The cloud has become the new computing cluster. A combination of services that were previously only prevalent in customized clustered configurations — including high availability, virtual storage management and near-term server failover — are now available in the virtual world of the cloud.
You can read my article in TechTarget’s SearchCloudComputing this week here.
Behold: this August will be the 30th anniversary of the first IBM PC. That humble box changed our world. No, IBM wasn’t the first PC maker, but back then the company revolutionized our industry. It created an entire ecosystem of partners and suppliers, and prompted development of desktop applications such as Lotus 1-2-3.
Looking back on the past 30 years, I came up with a dozen steps forward that could be called the greatest innovations of technology. It is, admittedly, very idiosyncratic, and colored by what we use today. You can read the article published today at Datamation.com.
If you want to test a new piece of software, most of the time you reimage your PC or install a new OS from scratch to make sure you start with a clean copy. But now CloudShare ProPlus makes testing easier and cheaper. You can read my review published this week in Computerworld here.
Do you need to take credit card payments on the go for your business? Do you operate a food truck, maybe, or sell your wares from a booth at trade shows or craft fairs? There are now several different hardware add-ons that can turn your iPhone into a credit card processor.
It’s becoming easier to run an economical and efficient data center by virtualizing your server population and upgrading your server fleet with more energy-efficient hardware. But be sure to keep these strategies in mind.
You can read the entire story in this month’s issue of Baseline here.
Choosing protection for a virtual infrastructure is a lot like buying an antivirus product for the Mac OS: most people would wonder why you bothered. Nonetheless, as more IT shops migrate their servers to virtual machines and cloud-based environments, it is only a matter of time before protecting these resources becomes considerably more important.
You can read the full story, published this week in TechTarget’s SearchCloudComputing.com site, here.
Amazon this week announced the availability of its Cloud Drive to consumers; the global retailer will give away 5 GB of storage to anyone who has an Amazon account. How does this compare with existing offerings from Google and Microsoft? The short answer is: not very well.
You can read the article in ITworld here.
If you have the kind of business that requires getting paid when on the go, you have probably heard that your iPhone can be used for this purpose. If you have a mobile food truck, or set up a booth at a tradeshow, or need to take credit cards for your business, there are now several different hardware add-ons that can scan credit cards, and several additional apps that can work by typing in the credit card number manually.
In the olden times (say last year), retailers had to go through a lengthy process to accept credit cards and often had to purchase a card reader for $150 or more that could only attach to a land phone line. Those days are officially over, and with these iPhone readers, you can get paid wherever and whenever you might be.
All of these apps are still somewhat rough around the edges. There are usually two different fee structures: one in which the card is physically present and is swiped through the reader, and a higher set of fees charged if it isn’t (this is because of credit card policies that carry a greater risk of fraud for cards not present).
Before the portable readers were invented, there were a number of iPhone apps that offered payment processing. The problem with these apps is that because they didn’t have any way to physically swipe the card, they had to charge you the higher transaction fees.
So what is involved with each reader? First, you sign up online with a Web form (or in some cases within the iPhone app itself) to create your merchant account, the type of account that banks require for anyone to accept credit card payments. Part of this process is to identify yourself and authorize your checking account that will collect your deposits. Once your account is setup, you can begin accepting payments with your iPhone.
All of these apps have the ability to email receipts to your purchasers as well as to yourself, and have Web-based management dashboards that show you the status of your purchases and collections. These are nice features and some users of the typical point-of-sale credit card machine might be interested in switching to the iPhone readers too.
If you already have a merchant account with your bank, you still need to setup a new one on some of the readers because each device is tied to a particular payment processor. In the past, merchant accounts took lots of time and effort to setup and had monthly account fees even if you never charged a single credit card on them. That is all changing now with these devices. In each case it was a matter of hours between getting started and being able to accept payments.
All of these solutions are limited to US account holders, and in some cases will only authorize cards issued to US-based addresses too. For a review in ITworld, I looked at three hardware credit card readers, some of which are free:
Some of the readers are for v3 or v4 of the iPhone only because of they way the fit around the phone’s data connector, while others like Roam and Square fit into the phone’s headphone jack and can support a wider variety of phones. I liked the simplicity of the Square setup and use, but the additional features of the Mophie reader might be useful. You can see the results of my tests here.
As enterprises move toward virtualizing more of their servers and data center infrastructure, the security technologies that are plentiful and common-place in the physical world become few and far between. In this review for Network World this week, I look at five common VM security tools that offer a range of protective features. Included in the review are:
The recent unfortunate doings in Libya have made an example of how the Internet works around problem areas. And it reminded me that if you are going to put your content in the hands of a dictator, it is nice to know whom you are dealing with.
Let me explain. Many of us, including myself, use the URL shortening service Bit.ly, for promoting our content on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places. Aside from conserving on character counts, it has a nice dashboard that shows you how many people open that link and other tracking data.
But the Bit.ly domain uses the Libyan country code .LY. So if some crazies decide to remove Libya from the Internet, does that mean that all your shortened links will die? Not necessarily.
To understand the reason why you need to know more about the Internet domain name system and how it is structured. While I don’t want to get into a tutorial here, an easy way to figure out where Libyan domains are cared for is to look here.
This is the international registry by IANA that keeps track of these sorts of things. Who made them in charge? (Jon Postel originally but getting into that is another story.) You can see by looking at this page that there are five different “name servers” where Libyan domains are kept. This doesn’t mean that these five places host any content – in fact, I am sure that they host no Libyan content whatsoever. It just means that when you type in a .LY URL, these five places keep the master directory of where those domains actually live.
If you want to see the actual physical locations where these directory servers are connected to the Internet, bring up the following site and cut and paste the IP addresses.
You’ll see that there are two servers in Oregon of all places, and another one in Holland. This means that if you want to have your content elsewhere – outside of the country that the two-letter code domain indicates such as Bit.ly — chances are good that you will still get connectivity.
Now try to track down the servers for Bahrain (country code BH) and you will see all four of them are on the same subnet 193.188.97.x that is inside the country and controlled by the national telecom authority. That means if you have a .BH site, you might have more trouble getting connected if the country pulled the plug.
I am sure there is a story why the University of Oregon is a name server for Libya (and I am sure that someone seeing this will post a reason why), this is just one of many such instances where seemingly random places and people house servers in the greater good of the overall Internet. Poking around the IANA name directory I found psg.com as the name server for a few country domains.
What this little exercise brings up is how dependent we are on the kindness of others when it comes to the Internet. In the case of using Bit.ly, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or even Twitter to promote our content or provide links to our own servers, we think we know whom we are dealing with. But we still trust these businesses to act responsively and stay in business. Look at how many times Twitter’s Fail Whale appears, and there have been plenty of outages with other sites.
I admit that I haven’t given this a lot of thought. For the past several years, I have owned the domain Webinformant.tv to host my screencast video reviews. Until this week, I never even looked at where the Tuvalu country code .TV domain names were being served – turns out I don’t have to worry, Verisign has it under control from several locations around the world. And while I think they aren’t plotting to takeover the .TV namespace, or the many other domain names that they provide service from, it is an interesting piece of information to know.
Many of the Internet Irregulars like psg.com operate outside of any real recognition for their efforts – in some cases it is just a couple of guys that have been involved early on in the Internet infrastructure and just through inertia still are involved.
I remember many years when I got to actually visit the location for one of the lettered root domain servers in Silicon Valley. My friend had to replace one of his servers that was co-located there – this was back before the concept even was given a name. It was in some nondescript warehouse and the level of security wasn’t even near Defcon status. Now these servers have multiple backups and locations, and indeed most of them are located outside of the US to make the Internet naming system more resilient.
So, think about this the next time you are tempted to purchase an oddball domain name, or rely on a service to link to your content. And hopefully we’ll see some relief and a better situation to what is happening in Libya too.