We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud
servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost
ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use
(commercial and government). And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart
guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera’s
CDH3). Using Bryan’s guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running
in under 20 minutes.
With this post we would like to provide you with some additional tips that
flow from these other posts. We will show you how to build clusters even
faster using another common tool in community use, Whirr.
What is Whirr? Apache Whirr is a set of libraries for running cloud
services. Here is more from http://whirr.apache.org/
Whirr provides:
A cloud-neutral way to run services. You don’t have to worry a... (more)
Gaining Access to a Check Point Appliance – Physical Access Trumps All
by Tom Kopchak
Recently, one of my co-workers and I were tasked with reconfiguring a Check
Point Appliance for use as the main firewall in a lab environment we are
building for some internal testing. Because we both are recent hires (and
thus, the low men on the totem pole), we were not given passwords to the
devices or any other useful information regarding their previous
configuration. We were expected to learn how to manage the devices, reload
the Check Point software, and configure the equipment entirely fr... (more)
#adcfw #infosec F5 is changing the game on security by unifying it at the
application and service delivery layer.
Over the past few years we’ve seen firewalls fail repeatedly. We’ve seen
business disrupted, security thwarted, and reputations damaged by the failure
of the very devices meant to prevent such catastrophes from happening. These
failures have been caused by a change in tactics from invaders who seek no
longer to find away through or over the walls, but who simply batter it down
instead. A combination of traditional attacks – network-layer – and
modern attacks – applic... (more)
Managing access to confidential information and application resources via
firewalls is the foundation of network security, and firewall audits are
central to any mature network security process. However, relying on security
and network experts to review rules across multiple firewall zones and
different firewall products is proving to be costly and ineffective. Few will
dispute that when it comes to network security, automating best practices to
reduce operating costs, complexity, human error, and streamline processes is
a good thing. However, in what we call the age of Continuou... (more)
While virtualization offers many benefits to enterprise such as lower costs
and greater flexibility, it also creates new challenges. One of the greatest
concerns with switching over to virtualized infrastructure, espeically in
government, is security and compliance in a complex and dynamic environment
which legacy software can no longer handle. Catbird offers automated security
solutions tailored to virtualized data centers and has recently unveilled the
next generation of its vSecurity software, vSecurity 5.0.
By integrating with the hypervisor, which manages all of the virtual ... (more)