When choosing a cloud service for your enterprise, there are several things consider.

Public Cloud Offerings
Pro: Particularly useful for “informal” buyers, small to medium size business users or Enterprise users outside of the core IT Operations department.
Con: Public Clouds traditionally do not meet Enterprise security requirements.

Private & Hybrid Cloud Offerings:
Pro: Private Cloud Hosting or Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) as Service provides full control and is useful in the delivery of applications that have security and scalability requirements.
Con: Most of the perceived hourly cost savings marketed by “Public” Cloud providers can not be achieved in the Enterprise environment because the core components of their IT infrastructures are “Always-on”.

Atlantic Metro’s Thoughts
Public, Private, Hybrid, and Virtual Private Data Center as Service all play unique roles in the growing “CLOUD” marketplace. However, when it comes down to way Enterprise IT professionals utilize Cloud services, they need an Always-on and reliable delivery platform for their users. There are no costs savings to be achieved with mail servers, share point servers, or file servers. The true cost savings for Enterprise IT groups is the ability to deploy application resources quickly in a secure environment that meets all standards mandated by their companies.

Learn more about Atlantic Metro’s Virtual Private Data Center as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service offerings.

Contact us today for a FREE Cloud readiness evaluation and discuss opportunities that will allow you to curb your shrinking IT budget.

Besides the obvious changes such as logins, hostname, network information, and hosts file entry, one key item that is commonly overlooked is recreating the SSH keys. Recreating these keys will aid in the prevention of a possible MITM attack on your “secure” connection. If someone were to obtain your private key, they could quite possibly be able to hijack your network traffic.

Here is a real quick way to recreate the keys on a CentOS/Fedora based system:

# delete your existing private keys
rm -i /etc/ssh/*key*

# re-generate the rsa1 key
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N '' -t rsa1

# re-generate the dsa key
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N '' -t dsa

Feel free to place this in any “post install” script swapping out the “-i” switch with the “-f” switch for the “rm” command used in the example above. The “-i” switch stands for for “interactive”, meaning it will prompt you prior to the removal of said data. The “-f” stands for “force”. “Force” will ignore nonexistent files and will never prompt you. I choose the “-i” option for my own sanity.

I was recently tasked with duplicating three production servers for a new staging environment within the same network. For this to occur, it would not be  as simple to just clone and sysprep. For various reasons, I decided to clone from a template, configure the basics, install features, and deploy app/db specific software. The only portion of this that would be time consuming would be getting the roles and features to be the same from production to staging.

Let’s get this done in under two minutes.

Make certain you have opened powershell with admin/elevated rights

• Step 1: Run PowerShell with the ServerManager module:

import-module servermanager

• Step 2: Export the list of currently installed features to XML

Get-WindowsFeature | ? { $_.installed } | Export-Clixml \\server\share\features.xml

• Step 3: On second server, run PowerShell and import XML

$f = Import-Clixml \\server\share\features.xml

• Step 4: Pipe that bad boy into Add-WindowsFeature!

$f | Add-WindowsFeature

• Step 5: Restart, if needed

Restart-Computer

• Step 6: Go eat a sandwich

mmmmmmm

After this was completed, I ran the installers for the app/db software and passed back to the client’s dev team for specific data load and deployment.

You can get creative with these types of one-liners when you start making your own scripts and go really nutty with it. For now, this just shows some basic tasks that could potentially save you anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes depending.

-Anton

We have been seeing it everywhere lately: SOPA this, PIPA that. Websites shutting down in protest. Petitions created in an attempt to curb Senators’ desires to get these pieces of legislature passed and eventually enacted into our society. Now, there is a lot of information floating around cyberspace; some accurate, and some not so accurate.

You might be thinking that there is already a law in place to prevent pirated material from being displayed on the Internet. You would be correct. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA was enacted in 1998, and bans copyrighted material from being used on websites as accessible media.  The difference between DMCA and SOPA/PIPA is twofold. First, the actual providers of the content themselves (Internet Providers or their users) were not liable (under DMCA) for the illegal material they were providing/using. Second, once the illegal material was located, owners of that material could only demand the material be taken down. Only after the ultimatum was given and ignored could copyright owners go after those individual sites or even the users themselves with lawsuits.

So the main question becomes how, if these bills pass, will they affect me or my business? SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) would definitely have an impact on your Internet experience. The key legislators are pushing for a stop to the piracy of illegal material like movies, music and general media. If enacted, websites, search engines, Internet service providers and even payment facilities (i.e. paypal) would have to block access to infringing material on their sites, as well as monitor continuous user content activity on their websites or networks. The idea is there, I agree, but there will be backfire from these bills if enacted.  Websites such as Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo have already divulged the fact that if these bills pass, their websites will very likely shut down. So would they affect a start-up or small business? Essentially, yes. Each independent website that has user provided content or even hyperlinks to pirated material of any type would be at risk to be shut down. Completely.

A Turn in the Tides.

On January 20, 2012, around 7:30 AM the voice of the masses was heard. U.S Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) put the bill on the backburner, as millions of Americans protested in anger over the legislation. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products,” Smith said in a statement. SOPA is not gone altogether, by any means. The senators that initially composed the bill are revamping the act, which always takes time. So for now, the issue of SOPA and PIPA has been curbed.

By: Rob Lombardi

Parsippany, NJ, January 16, 2011 – Atlantic Metro Communications, an award-winning, full-service Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider with solutions for businesses that make technology simple, manageable and affordable, today announced its cloud hosting services for retailers seeking cost-effective, flexible solutions.

As over 22,000 retailers meet in NYC this week for the NRF’s Annual Convention, industry professionals contemplate current technology issues such as cloud computing. This industry, among others, is seeing major momentum toward hosted cloud-based solutions. This trend is in part due to the fact that retailers are compelled to reduce costs while improving efficiency.

Atlantic Metro’s Cloud Hosting is based on the most innovative virtualization technologies that allow an unlimited number of virtual machines to be created. It has considerable advantages over the other hosting solutions, as the resource usage and the security of the cloud is guaranteed. Atlantic Metro’s cloud technology removes physical limitations for growth and makes custom solutions affordable and flexible. Further, its services are compatible across all platforms.

“Whether your company has decided to virtualize its internal servers or build a complete infrastructure from the ground up, it is important to work with a trusted partner like Atlantic Metro who can be flexible to meet an organization’s needs,” according to Matthew Lombardi, CEO of of Atlantic Metro. “With many long-standing retail customers, Atlantic Metro is committed to helping customers grow their businesses through the use of cost-effective, impactful solutions”.

Learn more about Atlantic Metro’s cloud solutions.