Table of contents for May/June 2020 in ADMIN Network & Security

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are on the rise in IT, especially in the field of system monitoring. AI, machine learning, and deep Learning often are wrongly used as synonyms. AI is the ability of a machine to make decisions similar to those made by humans. For example, software could decide to trigger an alarm that a human being would also have triggered. AI is the simulation of intelligent behavior by more or less complex algorithms. Machine learning, on the other hand, means classifying methods, procedures, and algorithms that help the machine make decisions. Machine learning is the math that lets AI learn from experience. From this perspective, machine learning merely provides the basis for decision making. An example can illustrate this point. The learning result is a percentage…

If you manage storage servers, chances are you are already aware of ZFS and some of the features and functions it boasts. In short, ZFS is a combined all-purpose filesystem and volume manager that simplifies data storage management while offering some advanced features, including drive pooling with software RAID support, file snapshots, in-line data compression, data deduplication, built-in data integrity, advanced caching (to DRAM and SSD), and more. ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), a weak copyleft license based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Although open source, ZFS and anything else under the CDDL was, and supposedly still is, incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). This hasn’t stopped ZFS enthusiasts from porting it over to the Linux kernel, where it remains a…

Microsoft provides several tools for Windows 10 that help you work more effectively, find errors faster, and change Windows settings more easily. The two most important collections are the well-known Sysinternals tools and the brand new PowerToys collection. PowerToys dates back to the days of Windows 95 and has been reissued by Microsoft for Windows 10. The current version of PowerToys is available as an open source project. The source code and tools are available on GitHub [1]. Installation can be done several ways by either downloading the PowerToysSetup.msi installation file [2] or with Chocolatey [3] and the choco install powertoys command. If a new version of the tools is available, you can also update it with the choco upgrade powertoys command. Existing tools will, of course, be updated. Microsoft…

The recent notable milestones in the evolution of software development and how applications are served over the Internet, not least of which are the popularity of portable containers and Docker’s remarkable rate of adoption, had security professionals scratching their heads until the security challenges that they presented were fully understood. Few niche vendors fully embraced container security headaches as Docker’s toolbox took the developer world by storm. The sophisticated security suite Twistlock, now Prisma Cloud Compute Edition [1] after their acquisition by Palo Alto Networks (see the “What’s in a Name?” box), stood out from the crowd and, through natural selection, took center stage in the container security space. Now, having increased its feature set significantly, the cloud-native security suite is exceptionally sophisticated. After the introduction of multiple new features…

The Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol plays a central role in user authentication in many companies. The client-server protocol is used for user and computer authentication, authorization, and accounting. RADIUS is often used in combination with access points, VPNs, and other technologies in which the protocol controls the dialin or login to a computer network. Network Policy Server [1] is an implementation of the RADIUS protocol for Microsoft environments. The protocol is the de facto standard for centralized authentication of dialup connections over VPN and WiFi (IEEE 802.1X). During authentication, the service determines which user or computer wants to authenticate itself. To make sure the user or computer is who or what they claim to be, classic username and password procedures are used along with security tokens. Once…

Despite, or perhaps because of, research successes in artificial intelligence (AI), powerful AI seems to be further away today than it was 10 years ago. Will AI ever step toward automated super-intelligence, or are artificial narrow-band geniuses all that can be expected for the foreseeable future? ADMIN interviewed Peter Protzel, who studied Electrical Engineering and received his Ph.D. from the University of Braunschweig, Germany, in 1987. He then spent five years as a staff scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, followed by seven years at the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems in Erlangen, Germany, where he headed the neural networks research group. Since 1998 he has been a full professor for automation technology at the University of Chemnitz, Germany. ADMIN: Prominent advocates of the idea of…

Machine learning has changed the computing paradigm. Products today are built with artificial intelligence (AI) as a central attribute, and consumers are beginning to expect automation and human-like interactions with the devices they are using. However, much of the deep learning revolution has been limited to the cloud. Recently, and thanks to the performance increase of microcontroller and embedded devices, several machine learning libraries for mobile, embedded, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been announced that aim to offload computation to the edge. One such toolset is TensorFlow Lite, which I use in a realworld vertical farming operation. Although building and training deep neural networks requires powerful servers provided with graphics processing units (GPUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs), machine learning inference requires fewer resources and can be executed…

PostgreSQL is an extensible, objectoriented database that supports both SQL for relational and JSON for nonrelational queries. Its extensive list of enterprise-class features makes it one of the most popular open source relational databases. Running a database server successfully, however, requires more than just the database. Along with the PostgreSQL database, you also need tools to administer the data it houses and tools for the administration of the server itself. As any database administrator knows, that involves keeping an eye on the logs to look for inconsistencies and regularly checking the server statistics to weed out bottlenecks. Elephant Shed [1] is an all-in-one appliance that combines several open source tools that a database administrator would need to run and manage a database server. Among other things, you can use it…

The main benefit of the Cloud Foundry service mesh is the weighted routing option. Routes can now be assigned to more than one application, a feature many members of the Cloud Foundry community have had on their wish list for several years. The growing popularity of the service mesh idea created a critical mass that led to the idea finally being implemented. (See also the “Microservices and the Service Mesh” box.) The function can be used to define a weighting that distributes the load among the applications involved. The weighting factor of each application statistically determines how many incoming requests it receives on average. Cloud Foundry For historical reasons, Cloud Foundry is often equated with the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) platform (and its famous cf push user experience), which…

Windows PowerShell is more than just a preferred tool for administrators – it’s ideal for penetration testing. To check a system thoroughly for vulnerabilities, pentesters need to assume the role of the attacker. With the help of native scripts by Nishang and Empire, known security gaps can be tested, the authorization level escalated, system information obtained, or the system damaged by malware. Windows PowerShell (WPS) has been the standard tool of many system administrators for several years, providing both imperative (command chains with system instructions) and declarative (defined objectives such as Desired State Configuration) features. The idea of associating this tool with “hacking” because of its everyday use seems a little strange. However, it is the comprehensive conceptual design of PowerShell that makes it interesting for penetration tests. In security,…

Data sent on a journey across the Internet often takes different amounts of time to travel the same distance. This delay time, which a packet experiences on the network, comprises: transmission delay, the time required to send the packet over the communication links; processing delay, the time each network element spends processing the packet; and queue delay, the time spent waiting for processing or transmission. The data paths between communicating endpoints typically consist of many hops with links of different speeds. The lowest bandwidth along the path represents the bottleneck, because the packets cannot reach their destination faster than the time required to transmit a packet at the bottleneck data rate. In practice, the delay time along the path – the time from the beginning of the transmission of a…

For admins looking to deploy a robust cloud-native app testing environment, Turing Pi has you covered. This new Raspberry Pi cluster is a mini ITX-size motherboard, designed to run up to seven computers in a cluster. But this isn’t just any Raspberry Pi-based cluster. The Turing Pi is designed specifically to support a cloud-native stack. The Turing Pi clusterboard supports Raspberry Pi compute modules which are interconnected with a 1 Gbps network (although each node is limited to 100 Mbps USB speed) and can share RAM and storage between the nodes. Other features include multiple I/O, nodes power management via an I2C bus, up to 28 cores, 7 x 40 pin GPIO, HDMI, audio jack, and ATX connections, 8 USB ports, real-time clock, flash mode, and boot mode. The Turing…

Those working in IT and in the AI environment often know little more about TensorFlow than that it has something to do with artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, TensorFlow is one of the most powerful artificial intelligence frameworks. In contrast to some abstract projects from university research labs, it can be used today. In this article, I introduce the topic and look into the features that TensorFlow offers and contexts in which it can be used sensibly. Basics Wikipedia describes TensorFlow as “a free and open-source software library for dataflow and differentiable programming across a range of tasks” [1]. If you don’t happen to be a math genius or an IT scientist, this description might make it difficult to understand what TensorFlow is actually about. To begin, it makes more…

Associations demand a plethora of applications to keep their members connected. At the very least, a small organization needs an email system and an address book. Often, they also need a private forum and a chat system. In practice, most small groups don’t have the resources required to set up and host all the required services themselves and end up externalizing them. Externalizing IT, such as adopting the address book service provided by Google, might seem an easy solution, but it is not free from problems. Under some jurisdictions, uploading the personal data of contacts to a server managed by a third party is problematic. Citadel [1] is a groupware solution that integrates many of the services an organization needs in a compact, easy-to-install package. In a matter of minutes,…

In the history of wireless networks, many innovations have already been exaggerated by providers as a major breakthrough yet, in the end, did not really meet the expectations of users. In the case of WiFi 6, however, the expectations are justified. The 802.11ax specification is the first WiFi standard developed with the premise that it will overtake wired as the primary means of connecting terminal devices to the network – in the office or on the shop floor. (See the “WiFi 6 Goals” box.) The earlier WiFi generations were designed for occasional use and less for downloading large data volumes. The 802.11ac specification (WiFi 5) certainly made WiFi networks faster, but in reality, this variant only partially improved an outdated concept and increased transmission speed. Every WiFi user has certainly…

Ever since Python was created, users have been looking for ways to achieve multiprocessing with threads, which the Python global interpreter lock (GIL) prevents. One common approach to getting around the GIL is to run computationally intensive code outside of Python with tools such as Cython [1] and ctypes [2]. You can even use F2PY [3] with compiled C functions. All of the previously mentioned tools bypass Python and rely on a compiled language to provide threaded multiprocessing elements with an interface to Python. What is really needed is either a way to perform threaded processing or a form of multiprocessing in Python itself. A very interesting tool for this purpose is Pymp [4], a Python-based method of providing OpenMP-like functionality. OpenMP OpenMP [5] employs a few principles in its…