Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Hot Patching’ files:   Make no mistake about it, Oracle is serious about its Linux business. Today Oracle announced what I consider to be a significant addition to that business with the acquisition of Ksplice. Ksplice is this really neat tech that lets Linux admins ‘hot patch’ that is patch an in-use system […]

From the ‘More Secure RHEL’ files: After a little less than two months of beta testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is now generally available. RHEL 5.7 hit public beta status at the end of May, and isn’t just about bug fixes and driver support. RHEL 5.7 also introduces some new features to RHEL 5.x […]

Apple is out with a new version of its Safari web browser this week. While Safari 5.1 is included as part of the new OS X Lion release, it’s also available for Windows PC users as well. The Safari 5.1 release provides at least 58 security updates, including fixes for memory, WebKit and privacy leakage […]

After years of reselling and rebranding gear from other networking vendors, Dell now is acquiring its own networking company. Dell announced today that it was acquiring privately-held networking vendor Force10 Networks. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed. In a call with analysts, Dell executives were questioned as to why the acquisition […]

Oracle is out this week with its July critical patch update (CPU), patching at least 78 different vulnerabilities across all of its various product lines. Oracle’s last CPU came out in April fixing 73 vulnerabilities. Topping the list of vulnerabilities by category is the Oracle-Sun product suite which is being fixed for 23 issues. Oracle […]

The virtualization business is big business, just ask VMware. VMware reported second-quarter fiscal 2011 earnings late Tuesday with revenues coming in at $921 million. The second quarter revenue tally is a 37 percent year-over-year increase. Net Income was reported at $220 million, or $0.51 per share, up from $75 million, or $0.18 per share, in […]

Oracle is continuing to push innovation forward on the open source VirtualBox project. VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a […]

The open source Joomla Content Management System (CMS) is out today with a new release that makes the platform more secure and extensible. Joomla 1.7 provides users with an improved updating mechanism as well as an integrated approach for finding and installing extensions. The new updating system is seen by Joomla as being a tool […]

From the ‘Circle This’ files: There was a time when all I needed to know about Linus Torvalds or the current state of kernel development, could be found on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. This week,  Linus Torvalds posted a note on Google +, advising the kernel community that Linux 3.0 would be delayed to […]

From the ‘365 Days of Life’ files: It was 1 year ago today that openstack was officially announced. I remember the day well, because it was the first time I’ve spoken with Chris Kemp, NASA’s chief technology officer for IT. NASA was one of the key founding members of OpenStack alongside Rackspace. It is NASA’s […]

At the age of 100, IBM still is continuing to grow and expand. IBM (NYSE:IBM) reported second quarter fiscal 2011 earning on Monday, with both revenue and income growth, as multiple segments of its business expand. Part of the growth is fueled by IBM’s expanding presence in growth markets and some is coming at the […]

Mono isn’t dead, and SUSE isn’t giving up on it entirely either. Attachmate’s SUSE Linux division today officially announced a deal with startup Xamarin for support and ongoing development of Mono. Xamarin is a company founded by former Novell employees including Nat Friedman and Mono founder Miguel de Icaza. The pair founded the company after […]