How to Practice Linux Skills for Free
Jul 13, 2017
Colleagues and friends often ask me how they can learn or practice Linux when they only have Windows at work and a single family Windows computer at home, for free. That’s a good question, and there are a couple of different answers. Before we get to the free methods, I want to acknowledge that there […]
SQL Server on Linux: Using LibreOffice Base as a Client Application
Jun 29, 2017
Run sqlcmd on Linux or the SQL Server Managment Studio on Windows? As of November 2106, those are the only two choices provided by Microsoft to serve as a client to SQL Server vNext running on Linux. There are, however, other alternatives and one, in particular, might be attractive to folks looking for a graphical […]
What do Clocks, Cars, and Warships have in Common?
Jun 27, 2017
A few months ago we had Daylight Savings Time. My parents were delighted to discover that “the clock” in their car automatically adjusted itself, as did their computer. But now they had to change the two clocks in their bedroom, the two clocks in the kitchen, and several others around the house. How did the […]
Patch Your Samba Servers or Risk a Worse Version of WannaCry
May 31, 2017
The big cybersecurity news of the past couple of weeks has been the WannaCry worm. It took advantage of some rather old bugs, dating back to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. We got lucky! The vulnerability, the problems in the targets, allowed unlimited abuse. But the exploit, the attackers’ code, had a built-in “kill […]
Is Perfect the Enemy of Good Enough in Software-Defined Networking?
May 25, 2017
Perfect is the enemy of good. That’s an old saying. Confucius (551-479 BC) said, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” Aristotle (384-322 BC) said something similar. Voltaire popularized the phrase in the 1770s. And maybe that’s where we are with SDN WAN. Software-Defined Networking and Wide Area Network Links Software-defined networking, […]
