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Submission + - Avoid Holiday Camera-geddon: How to Keep Holiday Family Photos from Bringing Dow

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: A hidden danger for your datacenter lays lurking during the holiday season – and it’s ready to bring your servers to their knees, write Yadin Porter de León and Tony Piscopo. Employees take a smartphone to family gatherings to capture the smiles of their family members. When the employees return to the office, those photos are synced and shared across your network.

And, come the first working day of the new year, they’ll all be backing up at once!

If you work in a large company with the backup solutions residing in the datacenter, you likely have experienced this phenomenon. It’s been described by some as “the worst day of the year for their infrastructure load.”

You know the painful process of trying to get the services up-and-running again after it crashes. You may find yourself struggling as the servers continue to crash as all those endpoints relentlessly try to shove photos of pets in Santa hats and bad Christmas sweaters through your precious network pipes and clog up the storage pools.

The authors have four suggestions for how sysadmins can avoid or minimize the damage, no matter what kind of backup system you use.

Submission + - Gartner: Mobility management is a mess.

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: What’s the future of endpoint management? According to a Gartner research director: It’s a mess.

Gartner Research Director Rob Smith, speaking in Barcelona this week at the Gartner Symposium, addressed business challenges, particularly in bigger businesses:

IT has to change its basic perspective: All endpoints are untrusted. That’s a big statement and the automatic response might be, “Not if I lock it down!” But, according to Smith, the days of saying no to users is dead. The new reality is that if you say no, users will go around you.

It might not be hopeless, though:

How do we possibly protect our data when things change so fast? Smith thinks the answer is in what he calls his “Lord of the Rings” philosophy: one system to rule them all, or what Gartner refers to as Unified Endpoint Management (UEM). UEM is a consistent, single approach to managing all aspects of endpoint data protection. It encompasses a whole range of features (identity management, app management, data access, etc.) and requires that vendors work together, ensuring their separate services and/or apps talk to each other and work together without necessitating IT involvement.

This sounds like utopia. The good news? According to Smith, vendors have already started to do it. The bad news? IT departments, with their legacy Windows XP and Windows 7 deployments, aren’t ready to support it.

Do you think this all is on the mark? Or are there ways to support users that don't drive both IT and end-users crazy?

Submission + - Big Bang Theory's Biggest Lesson: Let Nerds Be Nerds 1

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Sometimes we can learn great lessons from fictional characters. This article professes to explain what Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Raj from the “Big Bang Theory” can teach managers about tapping into nerd talent. For example: "Improvement is a way of life. It’s often difficult for managers to ensure the quality of work remains high for every member of a team, but they never have to worry where nerds are concerned. The brains of geeks are wired to solve problems."

Submission + - What should you back up? More important: What SHOULDN'T you?

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Whatever software you choose for backing up files, you need to be organized. Do you really need myriad copies of the Trash folder or *.bak files, which consume backup time, bandwidth, and storage? Probably not. Inclusions versus Exclusions: Choosing the Best Method for Backup and Data Collection has useful guidelines for designing a sensible business backup strategy, in order to ensure you keep all the right data securely but not the junk.

Submission + - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6's Big New Feature is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (serverwatch.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Red Hat is out today with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 (RHEL), providing its users with a long list of incremental updates. While many of those updates are new to RHEL 6, they are not new to RHEL 7, the newer version of Red Hat's flagship enterprise Linux product. High-availability, security and peformance features from RHEL 7 now land in RHEL 6.6. Going a step further, Red Hat is now providing a RHEL 6 Docker Image, so RHEL 7 users can run RHEL 6 applications on RHEL 7 without any changes.

As to why RHEL 6 applications cannot just simply run natively on RHEL 7, Bhavna Sarathy, technology product manager in the Platform Business Unit at Red Hat explained explained that applications that were built and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 have to be rebuilt and re-certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, as the software stack between the two major releases is vastly different.

Submission + - Protecting Corporate Data...When an Employee Leaves 3

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: When someone leaves the company, the HR department is quick to grab the employee's laptop. But what about the data on other equipment? How can the organization know what's on her mobile devices? Does anyone know to which websites and cloud-based software the employee has access? This article discusses how IT (working with HR) can help ensure the company's data doesn't walk out the front door.

Which raises the question of whether it's possible for IT to even know what external logins an employee has, and whether the effort to track all that is worth the time to do so. While everyone said, "Treat people right and they won't want to do anything malicious with the company data," isn't the implication that it only takes one bad experience...?

Submission + - The frustrations of supporting users in remote offices, and what to do about 'em

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: You're not alone in your struggle against people who think a shell is something you hold to your ear," writes Carol Pinchefsky. "Other techies are out there supporting users in remote offices, fighting the good fight against computer- and user-related mishaps – or at least tolerating user frustration with a modicum of grace."

You can laugh at their pain — and she gives you plenty of opportunity to do so, in The Joys of Remote Tech Support (for Low Values of Joy). Like the tech support person whose systems in Brazil went down — during Carnival:

...We had to wait more than a week for the locals to sober up enough to reconnect the line.

In the end, I had to walk a tech (who did not know the system) through the process step by step via an interpreter. Of course, the interpreter was not technical. So it was kind of like explaining to your mom to tell your grandfather (who is hard of hearing) how to do something while she is on the phone and he is across the room from her.

And maybe you can even learn from their advice.

Submission + - Understanding Self-Healing Storage

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: The primary objective of data storage systems is to persist data permanently (or at least until specifically destroyed). But hardware is imperfect, disks fail, servers crash, which leads to inconsistencies in the file-system metadata. The traditional ways to deal with errors require the system to go offline – not a pleasant scenario. Here's one way to get around the problems.

Submission + - Object Storage versus Block Storage: Understanding the Technology Differences 2

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Even very technical people scratch their heads over the business value of object storage. In other words, what problems does it solve? What are its drawbacks and limitations? Which types of applications run better, what breaks, and what do you need to completely redesign to take advantage of the storage technology?

Ultimately every IT admin wants to know if object storage is a good fit for certain workloads. This article defines object storage, compares it to alternatives, and gives an overview of where it can make a performance difference for enterprise computing.

Submission + - Spain's Link Tax Taxes My Patience (computerworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Spain's new tax on linking to Spanish newspaper articles is ill defined and short sighted and ends up protecting a dying industry, while undermining a vibrant one. In another case of disrupted industries turning to lawmakers to solve their problems, this one makes no sense at all, especially given the state of the Spanish economy and the fact that it comes 15 years too late to even matter.

Submission + - The Latest Microsoft Memo: Dymstified (techtarget.com)

Submitted by heusserm
heusserm writes: In his July 13 memo to the troops Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella defines the "Core" of Microsoft as Cloud-First and Mobile-First. Using bold phrases like "I'm proud of what we collectively achieved even as we drove significant changes in our business and organization. It's energizing to feel the momentum and enthusiasm building.", (did I say bold? I meant bland), Nadella used a lot of words to say ... not much. Here's my analysis of a few things he said that did have some depth and meaning ... maybe.

Submission + - Business Lessons from Mario and Donkey Kong

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: As of July 9, it’s been 23 years since Mario and the bellicose King Kong clone appeared in gaming arcades and then spread to our home consoles like kudzu. Since Donkey Kong (the first Mario game) appeared, writes Carol Pinschefsky, we’ve go-carted, golfed, and liberated oppressed princesses in over 250 games. You know what else we did when were saving a damsel in distress from a large, barrel-tossing ape? We learned some honest-to-goodness business lessons.

Yes, it's silly and funny. And then you think, "Wait. That's good advice!"

Submission + - What (not) to wear on an IT job interview: 6 real-life examples

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: For a lot of slashdot denizens, the fashion choice for a job interview is, "What's clean?"

But still: Some of us give more thought to it than that. We know that how we dress conveys something, even if it's "proof that I'm a techie who is above such things." And — among women more than men, I think — some of us care about that image. And want to look pretty. (I do.)

So, in this article, with the help of a few brave volunteers, we examine how that dress or suit really comes across to the people who might ask, "When can you start?" You see six real-world people in real-world outfits, and hear what our esteemed judges think is the best choice for that IT job interview. Plus, you can vote on the outfits you think are best for each individual, and compare your opinion to those of the fashionistas and hiring managers. It's IT meets career meets fashion police – practical and, I hope, also fun.

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