Veritas, IBM Plan Linux Bundles For IBM Partners

Linux

Scheduled to be available in the United States in early 2005, the Veritas-IBM bundles include hardware, software and services and start at about $30,000, according to Veritas. The solutions include Veritas' Cluster Server, Storage Foundation and Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC software on IBM's Intel-based xSeries servers. Tempe, Ariz.-based Avnet Partner Solutions, which assembled the bundles, will distribute them through the IBM Business Partner channel.

To sell the bundles, IBM Business Partners must participate in IBM's Value Advantage Plus program, Veritas said. The program enables partners to earn higher discounts and more incentives when they sell their services with IBM software. Veritas, IBM and Avnet will provide joint channel marketing, sales training and support for the solutions.

The bundles reflect customer demand for a complete solution, especially as Linux increasingly moves into enterprise settings, said Sanjay Poonen, vice president of strategic alliances at Veritas. "In this market, customers prefer to get their solutions from a single vendor, and resellers get the benefit of full training, marketing, services and support from Avnet," he said.

Veritas previously has teamed with other hardware vendors on bundles, but this is the first time one so significant has been put together for Linux, Poonen said. "We've been more focused on Unix in the past, but the trend for Linux is to get more enterprise-ready," he said. "As Linux gets into more heterogeneous settings, we can help because we are the market leader in heterogeneous settings."

Several other storage vendors also launched new solutions and channel programs at LinuxWorld this week:

&#149 Arkeia, an enterprise network backup software vendor targeting the Linux space, unveiled its first formal channel program. The new program gives solution providers unlimited presales support, free internal licenses for testing, a lead-protection program and renewable annuities as customers continue to buy software licenses, said Rick DiViesti, director of sales at the Carlsbad, Calif.-based company, which has focused on selling software through electronic distribution. Arkeia aims to recruit solution provider partners with strong storage and Linux experience, DiViesti said. About 65 percent of Arkeia's North American business comes via the channel, and the vendor hopes to boost that number to 90 percent, he said.

&#149 Arkeia and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) also showcased a bundle featuring an SGI Altix 350 server and Arkeia Network Backup software for data backups in technical computing environments in the research, education and government sectors. The bundle, which protects as many as 10 client servers, includes Arkeia Data Encryption and the Arkeia Tape Archive modules. Under a limited-time promotion, customers can lease the server from SGI starting at $370.30 per month for 36 months, with the software license costing $1,919, or 80 percent under the software's list price.

&#149 LSI Logic introduced its first SATA-II RAID controller card. The MegaRAID SATA 300 8x controller offers twice the speed of the Milpitas, Calif.-based company's SATA-I controller, or about 3-Gbyte-per-second throughput. In addition, it includes native command queuing and full backward compatibility with SATA-I hard drives, according to LSI.

&#149 San Diego-based BakBone Software announced the general availability of its NetVault enterprise data-protection software with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 4. The company said Linux support for Intel x86-based platforms is now available as well, and support for IBM PowerPC, Intel Itanium and AMD Opteron systems is expected next quarter. BakBone, too, said it now supports Novell's Open Enterprise Server platform, including the NetWare and SUSE Linux platforms.

&#149 CommVault said its QiNetix Unified Data Management software now offers extended backup and recovery support for Novell enterprise server operating systems, including Novell NetWare, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Novell Open Enterprise Server. The QiNetix suite includes CommVault's Galaxy Backup and Recovery solution. The Oceanport, N.J.-based vendor said support for QiNetix Galaxy for NetWare and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 will be available starting this week, and support for Novell Open Enterprise Server support is expected later this year.

&#149 Yosemite Technologies released a new service pack for its Yosemite TapeWare Release 7 product line with heterogeneous backup-to-disk functionality. The software allows centralized backup via a three-tier architecture for one to 20 servers across heterogeneous environments, including Red Hat and SUSE Linux as well as Windows, NetWare and Unix. San Jose, Calif.-based Yosemite said it expects the new version to be available by the end of the month.

Best Programming Certifications for 2024

There’s no denying that software runs the world, and underpinning all excellent software is well-written code. Programming skills are considered among the most in-demand career skills in today’s IT environment, so it makes sense to hone and sharpen your programming expertise. 

Today’s computer programming certifications are as much about development platforms and environments as specific programming languages. The best programming certifications include an interesting mix of language-focused or language-specific credentials – like C/C++ certifications – and platform or operating system-oriented credentials like Microsoft’s Azure Developer Associate certification or CompTIA’s Linux+ certification. 

Read on for the best programming, platform and operating system certifications of the year. 

Programming and platform-specific certifications demonstrate a baseline of knowledge. These certifications are typically highly technical and showcase applied knowledge. 

These programs are vendor or programming language-specific, making the right certification extremely useful for the right job. Even for jobs not using a language or platform with which you are certified, holding a related certification demonstrates a certain aptitude and willingness to learn that can help individuals succeed in any role. 

Some of our favorite certifications here include: 

When hiring for a new business, owners and managers tend to outsource programming needs, making programming a valuable freelance skill.

More than 20 years after Linus Torvalds developed Linux, the operating system remains a force in the computing industry. While Linux is not widely used on desktops, it is extraordinarily strong on the web server side, where it enjoys a market share of 45 percent, according to W3  Techs.

Information technology (IT) professionals invest considerable time learning about server computing for everything from installation, configuration, maintenance and virtualization to application support and security. This also means that many IT professionals are working with and around Linux operating systems daily, often alongside Windows and various UNIX OS brands as well.

Some of the best certifications include: 

The LPIC and Linux+ exams are great ways to demonstrate broad knowledge of the Linux system without having to specialize in a specific Linux distribution. This is a good pathway for either professions starting off in Linux or those who wish to maintain a wider knowledge base.

Microsoft is best known for its Windows operating systems and Office software. But the company has a much broader product portfolio that includes online services (Bing, MSN, advertising), servers, gaming (Xbox 360), and hardware (tablets, PCs, keyboards and mice). The company also has a sizable certification program that turns out qualified administrators and technicians to support its system and application products.

Achieving IT certifications through the Microsoft Certification Program shows a person’s competence in a specific IT role, and it can result in all kinds of work-related and personal benefits. For example, studies show that IT certifications increase the chances of landing a job (or getting a promotion). Some of our favorite Microsoft certifications are: 

Many other certification programs can help further the careers and professional development of IT professionals who work as programmers. Here are a few certs and resources to consider:

Consider vendor-specific certification programs like SAS certifications and Oracle certifications, and take advantage of free AWS online training resources.

Pursuing the best IT certifications, including programming certs, is an excellent career advancement asset that validates your skills and knowledge. 

Those interested in programming certifications have no shortage of choices, so choose carefully and wisely. IT professionals should carefully determine the technologies used in their work environments and consider the roles they may want to pursue in the future.  

Before even thinking about which certification program you want to choose, it’s important to consider your goals. Are you angling for a specific job opportunity? Do you want to deepen your expertise in a particular language? Are you interested in learning a new skill? Answering questions like these will help you better understand which program might be best for you.

When investing in your own education and skill development, you want to be sure the investment will pay off. Think about the current landscape in programming, and ask yourself which skills are likely to be valuable well into the future and which may soon be obsolete. Technology is rapidly evolving and the relevance of your skill set is of top importance, so try to spend time earning certifications with staying power.

Plenty of your colleagues are likely to have gone through certification programs, or they’re aware of desirable certifications in your field. Ask them about their experiences or what types of credentials they’d want to see. Feedback from your professional network can be a powerful way to find out which certifications are most highly sought after amongst programmers and employers.

While you can count on the list above, it’s important to do your due diligence and vet every program you’re considering before signing up. Look into the track record of the program and organization you’re considering. How well do people who hold this certification do in their career? Are there any complaints from others who went through the program before? If you find any red flags, you may want to look elsewhere.

Programming is a highly in-demand skill and will be well into the future. Those who succeed in programming careers are those who continually learn and evolve along with technology. So, periodically learning new skills and strengthening old ones, while earning the certifications to demonstrate your expertise, can never hurt. The certification programs above are a great place to start, whether you’re just beginning your career in programming or growing it to the next level.

Mary Kyle contributed to this article.

Linux Fu: Superpowers For Mere Mortals

You can hardly mention the sudo command without recalling the hilarious XKCD strip about making sandwiches. It does seem like sudo is the magic power to make a Linux system do what you want. The only problem is that those superpowers are not something to be taken lightly.

As a simple example, suppose you like to shut your computer down at the end of the day. You run the shutdown command from the terminal but it doesn’t work because you aren’t root. You then have to do it again with sudo and if you haven’t logged in lately, provide your password. Ugh.

In my case, I got to thinking about this when I needed to manipulate the dbus service in a startup script. I wanted the script to manipulate just that service as a normal user and not prompt for a password, especially since some users don’t have sudo powers anyway. Either way, you would like a way to let normal users run very specific commands without additional permission.

Your first thought might be to wrap the code in a shell script owned by root and set the suid bit so that when you execute it, the script elevates to having root access. That will work, but it seems like a potential security problem. After all, a script could do anything. Are you sure there is no way for a user to force it to do something else? Are you really sure?

Granted, you always have to think about this. If you, say, allowed someone to run emacs as root, that person could then open a shell and have full access to the system even if they didn’t otherwise have root access. That’s not good. But it is usually easier to reason about programs that have specific functions instead of a general-purpose shell script.

That’s where sudo comes in. There’s really only one place to set up sudo, although most modern distributions have that one place read files from a second place that you can also use. The primary place is /etc/sudoers and, as you would guess, you need to be root to change that file. In fact, you shouldn’t open it with a regular editor at all. Use visudo which verifies you aren’t going to lock yourself out of root access by messing up this file. That would be very bad on systems where there is no way to log in directly as root.

When you use visudo, an editor launches. These days that’s often nano by default, although vi is the historic choice as you can see by the name. If you prefer something else, the tool will pick up your VISUAL or EDITOR environment variable. Well… sort of.

The authors of visudo and sudo were paranoid and rightfully so. There are options to remove all environment variables before running a command or to preserve just selected ones. So most of the time if you try to set one of these environment variables it is wiped out by sudo. To fix that, you’ll have to survive with whatever editor you get by default one time. You can preserve the environment variables and provide a list of accepted editors by putting this near the top of the file:

Keep in mind that your DISPLAY variable won’t go through either, so don’t expect a GUI editor to work without some further configuration changes.

If visudo doesn’t like your changes because of a syntax error it will ask you what to do. Press ? to see your options. You can tell it save anyway, but I don’t recommend that.

There are many arcane syntax commands you can put in sudoers to get different effects. In this case, we want to run a command like shutdown or service without a password for a specific user. Say the user is jolly_wrencher:

This tells sudo that the user on all machines can run the command with no password. If the command takes parameters, the user is free to supply them. However, you can also provide parameters that must match or use a quoted space to imply no arguments allowed.

In the case of something that is disallowed, sudo may still let you run the command if you provide the password and you were otherwise allowed to run it. Otherwise, no dice.

For example, with the dbus example, I used two lines:

Many distributions will now have a final line in the sudoers file that looks like this:

This will scan the directory named for files (unless they have ~ or . characters in the name) and process them, too. So in my case, I have the two lines about dbus in a file /etc/sudoers.d/dbus-service. You still should use visudo to edit. In recent versions, you just pass the name of the file you want to edit. Old versions needed a -f option. After editing, the system checks the entire sudoers file for errors, so it is safer than editing the files directly.

There’s quite a bit more you can do with sudoand sudoers. However, you should resist the urge to do too much. It is easy to make assumptions about security that get you in trouble. However, there are always cases where you need this kind of power and, as usual, Linux doesn’t disappoint.