16 May 2012

Shared from TechRepublic: Virtualizing a physical Linux machine

Sent to you via TechRepublic for Android.

Virtualizing a physical Linux machine

Many businesses are opting to virtualize their existing machines. This solves a number of issues, which includes allowing you to: migrate many servers to one, have more control over backups, and more easily restore a machine after a major issue.

It's easy to create new virtual machines and download and run a virtual appliance, but what about converting a currently running Linux machine to a virtual...

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http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/itdojo/virtualizing-a-physical-linux-machine/3197

14 May 2012

Best Websites Balance Self-Expression and Functionality


Penn State Live
(05/07/12) Matthew Swayne

Penn State University researchers have found that providing users with a certain amount of freedom to express themselves could help designers develop more interactive Web portals and online communities. The researchers found that users increased their interactivity and developed a more robust community when they could write their own blog posts, change the look of the site, and add gadgets to personalized sites. "We need to strategically use interactive tools to help people interact in ways that are beneficial to both the users and site owners," says professor S. Shyam Sundar. However, the researchers also found that offering too many choices could frustrate or fatigue users. "Users feel overwhelmed when a site offers a lot of gadgets or tools and they seem fatigued by making too many decisions; but we can counter all this by providing them a chance to express themselves," Sundar says. The researchers designed 12 distinct variations of sites that either offered or did not offer users a chance to tailor the look of the site, to add gadgets and applications, and write original blog posts. The version that performed the best gave users a chance to write blog posts and allowed them to change the sites' look.

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http://live.psu.edu/story/59634

12 May 2012

Project Moon: One Small Step for a PC, One Giant Leap for Data


Wired News
(05/08/12) Robert McMillan

Virginia Tech researchers launched the MapReduce On Opportunistic Environments (Moon) project five years ago with the goal of turning the university's Math Emporium, which contains 550 Apple computers, into a type of supercomputer that is based on the same technology that Google developed to power its search engine. The Project Moon researchers' paper on the system was recently named one of the most important distributed supercomputing papers in the past 20 years. "We're going through technology transfer and trying to figure out how much more we might need to do to package it if people want to license it or to spinoff a company off of it," says Virginia Tech researcher Wu-chun Feng. Project Moon is based on Hadoop, the open source version of Google's MapReduce platform, and it is one of many efforts to apply the platform to more than just Web services. The Project Moon researchers used Hadoop to turn each Apple computer into a node on a supercomputer, with each machine helping to solve complex data-analysis problems. In theory, the 550 Apple computers in the Math Emporium could be transformed into a supercomputer capable of performing 6.6 trillion mathematical operations per second.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/project_moon/

07 May 2012

Running a secure DDNS service with BIND | Julien Valroff

This article will give you a short introduction to DDNS, and will only apply to a precise example. I will not detail the reasons of my choice. However, the links provided at the end of the document will allow you further understand the uses that can be made of DDNS.

Requirements

  • 2 machines running GNU/Linux: one at home with a dynamic IP, the other elsewhere with a fix IP
  • BIND 9.2.0 or newer should be installed on the external machine (and act as primary DNS for your domain – the setup won't be detailed here)
  • the nsupdate utility on your router at home. This comes as part of the dnsutils Debian package.