Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Gecko Rising‘ files: After months of development, eight milestone releases and two release candidates, openSUSE 11.3 is almost done. Novell’s community Linux developers today released openSUSE 11.3 RC2 which is supposed to be the final development milestone ahead of openSUSE hitting general availability. Currently openSUSE 11.3 is set for official release on July 15th. […]

The development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been closely watched by developers and open source fans, and, while the company won’t say just when it’s coming, it took another big step closer this week. That came in the form of the second beta of RHEL 6, which Red Hat says includes some added […]

Hadoop’s having a big week. The open source project, which provides for the management of vast data sets, saw backer Yahoo bring out a new edition of Hadoop. So did commercial vendor Cloudera. Version 3 of Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop, as it’s known, offers a new enterprise edition. Additionally, some features that had been closed […]

IBM continues its string of acquisitions, snapping up endpoint management player BigFix. It’s a move poised to help IBM’s Tivoli deliver additional features to IT managers and network security pros looking to better lock down their networks and thwart non-compliant systems from getting access to network assets. Datamation takes a look at the deal, what […]

From the ‘Firefox 4 Features‘ files: Firefox Sync (formerly known as Mozilla Weave) is being upgraded to version 1.4 this week, in preparation for inclusion into Firefox 4 later this year. Sync is a browser bookmark/tab/history synchronization add-on for Firefox 3.6.x now, but the plan moving forward is to integrate it directly into Firefox 4. […]

Computer networks aren’t getting any simpler. The explosion of internal and external data sources and the rapid adoption of high bandwidth media sources like video, require more sophisticated networks and an ever-rising challenge to manage them. Datamation reports on the latest efforts by Cisco to bring new technology to address the management problem. The company’s […]

From the ‘Are We There Yet?‘ files: Drum roll please… This post is my 1,000th blog post at Netstat-vat for InternetNews.com. That sure seems like a lot of posts to me and a mountain of work, but it’s all been good fun and very rewarding personally and professionally. This blog has been home to posts […]

As energy costs grow, so does the interest in better management, efficiency and cost-savings solutions. The so-called smart grid is one approach designed to help manage and control electricity costs. Because the smart grid relies on a network of connections, it should come as no surprise that Cisco sees an opportunity to bring its expertise […]

The race to unseat the top player in the nascent tablet market just got a new entrant. That would be Cisco, which has announced plans to bring a tablet computer to market in early 2011, following a period of customer trials in the third quarter this year. The Cius is powered by Google’s Android operating […]

From the ‘Cya Paul!’ files: I’m a huge fan of the work and the leadership that current Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields has done since 2008. Frields has always been one of the most articulate, honest and insightful Linux community leaders that I have ever had the pleasure of working with. As the saying goes […]

Computing giant HP is expanding the menu of security options available from its TippingPoint division, a business unit it picked up with the acquisition of 3Com. With the new security technology, HP is offering a new virtual intrusion prevention system dubbed vController, which routes incoming traffic on virtual machines to physical systems and then relays […]

From the ‘Networking is about more than just hardware‘ files: Global networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent is best known to me (and many others) as a hardware vendor for communications and networking equipment. Networks however are really just a means to an end though aren’t they? That’s a fact that Alcatel-Lucent realizes and they’ve now acquired the […]