Softpedia reports that Cities in Italy Drop Proprietary Software and Adopt LibreOffice. Good news for the alternative OpenDoc camp. Momentum is growing.

Without knowing the use of the two SANs, I would guess that saving the $12K is going to be worth it. Both vendors have great support, both are well known, both devices are competitive with each other. It would be good to know the intended use case, though.

Pretty big security news, JPM has had something like 76 million customers' data compromised.

@sn said in 40 TB NAS storage recommendations...:

@Reid-Cooper RAID 5 (SAM - please excuse me :))

Uh oh, you'd better start running now. I'll try to distract him.

Datamation recently recommended the XFCE desktop on Linux. Today they look at what to do should the XFCE project stagnate or stop.

I am a bit surprised that their answer was MATE and not Cinnamon.

One Big Array for me. Hypervisors are the worst things to put on their own arrays as they use the least disk space and speed of anything.

Another German city, this time Gummersbach (near Dusseldorf), has dropped Windows in favor of a Linux desktop environment. Gummersbach has decided to use a MATE desktop.

Recently it was announced that German powerhouse Hamburg is looking to switch from Windows to Linux as well.

Make sure that you know what a zombie process is. Seems to always get asked.

InfoWorld has posted their picks of the top features coming in the upcoming Windows Server 10 release.

Ticketing systems are very useful, even if you only use them in the background. They help to keep you organized, they provide metrics to help you know about issues and workflows. They simplify documentation. I would highly recommend that you use one, even if just for yourself.

Here is something that I have not heard about before today. Small boats, the aquatic version of drones, used by the US Navy for patrols. Apparently they are controlled via an Ubuntu VM on top of Windows 7. And the name is pretty funny too... a link textswarmboat.

Looks like a very interesting project. Oh and based on CentOS, that will be very popular around here.

A new stick is out, this time it is Android running on a quad core Inter Atom processor with 2GB of RAM. Of note, this little stick can run Linux or, this is very interesting, Windows 8.1!

Specifications listed for the Meegopad Meego-T01 include:

Processor — Intel Atom Z3735F or Z3735G (4x Silvermont cores @ 1.33GHz/1.83GHz); Intel HD Graphics
Memory/storage:
    1GB (Z3735G) or 2GB (Z3735F) DDR3L-RS-1333 RAM
    16GB or 32GB of eMMC 4.5 flash
    MicroSD slot
Wireless — 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 (via RTL 8723BS chipset)
Other I/O — HDMI; 2x micro-USB
Other features — ALC5640 audio codec
Power — AC 100 to 240V, 50/60Hz,5V/2A
Dimensions — 99.6 x 37.6 9.6mm
Weight — 46 g
Operating system — Android; Windows 8.1; Linux

@alefattorini said in Did you ever try NethServer ?:

@Reid-Cooper Not just based on CentOS, we're proudly compliant with.
You can just install CentOS and put NethServer on top of it

That's great. So easy to build on cloud instances in that case, too.

What the goal here is, I can't say. Maybe the FBI is trying to get people to fear them so that they will better protect themselves?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2838181/security/clueless-fbi-sabotages-its-anti-encryption-campaign.html

@Breffni-Potter said in The SHA1 hash function is now completely unsafe:

If you burn 110K in cash.
And have a team of cyber security experts.

Today, yes. But in six months it'll be a script and $30K in compute power. In two years it'll be $500 of AWS time.

Mint 17.1 Rebecca is coming in a few weeks, set to release in November. The big update here is that one of the largest updates to Cinnamon to date is coming with the update. Cinnamon is going to 2.4 and a lot is changing.

Smart switches are cheaper than managed switches, normally by quite a bit. And they are way easier for a small business to manage as they normally just use a web browser or a simple utility instead of making you use expensive and complex central management tools for SNMP.

Gnome has been a well known trademark for about fifteen years. But that didn't stop Groupon from attempting to file the name as their own trademark this week. However, level heads prevails and Groupon has backed down from a legal battle with Gnome over the trademark. This does not resolve Groupon from clearly being quite dodgy, however. It just means that they realized that they had no way to win this one and that open source projects will not simply be bullied.

@Eltolargo said in Substitutes for Active Directory and Windows Server:

@JaredBusch we agree on that no questions about it. I meant having email, firewall, Ad/DNS, DHCP, file server and VPN in one server that is a lot.

I agree, too. Keep that stuff separate. Especially if you are dealing with Linux, you don't have a licensing issue making you want to smoosh them all together.