WiFi all over the world

Posted by on April 20, 2014 No comments
WiFi

(Free) WiFi all over the world

This year I’m doing my fair share of traveling again and I’ve decided to write a blog on each of my Free WiFi experiences during the year (or longer?) It could very well be an ongoing comparison of the various places, public or private and even airplanes!

Free WiFi

WiFi at work is fantastic and at home it works like a charm as well, but tomorrow I’m flying to San Jose (California) and I need my internet access! I brought a book just in case I’ll be disconnected for a long period of time.

WiFi radiating

The “WiFi all over the world” series will start tomorrow when I’ll be flying from BRU to DUB to start with and from there to SFO. I will be picked up at the airport and I’m told the ride has on-board WiFi as well. I’ve never tried using WiFi in a car so far, but hey! I’m not driving myself this time, so I should be able to get some airtime when driving to the hotel 🙂 During my stay in San Jose and around there, in Silicon Valley, I will be using a variety of hot spots and I’m told I should have 99% coverage. I’ll be flying back home from SFO to DUB on Saturday and from DUB to BRU on Sunday.

WiFi antenna

I will dedicate a separate blog on each of the experiences and link to each of them from this starting point (this first blog). So expect to see some editing in this piece of text in the future.

Think about Free WiFi (or paid if I really really have to) in places like hotels, airports, a symposium, work, at customer’s sites, in cities, airplanes, taxis, regular cars (I’m getting one with WiFi in it myself in a few weeks)

Enjoy my first, but ongoing series!

WiFi on black square

 

April 21, 2014: Brussels Airport (BRU): Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

April 21, 2014: Dublin Airport (DUB): Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

April 26, 2014: San Francisco International Airport: Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

Storage Field Day 5 – what’s happening?

Posted by on April 18, 2014 1 comment

Storage Field Day 5

Suddenly, I received this tweet. Something about Tech Field Day, Storage Field Day. What? Ok, I actually met Stephen Foskett last year in Las Vegas and I know Gabrie Van Zanten, a colleague of mine, visited the TFD event. Also Roy Mikes, another friend of mine attended the event in the past. I had a decent share of information about the event, but it was still no surprise that I was honored by the invitation I received.

Software Defined Data Center Symposium

The first full day the delegates will attend the SDDC Symposium in Santa Clara. On April 22 the whole day is for discussions of OpenFlow, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, converged infrastructure, and the greater software-defined future! I’m quite curious who will be there, what we can discuss about and the depth in which discussions will go, but I guess I’ll have to see and find out. It’s exciting for sure!

The actual SFD5 event Read more »

Are my EMC products affected by the bleeding heart SSL bug?

Posted by on April 11, 2014 No comments
Bleeding heart

It’s been all over the news this week:

Bleeding heart

Heartbleed OpenSSL bug

OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f  as well as 1.0.2-beta1 are indicated to be vulnerable to Heartbeat Vulnerability.

Due to a missing bounds check in OpenSSL during the TLS heartbeat extension, a maximum of 64 KiB of memory can be revealed to a connected client or server. This may potentially allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information such as private keys, login passwords, and encryption keys (the so-called Secret Keys). As a result of this disclosure of potentially sensitive information, these Secret Keys could be leveraged to decrypt other sensitive information or conduct so-called man-in-the-middle attacks.

References:

I won’t copy/paste the complete list in this post as the list will be updated over time, but in general I can disclose that (according to EMC) Brocade FOS, Centera, Clariion, Connectrix Manager, Control Center, Data Domain OS, ESRS, Isilon OneFS, , Networker, RecoverPoint, Replication Manager, ViPR, VNVe, VNX1, VNX2, VPLEX, XtremIO are not vulnerable.

You should read the article on bit.ly/1hwgFpW for specific other products as there are a few that might need attention.

Make sure you patch your products if you need to and please change your passwords every now and then (and in this case as soon as possible).

Reaching USPEED – EMC Walhalla

Posted by on April 1, 2014 2 comments

It sure took me a while to read through the tons of performance related materials, but I admit that having done the Clariion IE Expert, Clariion TA and of course the latest VNX IE Expert and VNX TA Expert exams also helped. I got my invitation to join the USPEED gang a little over a year ago, in early 2013 and just like my fellow colleagues I was swamped in work and unable to even start reading through all the material.

During a beta I did for EMC in February ’14 I became interested again in actually getting that certification and all the goodies that come with it and I started reading and testing myself. For a test I just did the free VNX IE Specialist and Expert test exams as well as the TA specialist and expert exams: these are wonderful exams that can prepare you to actually enter the major league of storage gods (ahem).

EMC Walhalla!

Read more »

Software-Defined Data Center Symposium 2014

Posted by on March 24, 2014 1 comment
SDDC 2014

Tech Field Day plans SDDC Symposium

Being part of the SFD5 gang I was invited to join the Software-Defined Datacenter Symposium as well! This event will feature many key figures from the industry and end-user community, and will include discussions of OpenFlow, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, converged infrastructure, and the greater software-defined future!

Note that the event capacity is severely constrained. Therefore, the SDDC Symposium is focusing on end-user implementors and encouraging others to participate online by viewing the live video stream on this page!

Read more »