/ By Terrence Hines / Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

Cyber Security end user training – Course Recommendation

NovaTech Services views cyber security as a top priority.  We suggest all our clients consider giving end users cyber security training.  The end user continues to be the riskiest point for IT security.  Many users expect the IT systems to be the complete protection but they have a key responsibility themselves.  There are many options for training and we suggest the following:

 

https://www.eset.com/us/cybertraining/

 

It covers key cyber security topics for end users.  It’s free from Eset. It displays their logo but does not push any of their products.  The webinar lasts 1.5 hours.  But users can stop after 30 minutes and take the test.  If they get 7/10 questions right they get a certificate they can email to prove completion of the course.

 

This requires users to register or you can register as a company and provide a link for individual users.  The trick to viewing the webinar as a student and not “logging in as a manager” is not to answer the question about how many employees there are when registering as a student.

/ By Terrence Hines / Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

protection check against WannaCry ransomware

TrendMicro has a tool that verifies if the correct (needed) MS Patch (to protect against WannaCry) is active on a computer / server.  This seems to be a great Verification Tool and recommend to run it to confirm SMB V1 (WannaCry) protection.
I renamed the attached file with a -TXT-  instead of Dot EXEcutable
so, need to rename the attachment before using.
supportcustomizedpackage-ms17-010-chk – Copy
Please note that after the TrendMicro Check Utility verifies for the needed MS Patch, it prompts to Disable SMB V1 (maybe through the registry).
Good article on SMBv1 and turning it off,
The question is: can we turn SMBv1 off on all our supported servers ?  (to prevent against other future variants of risk)
The claim is that SMBv1 is over 30 years old, and most communication is now done over SMBv2 and SMBv3
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2016/09/16/stop-using-smb1/
 
How to Disable SMB1
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2696547/how-to-enable-and-disable-smbv1,-smbv2,-and-smbv3-in-windows-vista,-windows-server-2008,-windows-7,-windows-server-2008-r2,-windows-8,-and-windows-server-2012
/ By Terrence Hines / Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

NovaTech Submission to JPL Data Systems Implementation

NovaTech Services pursuing NASA JPL systems engineering.  Please provide any partnership or product ideas to it-plan@novatechservices.com

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NASA JPL RFI Response 6

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JPL Data Systems Implementation and Operations (DSIO) Recompetition for Software/Systems Engineering, Operations, Data Management/Distribution, and Support Services

Solicitation Number: LM-17-10
https://www.fbo.gov/ or https://vendors.nvdb.nasa.gov/
/ By Terrence Hines / Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

NASA JPL Data Systems Implementation – partner solicitation

NovaTech Services to pursue NASA JPL systems engineering.  Please provide any partnership or product ideas to it-plan@novatechservices.com

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JPL Data Systems Implementation and Operations (DSIO) Recompetition for Software/Systems Engineering, Operations, Data Management/Distribution, and Support Services

Solicitation Number: LM-17-10
https://www.fbo.gov/ or https://vendors.nvdb.nasa.gov/
/ By admin / Cloud • Cloud Hosting • Customer Service/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer and AWS: What’s the Difference?

People often compare SoftLayer with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It’s easy to understand why. We’ve both built scalable infrastructure platforms to provide cloud resources to the same broad range of customers—from individual entrepreneurs to the world’s largest enterprises.

But while the desire to compare is understandable, the comparison itself isn’t quite apt. The SoftLayer platform is fundamentally different from AWS.

In fact, AWS could be run on SoftLayer. SoftLayer couldn’t be run on AWS.

AWS provisions in the public cloud.

When AWS started letting customers have virtual machines deployed on the infrastructure that AWS had built for their e-commerce business, AWS accelerated the adoption of virtual server hosting within the existing world of Web hosting.In an AWS cloud environment, customers order the computing and storage resources they need, and AWS deploys those resources on demand. The mechanics of that deployment are important to note, though.

AWS has data centers full of physical servers that are integrated with each other in a massive public cloud environment. These servers are managed and maintained by AWS, and they collectively make up the available cloud infrastructure in the facility.

AWS installs a virtualization layer (also known as hypervisor) on these physical servers to tie the individual nodes into the environment’s total capacity. When a customer orders a cloud server from AWS, this virtualization layer finds a node with the requested resources available and provisions a server image with the customer’s desired operating system, applications, etc. The entire process is quick and automated, and each customer has complete control over the resources he or she ordered.

That virtualization layer is serving a purpose, and it may seem insignificant, but it highlights a critical difference in their platform and ours:

AWS automates and provisions at the hypervisor level, while SoftLayer automates and provisions at the data center level.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/softlayer-and-aws-whats-difference

/ By admin / Cloud • Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

Make the most of Watson Language Translation on Bluemix

How many languages can you speak (sorry, fellow geeks; I mean human languages, not programming)?

Every day people across the globe depend more and more on the Internet for their day-to-day activities, increasing the need for software to support multiple languages to accommodate the growing diversity of its users. If you work developing software, this means it is only a matter of time before you get tasked to translate your applications.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could learn something with just a few key strokes? Just like Neo in The Matrix when he learns kung fu. Well, wish no more! I’ll show you how to teach your applications to speak in multiple languages with just a few key strokes using Watson’s Language Translation service, available through Bluemix. It provides on-the-fly translation between many languages. You pay only for what you use and it’s consumable through web services, which means pretty much any application can connect to it—and it’s platform and technology agnostic!

I’ll show you how easy it is to create a PHP program with language translation capabilities using Watson’s service.

Step 1: The client.

You can write your own code to interact with Watson’s Translation API, but why should you? The work is already done for you. You can pull in the client via Composer, the de-facto dependency manager for PHP. Make sure you have Composer installed, then create a composer.json file with the following contents:

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/watson-bluemix-language-translation

/ By admin / Cloud • Cloud Hosting/ 0 Comments

For a Limited Time Only: Free POWER8 Servers

So maybe you’ve heard that POWER8 servers are now available from SoftLayer. But did you know you can try them for free?

Yep. That’s right. For. Free.

Even better: We’re excited to extend this offer to our new and existing customers. For a limited time only, our customers can take up to $2,238 off their entire order using promo code FREEPOWER8.

That’s a nice round number. (Not!)

I bet you’re wondering how we came up with that number. Well, $2,238 gets you the biggest, baddest POWER8-est machine we offer: POWER8 C812L-SSD, loaded with 10 cores, 3.49GHz, 512GB RAM, and 2x960GB SSDs. Of course, if you don’t need that much POWER (pun intended), we offer three other configs that might fit your lifestyle a little bit better.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2016/limited-time-only-free-power8-servers