Your IT News for the Week of February 4, 2019 […]

When I think of a NAS, I generally think of it in terms of a storage device. Then again, that kind of ignores the whole “network-attached” part!

That may seem like a minor point, but not when it comes to measuring data and transfer speeds. Confusing storage bytes with networking bits doesn’t just cause confusion, it might have implications for what is actually possible with your NAS. Tony Bourke put together an excellent primer to straighten everything out.

It’s become a media narrative that there is a “talent gap” in cybersecurity. The story goes that there are plenty of good paying jobs, but not enough qualified people to do them. On the face of it, there seem to be good reasons. The spate of high profile data leaks and hacks have made security a front and center concern for organizations of all sizes. As the sophistication of these attacks increase, it makes sense that the number of jobs needed would also increases. But Ben Tomhave can’t stand this narrative. He makes the case that this talent gap is actually symptomatic of organizational dysfunction.

In terms of repurposing old computer hardware, it would be hard to pick a project that would bring a bigger smile to my face than retrofitting an Intel Core2Duo-based Sun workstation to use modern AMD EPYC platform. It’s the best of both worlds, modern hardware in a chassis with perhaps the best logo in all of tech.

Ken Nalbone and Rich Stroffolino are running down the IT news of the week. This time they are talking about the latest US-Huawei tensions, Slack reaching 10 million DAU, Rubrik’s data leak, and Japan’s plan to hack into their own IOT devices.

Kubernetes is increasingly important in IT, but that doesn’t make it any less opaque. Luckily Eric Shanks put together an excellent series of posts to get you started. This first goes over the theory behind different elements, then jumps into specific practical examples.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new iteration on their module enterprise board, the Compute Module 3+. This adds an upgraded processor, configurable flash storage, and guaranteed availability through 2026. While Raspberry Pi units are never interested in bleeding edge performance, it’s a nice upgrade for organizations looking for a drop-in replacement.

Over the last few years, HPE has built up a […]

The current US government shutdown is a political problem, but one that has real world security implications. We touched on this during the Gestalt IT Rundown last week, but Brian Krebs has an in-depth breakdown of is actually happening behind the scenes.

Backblaze has been releasing an annual report of their hard drive reliability for five years now. It’s a rare look into real world performance of drives at pretty massive scale. For 2018, they had just under 105,000 data drives in operation for their cloud storage and backup services.