Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As we celebrate the American Independence Day, we’re reminded of the importance of freedom and efficiency in all aspects of life, including our telecommunications networks. Just as July 4th symbolizes breaking free from constraints, it’s time to liberate your network from the inefficiencies caused by sleeping cells.

Configuring virtual machines (VMs) is an important task for any organization. Users across departments depend on sysadmins, engineers, and the rest of the IT ops and infrastructure teams to get VMs secured and ready to use, whether you’re spinning one up for a quick test, a new database server, or standing up a whole fleet of dev-ready machines. That need for variability AND consistency can also make VM configuration one of the most tedious sysadmin tasks, especially at enterprise scale.

As a part of Perforce, we are committed to maintaining the highest standards of security for our products and our customers. Recently, we had the opportunity to further strengthen our security practices thanks to valuable input from an independent security researcher. This experience has not only reinforced our robust security protocols but also provided insights that we're eager to share with the wider tech community.

For security reasons, you generally want to uninstall talk, samba, and apache2 in your infrastructure. However, on your webservers, which have the webserver CFEngine class defined, you might want Apache to be installed. With the conditional-installer module, you can put talk,samba,apache2 in the list of packages to uninstall. And in the list of packages to install, you can put apache2 with the condition webserver. Hence, the module will install apache2 on your webservers and uninstall it everywhere else.

Did you know the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) ships with a host info report? That’s right, you can simply run cf-agent --bundlesequence host_info_report and a report will be generated. command output It’s packed with information about the specific host. Let’s peek: command output Here are the section headers: command output Running with the show_software class defined will add information about installed packages command output command output Happy Friday!

The consequences of not patching are everywhere: remember the Log4j vulnerability that grants hackers complete access to your devices? The best way to prevent this from happening is to use a patched version of Log4j — so why did this become a catastrophic and prolific security vulnerability event? A: Because people hate, forget, or simply dismiss patching as a labor-intensive part of managing their infrastructure.

Ah, RPA—the new-wave miracle cure for mundane tasks, cost-cutting, and boosting efficiency. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is hailed as a game changer for businesses looking to streamline operations and improve efficiency. By automating repetitive and mundane tasks, RPA allows employees to focus on more strategic, value-added activities. Yet, as anyone who’s ventured into its world knows, implementing RPA isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.