloved intertubes are going to die in “The Internet is about to die. Literally die!”.

Operating Systems

IT Wire claims “Microsoft teams up with Family Guy to sell Windows 7”. That’s just sad. If they are going to glorify Windows then I really can’t see how they can funny it up. I am guessing Seth will get to pan Microsoft just to spread word that Windows 7 is coming.

VMWare has announced that their new “VMware Fusion will support Windows 7 in more Mac-like way” says IT Wire. This “Unity” feature looks a lot like VirtualBox’s “seamless” mode. Check out the You Tube video “Unity in VMware Fusion for Mac OS X” to see it in action.

Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation gave the keynote address at the Maemo Summit and said that he thinks Linux could be the dominant OS for mobile phones and devices. Ars Technica has more in “Will Linux be the dominant OS for consumer electronics?”.

And from the wicked cool idea department

An interesting study from McCormick University on using your PC’s existing hardware as a sort of sonar to detect when you are there. See “Research Group Uses Sonar for Computer Power Management”. They plan to use this as a method of detecting if you are close to your computer and to turn off your screen if you are not, then turn back on again when you return. The group is currently looking for guinea pigs testers to evaluate if there is any real world power savings. The link to the software is in the article. Hey, if my TV remote control can do it, why not a laptop?

That’s all we’ll have time for this week. Come back again next week for more Blogrotate and, as always, feel free to speak your mind or post your interesting stories in the comments.