Good evening and welcome to the late night edition of Blogrotate. It’s been hectic around here but I did not want to skip a week so I am burning the midnight oil. There was a lot of action in the world of IT this week, here’s a few tidbits we took notice of.
Operating Systems
The Var Guy is reporting that Novell has rejected a bid by Elliott Associates to take over the company for a reported 1.8 billion dollars. Novell Rejects Takeover Bid… But Welcomes Other Bidders has the full story with some links to the back story as well.
The arguments are done and the deliberation begins in SCO vs Novell. The world yawns in anticipation. No Verdict Today, the Final Day, in SCO v. Novell – Deliberations Begin Again Tuesday – Updated at GrokLaw has the details. “Fine lawyering” indeed.
Internet
Tom Krazit at C-Net news reports that DNS registrar GoDaddy may be following in Google’s footsteps, steps that lead out of China. More details and source material links are in GoDaddy to stop registering domains in China
Security
The CanSecWest conference started this week in Vancouver BC, Canada. With it came the 4th annual Pwn2Own contest wherein hackers ply their exploits against various targets. This years target was web browsers. The results so far? See Peter Bright‘s article IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, iPhone fall on day 1 of Pwn2Own. Ok so the title ruined any suspense I may have built, but it’s still worth reading.
If you are not part of the 1337 gaming crowd you’ve probably never pwn’d anything any may not know what it means. See Wikipedias definition of pwn. After that you can set up a lan party and get fragged because you’re a n00b. Be careful not to camp or backpack, and watch out for headshots.
If you are a user of Cisco IOS on your devices, you need to check out the Summary of Cisco IOS Software Bundled Advisories, March 24, 2010. The patches fix security issues with IPSec, NAT, SIP, H.323 and much much more.
Virtualization
Mark Murphy, Global Alliances Director for Canonical, wrote on his blog that Dell announces support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. According to the blog the Canonical cloud team has been working for 6 months with Dell’s DCS team to “test and validate the integration of the cloud stack on their new PowerEdge-C series [servers]”, and will be offering a series of optimized ‘blueprint’ configurations for the PowerEdge-C servers.
Former MySQL CEO and Sun Sr. VP Marten Mickos will be the new CEO of Eucalyptus, the company behind the Ubuntu Cloud. See Former MySQL CEO to become Eucalyptus Systems CEO at The H Online for more of the story and links to the official press release. Matthew Weinberger at The Var Guy has some more analysis on this subject in “Can Marten Mickos Build Another $100 Million Company?”.
Datacenter
A couple of data center outages this week.
Wikipedia, linked heavily above, suffered an outage to their European data center this week due to overheating. Mark Bergsma from Wikimedia, the company that runs Wikipedia, posted on their tech blog that some of their servers powered down to protect themselves from a worse fate. Services had to be relocated to the Florida cluster causing an outage of at least 1 hour, more for some sites that don’t honour DNS TTL (time to live) properly. You can read more in Mark’s technical blog, called Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS). There is also more at Data Center Knowledge, see Wikipedia’s Data Center Overheats.
The very next day, YouTube suffered a 2 hour outage. I thought it was rather funny because they informed users of the outage via their Twitter feed. Judging by that feed there were more issues yesterday and again today. Is it just me or is this the oddest way to communicate site outages ever? I’d love to hear your opinions.
Eco-IT
The Register is reporting that the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay is planning to save cash by switching all it’s fonts to Century Gothic. Apparently Century Gothic uses up to 30% less ink when printed, saving their organization money. See Switch to Century Gothic to save the planet for the story and links to source materials. Gotta love the tag lines at el Reg. “Arial will doom us all, says American IT director”. Indeed.
That’ll have to do it for this week. I’m off to Tosche station to buy some power converters. As always, comments are welcome.
Hey! CNN just facebooked that their mail server is down! :)
No comments