Committing routine and even rarely required tasks to scripts is almost always a big win because you don’t have to reinvent the approach to getting work done each time it’s needed, and you save a lot of time on issues you handle often.

Here are some tips for writing bash scripts and ensuring that they’ll be easy to use, easy to update/ and hard to misuse.

Comments

One important thing to do when you're preparing a script on Linux is to add comments – especially for commands that might be a little complex. If you don’t run a script very often, comments can help ensure that you quickly grasp everything that it’s doing. If someone else has to use your scripts, the comments can make it a lot easier for them to know what to expect. So, always add comments. Even you might appreciate them! You don’t need to comment every line, just every significant group of commands. Here's a simple example.

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Most organizations use both on-prem data centers and cloud-based IaaS services, often employing multiple IaaS platforms.

For some, this multicloud reality has come about as part of a steady, one-way migration to the cloud, and they may have intentionally kept their cloud networks distinct as part of that goal. Others may have a business strategy for keeping them distinct, such as providing services for a stand-alone division or a particular geography.

As a consequence, they are almost certainly already tying their on-premises and cloud infrastructure networks together in some way or are about to be.

Those with limited integration among their networks are often dealing with a patchwork of solutions that evolved haphazardly as cloud systems went from being experimental and isolated to being developmental and peripheral and then to being central and in-production.

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Software and semiconductor maker Broadcom and its acquisition target VMware have agreed to give themselves another 90 days to complete the $61 billion acquisition they announced on May 26, 2022.  

A regulatory filing by enterprise cloud vendor VMware showed that both the companies had delivered a mutual notice to extend the final date of the merger to twelve months from the day the deal was announced.

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Secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN provider Aryaka is set to open 27 new points of presence in 21 countries and 15 major metropolitan areas, with the goal of delivering low-latency services to a broader potential client base.

Aryaka's AppAssure routing and application performance solution will be present in all new and current POPs, providing SaaS-based application delivery across its network, according to a company announcement. Aryaka said it will also support wireless last-mile connectivity worldwide.

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Multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) outages have hit users around the world this week, and coming after interruptions in Microsoft's cloud services last month, are a reminder of the importance of site engineering for systems administrators whose businesses rely on cloud-based mission critical applications.

The biggest OCI outage this week began on 17:30 GMT Monday and stretched till Wednesday 22:30 GMT, impacting customers across North and South America, Australia, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe and Africa.

“Oracle engineers identified a performance issue within the back-end infrastructure supporting the OCI Public DNS API, which prevented some incoming service requests from being processed as expected during the impact window,” the company said on its cloud infrastructure  website.

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Cisco is getting more products out the door, thanks to significant product redesigns and relentless efforts by its supply-chain team to address component shortages, but the situation is still challenging.

“While components for a few product areas remain highly constrained, we did see an overall improvement in the supply chain,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins during a call with financial analysts to discuss the vendor's second-quarter results. 

Cisco reduced its backlog 6% sequentially in the second quarter, however total backlog grew year over year, Robbins said, though he didn't cite an exact dollar figure. The company still expects to have a backlog that’s roughly double what it would normally be at the end of the year. (In February of last year, Cisco said its product backlog was valued at nearly $14 billion.)

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Cisco is adding compute power and streamlining edge hardware and software offerings to make SD-WAN easier to deploy and manage.

Taken together enhancements are aimed at helping to better handle growing distributed enterprises but also to help simplify environments—the hardware by allowing users to collapse multiple devices into one, and the software to ease configuration and management of SD-WANs.

On the hardware side, Cisco is adding the 3U, Catalyst 8500-20X6C edge platform to its Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms Family. It is an edge aggregation device built on the Cisco’s quantum-flow processor (QFP) ASIC and promises more than three times the performance over the existing high-end Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform, according to Archana Khetan, head of products in Cisco’s Enterprise Routing group. “With the increased power, customers can support more users and collapse the number of boxes they need to support edge applications as needed,” Khetan said.

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AMD continues to gain ground in the data center, grabbing CPU market share from leader Intel despite a significant decline in server processor shipments.

Overall, the processor market took a hit in the fourth quarter of 2022, as well as for the full year 2022, due to lower demand, ongoing inventory corrections, and a slowing economy, according to analyst firm Mercury Research.

For 2022, total unit shipments (client and server, excluding ARM) were 374 million and revenues came in at $65 billion, down 21% and 19%, respectively, compared to 2021.

Specific to server processors, sales for the year came in at 36.1 million units, down 4.2% from 37.7 million in 2021. Revenues were $24 billion in 2022, down 7.7% from $26 billion in 2021. Mercury’s principal analyst Dean McCarron attributes the sharper drop in revenue versus units because the average selling price (ASP) declined.

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The echo command (a bash built-in) is one of the very basic commands on Linux. As with ls and pwd, you can't sit on the command line very long without using it. At the same time, echo has quite a few uses that many of us never take advantage of. So, this post looks into the many ways you can use this command.

What is echo?

Basically, echo is a command that will display any text that you ask it to display. However, when you type “echo hello”, the echo command isn't only spitting out those five letters, it's actually sending out six characters – the last one being a linefeed. Let's look at a couple of commands that make this obvious.

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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.

ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.

5G connectivity is being used in a wide range of products, but one thing they have in common is that they tend to be very high-powered devices. Up until now, there has been little emphasis on low-power devices, such as small edge/IoT devices or consumer products.

Qualcomm is addressing that with Snapdragon X35 5G Modem-RF, a 5G New Radio (NR) processor designed to serve the low-power and low-bandwidth markets.

The company claims it is the first NR-Light processor based on the 2020 3GPP Release 17 spec that was written to support low-power 5G IoT devices over any of the broadcast frequencies allocated to 5G. At the same time, it is compatible with legacy LTE (4G). The spec is also known as “reduced capacity” or RedCap.

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Cloud communications firm Twilio has announced that it plans to reduce its global workforce by about 17%, within months of laying off over 800 employees. In addition to the layoffs, the company is also undergoing an internal restructuring to create two business units, Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications, according to a company blog post.

As of September 30, 2022, Twilio had 8,992 employees, of which 816 were laid off in the fourth quarter of 2022. The company is now expected to lay off an additional 1,400 employees in the new round of layoffs.

This fresh round of layoffs is meant to help the company “spend less, streamline, and become more efficient,” Jeff Lawson, chief executive officer and co-founder of Twilio, said in the blog post. “To do that, we’re forming two business units: Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications. And today, I’m unfortunately bearing the news that we’re parting ways with approximately 17% of our team.”

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CDN (content delivery network) giant Akamai Technologies today announced that it will discount cloud egress pricing, add ISO, SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, and build out enterprise-scale cloud computing sites and distributed points of presence in over 50 cities as part of a new initiative — dubbed Connected Cloud — aimed at filling a niche between the hyperscalers and edge computing.

The idea is to fulfill what the company sees as unmet demand. In Akamai's view, modern applications are ncreasingly being broken into a range of different microservices. In many cases, those microservices need to be distributed across a geographically wide area, creating different computing needs than those addressed by most cloud vendors.

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Observability may be the latest buzzword in an industry loaded with them, but Cisco will tell you the primary goal of the technology is to help enterprises get a handle on effectively managing distributed resources in ways that have not been possible in the past.

The idea of employing observability tools and applications is a hot idea. Gartner says that by 2024, 30% of enterprises implementing distributed system architectures will have adopted observability techniques to improve digital-business service performance, up from less than 10% in 2020.

“Today’s operational teams have tools for network monitoring, application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, call monitoring, and more, but they rarely intermingle to provide a cohesive view of what’s going on across the enterprise,” according to Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group.

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Nigel Williams-Lucas, director of Information Technology at Maryland-based footwear retailer DTLR, faced a challenge that most IT execs will recognize: the business was pushing hard on digital transformation, and the IT infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.

Store managers were seeking better data analytics and business intelligence from backend systems like inventory and sales. The business wanted IT systems to support customers ordering online and picking up at a physical store within two hours.

The network needed to securely support real-time, bandwidth-intensive IP security cameras. And Williams-Lucas wanted to roll out beaconing technology, in which the network gathers information about customer in-store activity via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and can send discount offers to a customer’s phone based on where they are in the store and what they appear to be interested in.

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Today’s CEOs have three top priorities for their CIOs: improve the customer experience, strengthen IT and business collaboration, and improve the employee experience, according to the Foundry 2023 State of the CIO.

There’s certainly room for improvement: 80% of respondents to a Juniper Networks survey said poor network connectivity interrupts their work, on average, two to three times per day.

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Over 90% of the network managers, executives, and planners I’ve interacted with in the last six months believe that they have little or no strategic influence on how their companies’ networks are evolving. That’s a pretty astonishing statistic, but here’s one that’s even more astonishing: Almost 90% of that same group say that their companies’ application cost overruns and benefit shortfalls were either predictable based on network behavior, or a direct result of mistakes that network professionals could have caught. It’s important for network professionals to get their seat back in those planning conferences, but it’s vital for their companies that they do so.

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With 56% of New York City households lacking both home and mobile broadband connections, a consortium is taking steps to supply at least mobile access via sidewalk kiosks, the latest of which include 5G.

Called Link5G, these kiosks also provide free Wi-Fi access, a built-in tablet to access maps and other resources including phone connections, a USB-port to charge mobile devices, a jack for headsets, and a button to make 911 calls. Some also include two 55-inch screens for digital signage that can provide the city with ad revenue to help pay for the kiosks. Perhaps the most interesting feature, though, are the 5G cellular antennas near the top of the 32-foot structures.

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There are number of ways to join multiple lines of text and change delimiters if needed. This article shows two of the easier ways to do this and explains the commands.

Using the tr command

The tr command is quite versatile. It’s used to make many types of changes to text files, but it can also flatten multiple lines into one by replacing newline characters with blanks. It does, however, remove the final newline as well. Note the $ prompt at the end of the second line. That's a clue!

$ tr '\n' ' ' < testfile This is a file that I can use for testing. $ $ tr '\n' ' ' < testfile > newfile 

To fix this problem, you can add a newline to the end of the file with an echo command like this:

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After the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday released a recovery script for organizations affected by a massive ransomware attack targeting VMWare ESXi servers worldwide, reports surfaced that the malware evolved in a way that made earlier recovery procedures ineffective.

The attacks, aimed at VMware’s ESXi bare metal hypervisor, were first made public February 3 by the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR), and target ESXi instances running older versions of the software, or those that have not been patched to current standards. Some 3,800 servers have been affected globally, CISA and the FBI said.

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Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.

Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.

“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”

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Cisco has added new visibility and security software to its cloud-based dashboard for managing configuration and applications for IoT devices in industrial settings.

The company has upgraded its IoT Operations Dashboard with Cisco Cyber Vision, software that automatically builds a detailed inventory of all operational technology (OT) devices and identifies vulnerabilities.

Cyber Vision can share its inventories with SecureX, Cisco’s enterprise Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to provide a combined inventory of both IT and OT assets, and that can make threat investigations easier and build remediation workflows, according to Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud connectivity and industrial IOT networking.

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Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.

Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.

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Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.

Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)

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