Sean Michael Kerner

Sitting at the heart of the Internet itself are the key A and J root DNS servers (define) that help to ensure that Internet traffic goes where it’s intended. So it only makes sense that for the coming IPv6 adoption to actually occur, those two root servers need to be on-board. Fortunately, that’s exactly what’s […]

On Feb. 9, 1998, the open source movement was born. It was on that historical day a decade ago that Bruce Perens published the defining document of the open source movement, the Open Source Definition. In the last 10 years open source has gone from being a manifesto to becoming a powerful force across nearly […]

Quarter after quarter, year after year, Cisco Systems has been a bellwether for the IT industry. So when the networking giant sees trouble ahead, people take notice. During Cisco’s Wednesday earnings call for its second fiscal quarter, CEO John Chambers announced solid results. However, the news was tempered by his warning that the company is […]

Business employees working remotely say they believe the Internet is getting safer. But they’re actually one of the reasons it’s so unsafe, according to a new study. The study, conducted by researcher Insight Express and sponsored by Cisco, polled 2,000 remote access workers in 10 countries. Most of the respondents (56 percent) said they felt […]

Like two heavyweight prizefighters slugging it out in a title match, networking colossus Cisco and challenger Juniper Networks traded monumental announcements this week in their battle for the multibillion-dollar switch market. Make no mistake about it, the new product announcements from Cisco (for its NX-7000) and from Juniper (for its EX-series switches) are big news […]

Windows security researchers now don’t necessarily need to move to Linux to take full advantage of Metasploit 3.1. Metasploit, a framework for developing, testing, and using exploit code, received its first major update since version 3 debuted in March 2007. (Allegedly, Metasploit has also been used in the past to help expedite Windows zero-day vulnerabilities.) […]

PHP 4, deployed on tens of millions of servers globally, is among the most successful languages of all time. But its run is coming to an end. Active development for the scripting language has been discontinued and security updates will conclude in August. And for some developers, PHP 4 will be history before Valentine’s Day. […]

Some pieces of software seem to jump version numbers with every minor revision, while others seem to never change. In the case of HP’s flagship Unix offering HP-UX 11i, HP is in no rush to move to version 12. That doesn’t mean that the company isn’t continuing to improve its Unix offering, however. Yet while […]

The first new Linux kernel of 2008 is now out, showcasing improvements that run the gambit of bug fixes to new performance and feature enhancements. One addition found in the new 2.6.24 Linux kernel is the new ability for write-throttling code. “This prevents one heavily-used block device from starving the other devices. so it’s great […]

For years, the poster child of the anti-open source movement was Microsoft, with its proprietary software model. In recent years, however, the company has changed its views, starting an open source software lab to work on interoperability issues. It’s even become a purveyor of its own open source-approved licenses. What do these efforts mean? For […]