Intro to the Linux command line

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February 3, 2020

If you’re new to Linux or have simply never bothered to explore the command line, you may not understand why so many Linux enthusiasts get excited typing commands when they’re sitting at a comfortable desktop with plenty of tools and apps available to them. In this post, we’ll take a quick dive to explore the wonders of the command line and see if maybe we can get you hooked.

First, to use the command line, you have to open up a command tool (also referred to as a “command prompt”). How to do this will depend on which version of Linux you’re running. On RedHat, for example, you might see an Activities tab at the top of your screen which will open a list of options and a small window for entering a command (like “cmd” which will open the window for you).

[Source: Network World]

IBM’s big bet on cloud computing, AI and open source needs to pay off soon

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 3, 2020

And so, after eight years spent leading one of the world’s oldest and most famous technology businesses, IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty will step down in April. Stepping up to the CEO role is Arvind Krishna, who currently serves as the senior VP for the company’s cloud and cognitive software unit.

When the news came out on Thursday, IBM’s shares jumped as much as 5%. Fingers can easily be pointed at Rometty’s mixed legacy: during her tenure, the company’s stock price dropped over 25% and – while the company has been keen to trumpet its artificial intelligence work (in the form of IBM Watson), and its reinvention as a cloud company (thanks to Red Hat) – there is still plenty of work to do if IBM is to ever approach its former glories.

[Source: ZDNet]

CERN dumps Facebook Workplace for open source

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 3, 2020

In what appears to be part of its ongoing campaign to “take back control” of its computing activities, CERN, the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has announced that it is dumping Facebook Workplace and replacing it with open source alternatives. This followed its announcement last year that it was moving away from Microsoft commercial software to open source as part of its ambitious Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt).

[Source: ITWeb]

When Open Source Software Costs Cities More

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

Over the past decade, I have served in various roles to deliver software for public agencies under government-funded contracts at MIT, UC Berkeley, and at transportation technology companies (the majority of that time as an academic). As transportation continues to rapidly change, and cities become increasingly reliant on software and data solutions that are hard to keep up with, I have been surprised by some common technical misconceptions that result in costly systems that are unable to adapt over time.

Several years ago, I noticed that many in the transportation space often used the terms “open standards” and “open source software” interchangeably, when they are actually quite different concepts. Open standards that are developed with a clear and transparent process are essential for ensuring flexibility and adaptability, and are almost always undeniably “good”. Whereas open source software, especially in the context of the public sector, has various pros, cons, and sometimes unexpected challenges.

[Source: Forbes]

Facebook open-sources Polygames- a new framework to train AI bots

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

Polygames is a new open source AI research framework for training agents to master strategy games through self-play, rather than by studying extensive examples of successful gameplay. Because it is more flexible and has more features than previous frameworks, Polygames can help researchers with advancing and benchmarking a broad range of zero learning (ZL) techniques that don’t require training data sets.

Polygames’ architecture makes it compatible with more kinds of games — including Breakthrough, Hex, Havannah, Minishogi, Connect6, Minesweeper, Mastermind, EinStein würfelt nicht!, Nogo, and Othello — than previous systems, such as AlphaZero and ELF OpenGo. In addition to building and evaluating ZL methods across a variety of games, Polygames allows researchers to study transfer learning, meaning the applicability of a model trained on one game to succeed at others. Polygames provides a library of included games, as well as a single-file API to implement your own game.

[Source: Analytics India Magazine]

Free Software Foundation Endorses First Product Of 2020: A $59~79 USD 802.11n WiFi Card

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

We’ve seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation’s “Respect Your Freedom” endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing — and their first endorsement of 2020 — is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter.

The Free Software Foundation announced today that the Libiquity Wi-Fri ND2H has been FSF-certified for respecting user freedoms. This WiFi card is the LiteOn WN6503AH that is then re-branded by Libiquity for their freedom-respecting products.

[Source: Phoronix]

6 Best Open Source Video Editor In 2020

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

When YouTube and other similar platforms are proliferating then need of the best video editor software is at its zenith and if we get something in free and opensource to edit our videos than it would be ‘icing on the cake’. Now, we are in 2020 and already the Open-source software has gained a good reputation in the IT sector. It is because of the source code which is available for everyone that is not the case with closed software thus also reduce the risk of having spies or other third party spy software.

However, we don’t have free and open-source video editing software range like paid and free programs but still whatever is there is enough to handle quite extensive editing tasks for Windows, macOS, FreeBSD and Linux operating systems, here are some of the best open source video editing programs.

[Source: H2S Media]

Google releases open-source 2FA security key platform called OpenSK

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

Two-factor security is a basic requirement these days if you want to take your digital responsibilities seriously, but some hardware lacks the sort of public documentation that some privacy advocates feel is truly necessary to provide ideal security. Open source enthusiasts will be glad to hear that Google has just announced the release of OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys, supporting both FIDO U2F and FIDO2.

This isn’t the sort of thing most of our readers will be able to appreciate immediately, you can’t zip out and buy a product running Google’s OpenSK just yet. This early, explicitly experimental release is only compatible with a single piece of reference hardware right now: the Nordic chip dongle (for which the project supplies a 3d-printable case).

[Source: Android Police]

Adobe, Open Source & Diversity: Joseph Sandoval

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

We sat down with Joseph Sandoval, SRE Manager of Cloud Platform at Adobe to talk about the work he is doing to help diversify the open source community. Despite the fact that Open Source lowers the barrier of entry and anyone can start contributing, open source is not as diverse as it should be. You still don’t see that many African American, Latinx or other minority groups. Why? We also talked about the open source work Adobe is doing.

[Source: TFiR YouTube]

Don’t Sweat Over AWS Downtime

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 31, 2020

Last year on August 31st, AWS’ Virginia-based datacenter (AWS US-EAST-1) went down due to a power failure. The back-up generators started failing within an hour or two, which ended up in bad news for many customers who were told by AWS that they have permanently lost their data.

This might be one of the extreme cases, but AWS downtime is not a rarity. According to Michael Bilancieri, SVP Products and Marketing of SIOS Technology, customers with just an average of three instances in EC2 experience downtime at least once a month. With a larger set of systems, that becomes a very significant amount of downtime on a yearly basis.

The reason for this downtime is the fact that many common system impairments and software issues are not covered by cloud vendor service level guarantees or addressed by cloud management tools.

DevOps engineers have to spend most of their precious time keeping their instances up-and-running, instead of investing their time on improving apps that add business value to their users. “The challenge for DevOps engineers is that they don’t know when something’s going to go down, so they have to monitor these systems constantly to see when something does happen and then take action,” said Bilancieri.

Without a strategic data recovery plan, businesses not only risk losing their critical data, they also lose valuable resources on things that don’t add any business value.

AWS tools and services for high availability and data recovery
AWS does have some services and tools that customers can use for data recovery and high availability, but they have their own limitations. Some tools, like CloudWatch, do monitoring whereas other tools do corrective actions. Oftentimes, these require manual intervention, scripting, and maintenance. From a managed service standpoint, there are many vendors out there that provide application monitoring services and system monitoring services.

That’s where SIOS AppKeeper enters the picture. After a successful launch on AWS Japan, SIOS is now bringing its AppKeeper to AWS in the US.

AppKeeper ensures availability of applications and systems running in AWS EC2 environments. It continuously monitors specific services within the operating system and within the application and identify when there are issues. If something goes wrong, AppKeeper takes corrective action, depending on the configuration, to remedy the problem. “What we found is that about 85% of failure scenarios that customers experience are being addressed with AppKeeper,” said Bilancieri.

AppKeeper not only brings SIOS data recovery capabilities to AWS customers, it also allows them to leverage existing services and tools. Vendors can integrate AppKeeper with their own solutions to utilize and take advantage of the capabilities and bring that information into their own product so they can offer services to their end customers.

“They can embed AppKeeper and integrate it with their existing tools, existing dashboards and interfaces and it drives more automation for them to get better results and higher service level agreements to their customers,” said Bilancieri.

The value that AppKeeper brings to AWS is that it automates that entire process of discovery, installation at the point of configuration, monitoring, and corrective action. It takes the onus off of an administrator to set it up, maintain it, and continue to monitor and do any corrective action necessary as time goes on.

Making life easier for DevOps teams
There’s so many things that DevOps teams have to look into and maintain: getting new systems in place, keeping things updated, monitoring for failures, and tracking alerts.

And when something fails, they experience a deluge of alerts coming in at them which they have to identify and investigate if they pose a downtime and whether they have already been remedied or needs to be addressed. AppKeeper takes a whole set of those service alerts from AWS out of their day-to-day monitoring job.

DevOps teams can still monitor all these activities through the AppKeeper console, but they don’t have to respond and react to them. They can configure AppKeeper to actually take action on their behalf. They can put more of their dedicated focus and time on other more critical things while AppKeeper maintains their application availability.

AppKeeper covers a wide range of services and applications. It doesn’t need to directly integrate with applications. It can actually look inside of the operating system of an instance (Windows or Linux running an EC2) and identify the services running there. It monitors both system and application services such as SAP, Sequel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc.

If these are running as system-level services, AppKeeper will identify them, monitor them, and ping them to check if they’re active and responsive. If they’re not, it can take action on that.

Some of the capabilities of SIOS AppKeeper include:
· Eliminates manual intervention by monitoring and proactively responding to service outages on AWS EC2 instances.
· Reduces downtime with automatic restarting of EC2 services or rebooting of instances when services become unavailable.
· Reduces costs and meets SLAs with automatic remediation of service outages.
· Fast and easy setup process. It takes only a few minutes and no software to install. Users simply connect to their AWS account and select which instances and services to monitor, and the level of protection they want.

Availability and pricing
AppKeeper is a cloud-based SaaS offering. It’s licensed at $40 per instance per month. Customers can test out a fully functioning version for free on some of their AWS instances.