Version control system, authoritarianism and freedom to code

by Jimmy Olano | Last updated Aug 27, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Version control system, authoritarianism and freedom to code

Version control is essential for the continuous development of software today: it is the basis for the continuous release and implementation of software.

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How Open Hardware Intends to Take Over Our World (Again)

by Jimmy Olano | Last updated Aug 27, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Open Hardware: The Past and Present

In the 1980s, Open Hardware made our society shake with the irruption of a giant: IBM® It seems that now in 2018 history will repeat itself!

Recently, we wrote on the blog a short story about supercomputers, as well as the big threat, without enough media coverage, about Spectre and Meltdown’s vulnerabilities. We will elaborate both articles in this post. We’ ll tell you about Open Architecture, Free Hardware and Open Hardware and their subtle differences.

Brief Historical Background

We always say that, if we don’t know where we come from, we’ll never know where we’re going. Although we have been using computers in a very useful way since the Second World War, a period that most of us have not experienced, we have known about computers in a domestic and massive way since the 1980s, and that is what many of us have experienced.

By the end of the 1970’s there were countless brands on the market, and yes, the Apple® company had also been born, which was starting to stand out from the rest, and this did not go unnoticed by the great Blue Giant® called Industrial Business Machines®, better known as IBM®. Does the phrase IBM® compatible ring a bell? IBM® has never lost its position in this server market thanks to its vertical integration: from the factory of its components and peripherals, operating systems, applications, user training and business support, all this is done by IBM® (and it continues to do so). So when they realised the potential for sales to small and medium-sized businesses, as well as to households, they realised that they were’late to the party’. They decided then, to save time, to choose the Open Architecture, and settled their operations in Boca Raton, in the state of Florida. This is where the Standard Industrial Architecture (SIA) was born, the precursor of the Open Hardware that we are discussing here today.

Former IBM building in Boca Raton, Florida (photo taken by Phillip Pessar in 2017 and published on Flickr)

After this announcement, many manufacturers began to build peripherals and accessories, as the technical specifications were very clear and widely known. What was the hidden card in the IBM® sleeve? Well, almost nothing, they reserved the opening of the motherboard BIOS by means of copyright, an essential component for this Open Architecture, and they charged for intellectual property rights to any manufacturer, under penalty of powerful lawsuits to those who dared to compete in this critical area (the code was within everyone’s reach, since IBM® published it in one of its manuals inadvertently).

IBM PC ROM BIOS (photo taken by German on Wikipedia)

Shortly thereafter Compaq® (acquired by Hewlett Packard® in 2002, assimilated as a division and now extinct) performed reverse engineering on the BIOS and won the legal case proving that it did not use any IBM® patents. Compaq® did not succeed in all its battles: IBM® commissioned a real army of lawyers to protect its 9,000 patents and, from all its searching and searching, realized that Compaq® violated one of them: they had to pay IBM® US$ 130 million for the right to use the copyright on just one of them.

Another IBM® mistake was to allow Microsoft® to sell the MS-DOS® operating system (which they had purchased from another programmer for US$80,000 and sold non-exclusively to IBM® as PC-DOS®) to those clone system manufacturers. In addition, by the year 2000, the term Wintel was well established in the computing community: Intel® refused to sign exclusive contracts for its 386 processors with IBM® in order to increase its sales in the clone market. However, IBM® did not give up and continued its fight, until in 2005, when it finally decided to sell the computer division to the Asian giant Lenovo®, which is the brand we buy today and many of us use because of the durability of its devices.

Lenovo Headquarters 2015 in Xibeiwang

Lenovo Headquarters 2015 in Xibeiwang (photo wikipedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenovo_western_headquarters_(20170707113944).jpg)

It was also a failed attempt in 1987 to reverse the use of Open Hardware with more restrictions in the famous and now extinct Micro Channel Architecture (MCA), which was not compatible with the software, which involved new compilations of all existing software running on IBM® compatible. But it wasn’t all hopeless for IBM®, nor for us as users: this model’s IBM PS/2® motherboards still come with VGA standard connectors and PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors (although they are now disappearing in favor of USB and DVI/HDMI).

This story ends with Compaq’s quick response, and together with Zenith Data Systems®, Tandy®, HP®, Olivetti®, NEC®, AST Research®, Epson® and WYSE® created the Extended Industrial Standard Architecture (EISA) that evolved with the extinct VESA (ISA backward compatibility) and the one we currently use to write these lines: the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus (PCI and now evolved as PCI Express). The PCI bus was so new and powerful that even Apple® adopted it in 1995 for its Power Macintosh and, guess what, inside the Power Macintosh there was a processor called PowerPC from…. IBM®!

Open Hardware and Free Hardware

As you can see, the fact that we have the source code of an application or electronic device (and that it is available to millions of people and is well known) and that we can improve it does not mean that it is free of charge for our pockets, and the Open Hardware is an example of this. Free Hardware, on the other hand, does not place any restrictions (such as Free Software):

1. With Open Hardware and Free Hardware, we can both use them how and where we want or need them.
2. With Open Hardware and Free Hardware, both, we know how it works, and this is where the differences begin: any improvement we make to Open Hardware must be paid back to the company that owns the copyright, in order to know how much we must pay for the improvement we make ourselves. In this scenario, several alternatives may occur: we may be released from payment (but not the other clients) or, in the best of cases, paid by royalties, in other words, our authorship may be acknowledged (based on the knowledge that previously allowed us to know, in complete contrast to the case of the company Compaq® that we have mentioned).
3. With Open Hardware and Free Hardware we can distribute the source code to third parties to facilitate its dissemination, as it is public, open and notorious code. However, making a profit from the Open Hardware will be impossible because we do not own the copyright, perhaps we could recover the value of the substrate (paper, DVD, etc.) where the information is contained.
4. In the Free Hardware we will be able to share and even sell our improvements to third parties without any problems, but in the case of the Open Hardware we already saw in the zero point that is not allowed in any way or form.

Quote: “Directly said: with Open Hardware we will always have to pay the patent fees and any improvements we make will always belong to the company that owns the copyright“.

The Open Hardware and the lesson learned

IBM PowerPC 604e from 1996

IBM® learned from their mistakes, and the PowerPC processor was made in partnership with Motorola®, and Apple® was involved, with millions of customers eager to invest their savings in cutting-edge technology. Everything took an unexpected turn in 2007, when Steve Jobs announced that Apple® would start using Intel® processors and that they had always been prepared for them because they secretly also compiled their proprietary operating system on both hardware platforms.

Open Hardware: POWER8 processor in an E870 Power System

Everything looked hopeless to the POWER processor… or so.
The point is that IBM® never cut back on developing and maintaining this processor, and never forgot that Intel® refused to sign any exclusive agreement, which was an unforgettable lesson for them (IBM®). So good and powerful are the POWER1 to POWER7 series processors that they were used in two of the thirteen most powerful supercomputers in Spain: the Magerit and the Marenostrum (I and II).

Open Hardware: Magerit Supercomputer in Spain, year 2011

If you’ve come this far, you probably have the feeling that we’re earning a commission for advertising and “selling you this POWER9 processor” : each of these processors costs more than 5,000 euros to change (not to mention other components) and are intended – or intend – to dethrone the reign of the Intel® Xeon® on the large application and database servers. In fact, until 2013 they were only used on IBM® large servers, but in that year they sponsored the Open POWER Foundation.

The Open POWER Foundation

It is led by IBM® and the following Platinum Members: Google®, nVidia®, Micron®, Red Hat® and Ubuntu®. Its purpose is to “popularize” the use of these processors and eventually displace Intel® from its Web 2.0 site of honor. Copying the whole market is not an easy task, that’s why they must leave their niche in Unix® to reach Linux, which is present in 498 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers of today, and we know that if they use Linux they can be monitored with Pandora FMS in a reliable and precise way.

From this group that makes up the Open POWER Foundation, you may find it strange to see nVidia®, a video card manufacturer, how does this company fit into this supercomputer business and what does it have to do with Open Hardware?

POWER9 Features

To understand why nVidia® is interested in participating in the Open Hardware without really manufacturing anything with this paradigm, we will need to look very briefly at the capabilities and architecture of this POWER9 processor:

• They start from 24 cores and what is really interesting is their ability to connect to the new NVLink 2.0 standard, which allows parallel computing to nVidia® cards. This allows a high data throughput (25 Gbps) to be passed quickly to these auxiliary processors and every millisecond saved in data transmission and reception is a lot of computing power used by POWER9.
• They also support the PCI-Express 4.0 standard that allows up to 16 Gbps to connect any peripheral that needs to transmit data to the processor.
• The most important thing: boot security, as it is totally immune to attacks that corrupt the boot sector (in theory, a reboot will be enough to load the OS cleanly).

But wait, there’s more…

Unfortunately, on May 22, 2018, IBM® officially announced that although they were not exempt from the two Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities exposed in January 2018, a fourth of high severity was found at the beginning of May, which forced the publication of a correction by their official repositories and also the respective patches were given to Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical (Ubuntu) while the situation in future developments is being completely corrected (we speculate on the presentation of POWER10, by mere logic).

What does Open Hardware have to do with vulnerabilities in general? A lot was said about the very little time of grace offered by the researchers who discovered Spectre and Meltdown, which put at risk the security of countless equipment we use on websites such as banking platforms, the oil industry and nuclear power plants. IBM®, by delivering everything about the performance of its processors, opens up the possibility of early detection of design flaws involving vulnerability. Although this is a long-term task, it will pay off in the future.

Conclusions

The flexibilization of licenses and patents to spread knowledge about hardware will greatly help future companies to achieve the same results in different ways and forms, as Compaq® did last century and as history shows.

Donald Knuth: learning from the best

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Jun 10, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Donald Knuth; The Best Programmer Ever, right?

He defines himself as “a geek”, he was one of the main people responsible for laying the foundations of modern compilers and is considered the “father” of algorithm analysis.

Some of you may know him, or at least know his name, but he is unknown to the non-specialist public. However, when we refer to Donald Knuth, we are talking about a computer legend, whose life and work are plagued with achievements and anecdotes.

Some people even award him the honorary title of “Best Programmer in History” for the precision of his programs, especially the one called TeX, which only has a few bugs. In addition, we also owe him a series of volumes considered by many as one of the “Bibles” of programming. Do you want to get to know him a little better?

A brief summary about Donald Knuth

Today, Donald Knuth is a veteran; he is 80 years old and considering the youth of his discipline – computer science – it could be said that he has lived almost since its inception.

Donald Ervin Knuth was born one day in 1938 in Milwaukee (United States) in the environment of a Lutheran family, and a few years later decided to study physics at University. Despite his inclinations for programming, it should come as no surprise that he did not study computer science; at that time, computer science did not even exist, so programming tasks were carried out by physicists and mathematicians. Perhaps because of this, and because of his insatiable thirst for knowledge, Knuth completed a few years later also the career of mathematics. A few years earlier, in 1958, he had already written his first program.

The idea of capturing his knowledge to share it with the world was quite precocious. Already in 1962 he began to write the work that, perhaps, gave him greater fame; it is the classic “The art of computer programming”, a colossal work, projected for 7 volumes and we currently only have 3 of them (Knuth is currently writing the 4th one).

For many developers, The art of programming computers is considered something like the programming Bible, one of the most fundamental works written on the subject, and the one that laid the foundation for algorithmic analysis. It’s quite a big deal…

What about the best software ever?

Another of Donald Knuth’s milestones is his TeX software, considered by some to be the most perfect program ever written.

TeX is a word processor, which is commonly used integrated into the LaTeX system (among others), widely used in the academic world for the way it edits mathematical equations. In fact, TeX arose from the professor’s own need who, disappointed by the poor quality of the typography of the first volumes of The Art of Programming Computers, developed the program in order to have a higher quality text editing tool.

The truth is that TeX brings together some anecdotes that have served to earn Professor Knuth the honorary title of “best programmer in history”.

The popular thing is the reward, offered by the professor himself, for all those who are able to detect an error in the program.

The prize is $2.56, or what Knuth calls a “hexadecimal dollar” (the professor is also known for his sense of humour). However, it has to be said that this was quite successful; despite its complexity, the software is so good that very few errors have been found. In addition, most of those who have done so have not cashed the professor’s cheques, but keep them, with admiration, as a historical object.

Another curious anecdote is found in the TeX version numbering system. Following the usual methodology, when TeX reached version 3.1 it did not continue towards 3.2 as would be expected, but towards 3.14, moving closer and closer in its subsequent versions towards the number π (3,14159265…). In this regard, it is foreseen that this anecdote will have a sad and beautiful ending: the professor asked that the last version, after his death, be the π, and all the errors that he conserves then will not be considered as such, but as characteristics of the program.

However, let us rejoice that the teacher is still active. He currently combines the continuation of his volumes of The Art of Programming Computers with his lectures at Stanford University, which he holds the title of Professor Emeritus. Some of them can even be found online and although they are technically complex, they are thought to be excellent by experts.

Figures like Professor Knuth’s have been inspiring generations and the dissemination of his knowledge is still awaited by many today.

However, in order to find more volumes of Professor Knuth’s work we might have to wait a while. What if, in the meantime, you get to know a little better Pandora FMS?

Pandora FMS is flexible monitoring software, which is capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Do you want to know what Pandora FMS can offer you? Click here:

Currently, hundreds of companies and organizations around the world, including public institutions and universities, already have Pandora FMS. Do you want to know some of the Pandora FMS customers and some success stories? Take a look here: https://pandorafms.com/pandora-customers/

Or you can also send us any query you may have about Pandora FMS. You can do it in a very simple way, thanks to the contact form that can be found at the following address: https://pandorafms.com/contact/

Do not hesitate to send us your questions. The team behind Pandora FMS will be delighted to help you!

And don’t forget to have a look at the other articles that we have published in this blog, we are pretty sure that you will like them…

What did you think of this article on Donald Knuth?

Leave us your opinion about Donald Knuth in the comments section below.

We will be happy to answer all your questions.

We hope to see you soon here again, we hope you liked this article, and we hope you keep learning with our blog!

The strange case of SNMP: A weird story about protocols

by Dimas Pardo | Last updated Jun 10, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

What is SNMP? A very useful and interesting protocol

A crime had taken place in Manhattan Grow, a well-established company, so to speak, of invoices. Someone shouted “OH MY GOD, WE MUST FIND THE GUILTY ONE! There wasn’t enough coffee and doughnuts in the machine to calm the entire office.

In the middle of summer, the sky was slowly walking towards dusk, slowly fading away. No one was going to leave Manhattan Grow until the mess was fixed. Heads were going to roll.

They handed the case over to one of the veterans, a senior systems chief who had experienced everything possible within the company. His name was Amonario and, as you can imagine, he was about to retire.

Amonario enjoyed going out and smoking his cigarettes on the stairs and configuring switches and routers by hand by using a cable. That’s how happy he was. Lately, however, something was giving him a headache. That was caused by a new junior systems technician. His name was “Fraguas”.

Fraguas was much more used to the technological whirlwind of the new times. He could break records at Angry Birds and thought he was going to become a millionaire at any moment thanks to the development of a new mobile application. His chair in the computer fish tank was the finest and most customized. He could sit for hours with his pc and configure it all without having to move a single millimeter from his chair.

The boss brought both of them to his office on the top floor.

-Okay gentlemen, there has been a cybercrime in our domains. An identity theft that involves a loss of about three million euros.

-Don’t worry, sir, I’ll take care of it – Amonary said.

–We will take care of it! – Fraguas said.

“The new one” initially followed the veteran. Did he really intend to check the computers one by one? All of them? In order to see if he could find something. He went from one computer to another looking at records and files! However, Fraguas, simply got into the business network to look at the moves of each one in it, he would notice if someone had touched the invoices and if so he would try to scan their IP to see if they had really committed the cybercrime. He would do it thanks to the SNMP protocol, which would make it easy for him to explore the traces left by the cybercriminal.

What is SNMP?

–SNMP? What is SNMP?

-What do you mean, “What is SNMP, Amonary? I thought you knew all the possible topics – this touched the sensitive nerve of Amonary, but Fraguas continued with a smile in his face.

-You see, SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol that allows network administrators to manage network devices and diagnose their problems. The SNMP protocol has two different ways of working: polling and traps. Polling relies on sending remote queries either actively or on demand, executing a synchronous query operation. Traps, however, are rather messages that launch SNMP devices to an already constituted address, based on changes or events, this time asynchronously.

-Like an application layer protocol that enables the exchange of administration data between network instruments.

-That’s right! Instruments or devices that support SNMP include routers, switches, servers, printers, modems and so on. It empowers administrators, like us, to monitor network performance, find and solve their problems and to plan its growth. It is made up of a set of rules for network management, comprising a protocol application layer, a schema database, and a set of data objects. The most widely used SNMP versions are SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) and SNMP version 2 (SNMPv2). The latest release, SNMPv3, has representative advances in relation to its predecessors, especially in terms of security, but it has not been fully approved by the industry. I don’t understand very well why.

-In general, we can say that SNMP is used to configure remote devices -said Fraguas-. Configuration information can be triggered to each host interconnected with the network from the management system. It is also used to monitor overall network performance. You can track the processing speed and capabilities of the network, and get information about data transfers. And of course to detect network errors or inadequate access. What we’re going to come up with right now is pretty good for finding that scoundrel. In fact, we can also set up alarms that are triggered on network devices when certain events occur. When an alarm is triggered, the device sends an event signal to the administration system and that saves a lot of time.

Thanks to the SNMP protocol, our friends followed in the footsteps of cybercrime and finally found the crook. This meant a promotion and a pat on the back from the leaders, but more importantly, it united these two agents with a great friendship that would last for many years and many beers on the way out.

By the way, do you know who is taking advantage of this famous protocol, apart from our Manhattan Grow detectives? Pandora FMS, a flexible monitoring system, which is capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

For example, in Pandora FMS you can easily create an SNMP module. We explain you how in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHHG7FQe8DU&t

You can also meet Pandora FMS directly. Click here: https://pandorafms.com/

You can even send us any query you may have about Pandora FMS. You can easily do it, thanks to the contact form at the following address:
https://pandorafms.com/contact/

Don’t forget to leave a comment in the comments section. what is SNMP? Hopefully this article has answered that question. Have you ever heard of SNMP before? Tell us what you think. We are looking forward to hearing from you. and don’t forget to take a look at the other articles that are posted on this blog. We’re sure you’ll like them.

So what was the Y2K effect which really scared us all?

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Aug 27, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

The Y2K Effect: Was it true or just a technological hoax?

I am here to tell you a horror story. Something that will make you tremble from head to toe. It happened over Christmas and caused chaos among the gullible and conspirators.

A wicked Santa Claus? A contaminated consignment of cava? The closure of the Playmobil company? Nope! We are talking about the Y2K effect!

Young people will not remember that technological shock, but Y2K caused a lot of attention in all the media, and although on January 1st of that year it already suffered the disappointing hangover, the last day of December kept us on edge until the last minute.

The Y2K Effect

Yes, during all those last months of 1999 (Oh, the 90´s) the TV, the radio, the newspapers wouldn’t stop sending sparks and warnings: “Don’t leave your homes! Don’t take the risk! The world needs to update all its computers to avoid the total collapse that will occur at the end of this year! Then it turned out that when the whole family arrived at the New Year’s meal with a hangover asked if the planet had exploded, someone said, “Not Really”. Y2K went by without pain or glory as a macabre hoax to sell computers and to frighten old people and Skynet fans.

But you should know that the Y2K Effect was a real bug; it did not reach apocalyptic proportions as announced by the posters of screaming dooms at the exit of the subway, but it was an error caused by the programmers obsession to date only with two digits (00) to save memory. As you can imagine, or as it spread, when it reached January 1, 2000, gadgets all over the world would interpret the change as a restart of their innermost self, which would mean the year 1900 instead of 2000, causing a series of problems.

The end of humankind did not arrive, and even Leonard Nimoy signed up for hysteria and in 1998 already announced that it would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions. It was written in stone that the elevators would stop leaving you trapped in the middle, that the ATMs would start spitting bills and that the planes would explode in the air. From communications to the economic system, through the electricity that supplied the world, everything was controlled by machines, those that were meant to go crazy.

Many of the countries in the world, including Spain with some 420 million euros, took the time to update their systems to avoid the Y2K problem.
But the truth is that thanks to the money invested, the crisis could be solved and on day one we had nothing to worry about… To be honest there were quite a few Y2K-related incidents, including… shutdowns in fifteen nuclear reactors!
Many of the problems were seen as minor details and others were not related to the Effect because they did not occur at midnight. But the truth is that many of the programs were not active precisely at that time, so they presented the error simply when they were executed.

Some of the many bugs related or presumably related to Y2K:

• Ishikawa, Japan. A radiation monitoring team failed at midnight.
• Onagawa, Japan. An alarm sounded at an atomic power plant two minutes after midnight.
• United States. The naval observatory, where the main clock that marks the official time of the country operates, had an interference. Due to a scheduling problem, it announced that the date was January 1, 1910.
• United Kingdom. Credit card transactions were rejected or failed altogether while reciprocally working certain systems.
• Pennsylvania, United States. An elementary school library computer overcharged the students for borrowing books for 100 years.

These are just some of the most revealing cases recorded. In our beloved country, Spain, problems were also detected at two nuclear power stations, at petrol stations and in the traffic data collection system. But, as we have pointed out before, New Year’s Day passed without pain or glory. The fight was over and the crisis was saved. We all assumed that nothing had happened, that there was never any danger and that everything was a hoax scattered by little primary school children or by someone interested in the computer shop in our neighbourhood. But what if we simply avoided the Y2K problem because we were really preparing for it?

But let’s stay away from the failures of technology, let’s go to the benefits and the good results. There are programs, such as monitoring systems, that are unlikely to fail us on a worldwide scale on New Year’s Eve every millennium change. One of them is Pandora FMS.

The acronym FMS means “Flexible Monitoring System”

And why is it called like that? Because Pandora FMS is one of the most flexible monitoring software in the market. Pandora FMS is able to monitor devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Nowadays there are many companies and organizations that have Pandora FMS. Do you want to know some of them and to read some of our success stories? Click here: https://pandorafms.com/pandora-customers/

Or you can also start from the beginning and get to know what Pandora FMS can do for you, here: https://pandorafms.com

And you can even send us any question you may have about Pandora FMS. And you can easily do it thanks to the contact form at the following address: https://pandorafms.com/contact/

Do not forget to leave a comment in the area below in the comments section, what did you think of this article? we want to hear your opinion. Have you ever heard of the Y2K Effect? Hopefully with this article, all your doubts have been answered.

And don’t forget to take a look at the other articles that have been posted on this blog. We’re sure you’ll like them a lot! They are very different and quite entertaining so don’t forget to take a look at them!

How did you experience The Y2K Effect? What were you doing when this happened? We want to hear your opinion, you know you can write it at the end of this article in the comments section.

Historical events that you should know as an IT person

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Feb 28, 2024 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Computer History: Let’s take a look at this timeline

Trivia question, : Could you draw a line with the most important historical events in computer science? Certainly not! because we all know that Trivial Pursuit doesn’t have any questions about computer history among its old categories of questions, so this question would come from an GCSE teacher or a boring friend.

In any case, either to astonish our teacher or to silence our friend, we must know the answer.

Computer History

Our journey begins here. Let’s go back in time to learn about computer history

In 1834, Charles Babbage announces the analysis engine

Unbelievable, did you think that the furthest we could go back in time in terms of computing was the 1980s, right? Not at all. British mathematics teacher Charles Babbage woke up one morning to start creating the analytical machine! A modern general-purpose computer that was a major breakthrough in the history of computer science.

Its general purpose was a machine that could be programmed by the user, capable of executing the desired instructions and commands. It was mechanical in nature, and already had many parts of a modern computer. It could store 1000 numbers of 50 digits each, and although it could never be built by its inventor, Babbage, because the necessary technology was not yet available, it was one of the first milestones of computer science.

1943: The birth of Mark I Colossus

More than 70 years ago, this top secret project arrived and helped to win a war. It sounds like a science fiction story, doesn’t it? The Colossus machines were the first electronic calculating devices. They were used by the British to read German encrypted communications during World War II. This means that the Colossus, originally designed by Tommy Flowers, was one of the first digital computers.

1954: First prototype of desktop calculators

As a former student I can say that calculators have saved my exams on more than one occasion, not only by learning how to spell the word “pocket” with numbers on its small screen, by giving me hours of fun while others were doing the written test, but also because they helped me hide a lot of cheat sheets on its back and cover.

Back in 1954, IBM presented the world’s first electronic calculator in the United States, made with transistors, something highly revolutionary and technological for the time. It was quite large and could cost around $80,000. But, after a short time, more commercial models were launched, which thanks to the development were more reliable and affordable.

1969: The creation of ARPANET

ARPANET was just a small network of computers that was created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense. They did so as a way of communication for the various agencies in the country. We are witnessing the seminal net that would become what we now know as the Internet. In 1990, ARPANET ended its existence.

1971: The first e-mail is sent

The first e-mail was sent by Ray Tomlinson. What kind of verse did he put for posterity? Well, nothing more and nothing less than the first few letters of the computer keyboard. An indecipherable text without much meaning.

As a curiosity, he used for the first time the @ symbol between the user name and the machine. This fact is now a thing of the past, as you can imagine. He chose this symbol because, he explained, “it certainly wasn’t in a real name”.

Ray’s heart must have been broken because he received no response…. The innovation was so innovative that since it was the only program installed, there was no opportunity for dialogue.

1981: IBM launches a PC

IBM achieved a milestone in the history of humanity in general and of computing in particular: with the commercialization of the personal computer, or PC, it managed to turn computing from being a hidden mystery for the majority, to becoming something useful and practical for everyone.

I assure you that neither prophets nor seers could have imagined the revolution that this would entail today.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee writes the first website

And here’s the link:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It was exactly on December 20, 1990, when Berners-Lee, a British scientist, uploaded this page to CERN’s servers, with the mission of explaining the basic principles of what the modern web was going to be.

As you can see, it is a simple page with rudimentary text and hyperlinks. This is a modest guide on how his project would work.

1997: The machine defeats the man, in chess

Such a prick to our ego resonated beyond the limits of the board, to spread beyond the confines of the pedestal on which the human being thought he was standing.

The event took place in two parts, the first in Philadelphia on February 10, 1996, where the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer faced the then champion, Garry Kasparov. In the first game, after an initial fright, the great master ended up winning. Humanity could continue to breathe in peace. But IBM prepared the rematch. It was held shortly thereafter in New York City in 1997. In that historic duel the machine won. Though by an adjusted outcome, man’s intellectual supremacy on Earth was defeated.

1998: Google was founded

In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as colleagues at Stanford. Already as computer students, they collaborated on a search engine called BackRub that operated on Stanford’s servers until it was too bandwidth-intensive to cope with the university.

In 1997, they decided that the BackRub search engine needed a new look and feel and considered some ideas, including a game of the word “googol”, a mathematical term represented by the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

In 1998, the then co-founder of Sun, Andy Bechtolsheim, prepared a check for about $100,000 for a newly registered company, a certain Google Inc. that would make us all happy.

2018: You get to meet Pandora FMS

Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring software, which is capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Do you want to learn more about what Pandora FMS can offer you? And do you want to see why it is already a milestone? Click here: https://pandorafms.com

Or you can also send us any query you may have about Pandora FMS, in a simple way, thanks to the contact form that can be found at the following address: https://pandorafms.com/contact/

The team behind Pandora FMS will be happy to help you!

We hope you enjoyed this article on computer history!

8 testing tools in 2018

by Jimmy Olano | Last updated Jul 18, 2023 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Testing tools in 2018: Which one is the best?

In the last decade, the term beta user has become very popular – even as a business, and in some cases it has become a job – for the beta user, which refers to the test user between the programmer and the end user.

Introduction to Testing Tools

Testing tools have a funny story; since the 1980s, game programmers like John Romero have had special codes to quickly pass levels or to go straight to the final stage of programming. We consider that they were, in fact, very rudimentary testing tools, but we must bear in mind that the cost and capacity of computers at that time (we have witnessed this) prevented, in practice, the automation of testing.

In this 21st century, computers soon began to exceed the capabilities of their owners and the computing power allowed us to use them beyond ordinary use. One of these tasks is the execution of field-oriented testing tools in monitoring. Testing tools are used, for example, in White and Black Box Testing in Monitoring, and in the article on web performance optimization we listed some of them (“Selenio, TestingWhiz and TestComplete”). Of course, Pandora FMS and the flexibility that makes it unique combines all of this in the UX PWR Monitoring. We invite you to read these publications and to return to this article for more in-depth testing tools.

What are testing tools?

With the arrival of software development automation, it became clear that we would need more than just a beta user to achieve international “maturity” standards. We need a programmer beta user, in other words, a person who has the ability to “speak” various programming languages as a basis and then choose the most appropriate testing tools for each case, in order to automate software testing to keep up with the ongoing development of software.
Please note that in this article we will not recommend any particular software, because even our homemade tool needs Pandora FMS to deliver the data, so that it can be converted into information and generate the necessary alerts, if necessary, from the monitoring point of view. So each case and need is very particular.In honor of justice, we will list them according to the year their first version was released to the public, and I am sure you will like our list.

The best testing tools in 2018

Unified Functional Testing® (UFT), year 1998

“Micro Focus®, a company founded in 1976 by Brian Reynolds in the UK, launched this tool in 1998, which still uses ” innovative ” technology: VBScripting. It is proprietary software that runs on “Microsoft Windows”® (GNU/Linux had been released just 4 years ago and still had a long way to go), but let’s not underestimate this company for that reason, instead, it has been modernized according to the passage of time. In the same year, “Micro Focus”® acquired Intersolv®, in 2009 it acquired the legendary Borland® and in 2014 it acquired “Atachmate Group”®, who in turn owned Novell®, NetIQ®, and SUSE®. To top it all off, in 2017 it merged with HP Enterprise®, a division that serves only business software needs – a huge powerhouse with many pounds sterling under its belt!

We are not here to make financial evaluations of companies; however, the experience of the software company is unavoidable and we could not help but mention it. This experience is very well charged on their product and just as we pay money for their license, we will “spend” time on their installation and user training, both complex tasks. As an extenuating factor, the beta user should not have great programming skills; VBscript is a technology with years of experience in the market and a lot of trained people who handle it; the offer is large and it lowers our employee budget. It has a web user interface, API, desktop version and web application. It has reusable test components, automated documentation and is integrated with continuous development tools such as Jenkis (which we recently introduced in another article). Additionally, as a complement, UFT offers Lean Functional Testing (LeanFT) for test creation with Visual Studio (C#) or Eclipse (Java).

TestComplete®, year 1999

This is another proprietary tool, along with “SmartBear Software”®, which also uses VBScript and also handles C#Script, C++Script, DelphiScript, JScript, JavaScript and Python. In spite of all the interpreted languages it supports, extraordinary programming skills are still not required and its installation is relatively simple. It has three main modules: a desktop, web and mobile application. In many ways it looks like your UFT opponent, as it also integrates with Jenkins and keeps scripts or recorded objects up to date when changing any of them, which saves time and effort.

In this last point we must say that TestComplete offers keyword-driven testing. In keyword-based testing, each keyword corresponds to an individual test action, such as a mouse click, selection of a menu item, keyboard clicks, opening or closing a window, or other actions. These are the initial steps, and little by little, we will have to configure, and then create a keyword test, which is a sequence of operations, in keyword format, that simulates the user’s actions in the tested application. Basically, to perform any test action, evaluators simply drag and drop the keyword that corresponds to the desired operation or they can simply record their actions and the test directed by the keyword is built for them. These keywords can be reused endlessly to prevent this “Don’t repeat yourself” principle . It also offers flexibility when changing the application to be tested and for new beta users who come to work it will be more intuitive to maintain the created tests, to gain experience and to create new keyword-driven tests.

Apache JMeter, year 2001

One of the tools for testing databases that work with web pages, written entirely in Java language and aimed directly at programmers. If we need to test the massive data load and perform stress tests to the servers, we must use JMeter with a monitoring software like Pandora FMS (do not hesitate to contact us). Apache JMeter is not a web browser (it does not execute JavaScript in HTML code, for example) but works at the level of HTTP, HTTPS (Java, NodeJS, PHP, ASP.NET, among others), FTP, SMTP(S), POP3(S) and IMAP(S) protocols. It also offers options for recording results in a simple text file, since the monitoring functions were removed from version 3.2.

Rational Functional Tester, year 2002

The company Rational® Software initially launched it as “Robotj 1.0” and when IBM® acquired the company in 2004 it simply renamed it “Rational” ® (although its logo includes the word “software” in reference to the parent company). It is the deepest and most complex of the testing tools and we dare to say that it is ineffable. The scripts are saved in Java and Visual Basic.NET, although from version 8.1 onwards you can interact with the screenshots that are recorded on a storyboard (something like WYSIWYG). It is available for both Windows and GNU/Linux vertically with “IBM Jazz integration”, like all the products of this giant company.

Selenium, year 2004

Here we go with our favorite: it runs on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and OS X; it supports Java, Groovy, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, and Perl; it is one of the web application testing tools that integrates with Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft IE and even browsers without a graphical interface, and as if that were not enough, it is free software!

Selenium is so advanced – full programmer skills are needed to use it – that it became a development platform for other test tools such as Katalon Studio, Watir, Protractor, and Robot Framework – what’s its downside? Expensive labor: to install, program and to adapt it to the needs, you need highly trained and difficult personnel. For anyone who has any doubt about our claim, Selenium has its own scripting language called Selenese (they inexplicably also used that name for the “Selenium Remote Control” protocol), so we can either save our scripts in their original Selenium supported language or in their specific Selenese language for compatibility. The components of Selenium are: IDE, Client API, Remote Control, WebDriver and Grid. Supports integration with Jenkins and Cruise Control.

Robot framework, year 2005

Presented as a Master’s work by Pekka Klärck and developed in the company “Nokia Siemens Networks” that same year, since version 2.0 was changed as free software (year 2008) and its version 3.0 came last year. Written in Python and with Apache 2.0 license, it is possible to use it mainly with Java and.NET (with plugins you can use Perl, Javascript and PHP). Like many other Python libraries, it is installed via PIP, and Selenium Web Driver libraries must be installed in a second step; then we can install additional libraries for MongoDB, FTP, Android, Appium (an application specialized in running scripts under Android and iOS) and many more. Robot framework also uses keyword-guided testing.

Watir, year 2008

As we mentioned, Watir uses Selenium and inherits its license and many of its features; however, it only supports Ruby language. Initially developed by Bret Pettichord and Paul Rogers and an enthusiastic community of developers, it focuses on automating web browsers as a normal user would and on manipulating all HTML elements. As with Selenium, deep programming knowledge is required and its installation takes the form of “RubyGems” as a package manager.

Katalon Studio, year 2015

Its parent company, KMS Technology, was jointly founded in 2009 in the United States and Vietnam, and after three years of development based on Selenium and Appium with support for Groovy (Java) was released under the name “Katalon Studio”. The highlight of Katalon is that instead of downloading and installing Selenium and Appium separately, Katalon offers it in a single package and also enhances the user experience, allowing for fast learning. Once we’ve mastered it, we can go all the way with Selenium, which runs in the background, dormant. It also supports ongoing software development with Teamcity, qTest, JIRA, Jenkins, and Git. You can read about the many benefits, actually, in this link in detail.

Conclusion

This is a list that obviously does not include all existing software – nor does it pretend to be exhaustive – but reflects the current situation of the software market, which is in excellent health with a range of prices and features – which one will be the most appropriate? We recommend the use of virtual machines, because of their unique features, so that you can carefully evaluate each of the programs and have a complete picture based on specific tests. Once you have chosen the best candidates it will be time to present them to the development teams on real computers and then select one or more, so that your company can acquire a service and/or use license, leave your comment here below and we will answer any questions, doubts or comments!

Course 101: Instrumentation, Software Metrics, Monitoring, Alerts

by Jimmy Olano | Last updated Aug 4, 2023 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Course 101: Instrumentation, Software Metrics, Monitoring, Alerts

Course 101 -1: Introduction

Since the 1920s, higher education institutions have been using this term to describe the nomenclature of the early years of study. Here we announced some time ago our intentions to focus on tutorials, but we believe that as knowledge is important, we have brought you different kinds of articles because we consider that wisdom is a valuable asset (we include a source for some online encyclopaedias).

A formal introduction to Pandora FMS involves many terms and concepts that we may not know; we may have forgotten them or we should revisit them. We offer OPT certification for those who want a professionalization or specialization in the area. In this blog of ours we are flexible and we also offer a pragmatic approach: today we would like to show you, from the components perspective, the Course 101 on monitoring with plenty of web links to help you expand -or clarify- any of the concepts ” Let’s do this!

Course 101 -2: Instrumentation

In English this term is common although it has become obsolete over time. It comes from the first industrial revolution where there was no telematics, obviously. Thus, one or several people would go to each machine to read the instruments that indicated pressure, temperature, speed, etc. and would take them to the engineers or people in charge of the production processes. An incorrect reading could cause a boiler to explode with water vapor, resulting in the extinction of even human lives. Monitoring was then, as now, still a very serious issue.

We wanted to show you this concept to illustrate how the passing of time leads to changes in names and denominations, which clearly reflect the innovations of technology. In this Course 101 we will describe Monitoring as a whole, i.e. a Monitoring System, although strictly speaking “Monitoring” is only one of the components. To differentiate this component we will write it as Monitoring. Thus, Software Metrics (modern version of Instrumentation), Monitoring and Alerts are concepts that form an interrelationship and are the basis of a Monitoring System.

Course 101 -3: Software Metrics

As in the Instrumentation era we took the values with the Software Metrics we will do the same but part of the work will be done in advance. Why do we state this? As it turns out, modern operating systems already offer by default the basic values such as disk capacity, RAM memory, etc. and we will find data even from the moment the operating system is installed. This data has a time stamp, of great importance to be able to synchronize events later. We will call this collective set of data supplied by the operating system itself low-level metrics .

Of course, a computer that does not run any applications is of very little use. We use the term application for any software that needs to be installed additionally or expressly during the installation of the OS, the latter being very common in the GNU/Linux environment. These applications have their own way of working and the possibilities of event logs that may occur (and also where they are located on the hard disk) are endless. That’s why Pandora FMS has the modality of complements or plugins that allow us to accommodate any software that arises, hence our flexibility. We will call this set of Application Metrics high level.

We must keep the collection of both Metrics separate, it means more burden for an application to keep track (and we collect it for that application) of the Low Level Metrics, we are interested in the High Level Metrics that are unique to that application, we can get the rest directly from the operating system.

Course 101 3.1: Absolute and relative metrics

Metrics can be classified this way because there are values that have a limit (storage capacity, for example) and we are interested in seeing the percentage of use, that is, the amount of bytes stored is relative to the storage capacity. On the other hand, we would also be interested to know the amount of free space for storage, for example to know if we can install any new application, and that value is absolute, regardless of the storage capacity of the device. The same reasoning can be applied to a network card and its data flow or other device components.

We will go further by saying that these limits that set the Relative Metrics are not set in stone either, although it is true that in order to expand its RAM we must add a physical component to a physical server, nowadays virtual machines have been more effective and practical to manage and if we are short of memory we can contract -or assign- more memory (of course with the limit imposed by the amount of memory of the real machine that it contains to the virtual machine).

Course 101 -4: Monitoring

So far what we have done is to collect and store data like a squirrel getting food for the winter. Collecting data has its own methodology, indexing to quickly locate them by time and origin. The key point of monitoring is to relate and add these data at different points of time and origin but with similar characteristics. I mean, we compared pears to pears and apples to apples: what was the server workload yesterday? and what about a week ago? from a server cluster that had the most workload last Saturday? Here, again, the combinations are endless, we don’t know what the customer can ask for, but dynamic monitoring will give us an excellent starting point.

We can say that by making such comparisons, after conscientious and organized data collection and storage, we will be able to obtain information that is important to the company in order to foresee future expansion plans – and why not? Reduction plans if it is not profitable. So that’ s the difference between data and information and we will see another important point: how that information is displayed.

In Pandora FMS we take care until the smallest detail proposed by the users in order to show the information in the best way possible for its comprehension. If you check the version history of Pandora FMS you will always find that some improvement was made in the metaconsole or in the graphics, since there are many ways and means to show that precious information.

No matter how well presented the information may be (third dimension, augmented reality, etc.) we will always have another inconvenience for us humans: firstly, we are unable to be 24 hours aware of what is happening with the systems and secondly, we like repetitive tasks but to a certain extent (we have a daily routine, but Sundays are different, right?) which leads us to the following point: the Alerts.

Course 101 -5: Alerts

Alerts are a planned mechanism: according to the values observed during a certain time (at least one week) we can establish that when some values are reached for more than a predetermined time, a message will be sent to the person in charge of the area. Alerts can be direct, for example by email, or delegated to a third party, for example Twitter, Slack, Telegram or Whatsapp.

Before we start to send a lot of messages to network administrators, we must take into account that we must classify the alerts to respond according to the magnitude of the abnormality. A failure in a server hard disk with built-in RAID 0+1 must generate a reminder alert: when the employee who works in the physical facilities shows up to work, he or she will proceed to replace it with a new one. We see that this is a strictly necessary alert to attend to, but its urgency is not so great. That’s why we can classify alerts into:

• Notices (minor).
• Warnings.
• Critical (greater importance).

Some monitoring systems have integrated monitoring, control and resolution of incidents and Pandora FMS provides the option to add comments for future references and reminders. Also the management of multiple alarms that depend on one main alarm is considered: if a server is turned off obviously its disk space, memory and other alarms will show a warning sign that does not need to be displayed. Another special case is when a system suffers three or more Warning type alerts in a period of say 6 hours: although the system is successfully recovered and that these warnings can wait until the next day for correction, their sum and coincidence in time justifies immediate human attention to decide what is happening based on the panorama in the console.

Course 101 -5.1: Responsive alerts

In the case of Warning type Alerts, they may perform a specific automated task in order to get out of the abnormal situation. Let’s explain with real facts: we know a web server and we know that its maximum capacity is to serve a thousand clients with a logged in session. When you reach this limit and maintain this value for a period of time, let’s say 15 minutes, a Warning type alarm will be triggered: the server is working but its performance is known to be degraded. We could program the monitoring system to order the execution of another machine (virtual or real) to start serving new customers.

Although the last example may seem like a trivial matter, we will notice it in our pockets: if we have a virtual machine contracted and it is enough to attend to our customers, we save money by keeping the minimum amount contracted, the least expense. But if we increase our number of clients, a good monitoring system can “contract” more virtual machines, serve more clients and increase our revenue (of course, both virtual machines are configured to share the workload). Our graduates will also increase, but the profit margin will pay off. Something important is that this alert will always reach us but will be degraded to a Notice type to notify you that this month we will implicitly pay more for the use of virtual computers.

Course 101 -6: How many Metrics should we collect?

We must maintain good monitoring practices, avoiding false alerts as much as possible and this leads to focusing on the metrics that really matter. In an ideal world we could collect everything and then filter it, but it is much better to select the data. This is because monitoring already places a burden on the target system, so we must keep interference to a minimum. If we want to monitor our NGINX web server it does not exceed a dozen parameters and if we cache the server to improve its performance the monitoring of the same cache will not be a major problem either. In the case of monitoring a document-oriented database such as MongoDB, which handles huge amounts of data, the number of parameters will be two to three dozens.

The complexity of the application is directly related to the amount of Metrics it generates and the great complexity reduces the efficiency plus Pandora FMS breaks with the established in the monitoring, generating a necessary balance.

Completing Monitoring 101

We have covered the basics of monitoring and as good teachers we leave you the task of doing some research on the following ones from the letter D to the letter Z and in order to do this you have many links to help you move forward, also use the search function in the drop-down menu to find out about many other good articles that the Pandora FMS community keeps online always at your disposal.

Comment below and we will answer your questions or if you want just leave a greeting, like a guestbook!

Is it possible to prevent software glitch?

by Jimmy Olano | Last updated Aug 14, 2023 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Software glitch, an unforeseen incident, is that possible to prevent at all?

“Software glitch” was first defined in 1965 by astronaut John Glenn and his flight team as a sudden drop in voltage that caused the computers to restart. This is exactly what happened to Altéa Amadeus’ software, which manages the passenger reservation and verification system for 125 airlines in seven countries, including such well-known airlines as British Airways, Qantas, Southwest and Lufthansa.

We still remember that incident involving “British Airways” in May 2017, and now history is repeating itself globally but temporarily. “British Airways also suffered a similar mishap in August 2017, which required manual boarding of passengers; at that time the company offered a public apology but did not specify the cause of the problem, so it may have been an incident unrelated to a “software glitch”.

The result of this failure was that many people expressed their opinions sarcastically on social networks. Remember that in this case we are not talking about a power failure, but an elegant way of classifying a transitory error as “software glitch”, which occurs in certain circumstances and although it is automatically restarted, it can cause many problems. Can you imagine spending 4 hours waiting to get on a plane? that’s what happened to the travelers. It was a huge amount of money for the airlines to keep their planes on the ground while they waited for their passengers!

What is “software glitch”?

The term “software glitch” comes from the 1960s, the dawn of the space age. Computers were still very primitive, but they did calculate trajectories faster than any human being – and still do – so they started to become very important as a source of processed data. It turned out that these machines were sensitive to electrical voltage fluctuations, which caused them to restart automatically and without proper intervention they recovered as if nothing had happened, causing only a slight delay.

From there it became clear that any unforeseen event, from which we could recover in a relatively short period of human time (for computers more than 200 milliseconds is an eternity), can be called “software glitch”. This is how this name was extended in electronics to computer science (which is very common in the field of video games), radio and television broadcasting, and even in human behaviour (we consider that in a football match the unwritten rule on “the law of advantage” is a “human glitch”).

But in the 21st century, being in a globalized world, “software glitch” in an interconnected system undoubtedly has an impact on the performance of the entire network or system. So let’s see if it is possible to prevent it or at least to avoid its repetition.

Official recognition of software glitch

The official statement about the “Altéa Amadeus” incident can be read in this link, even though it does not explicitly mention the “software glitch” that happened.

“Amadeus can confirm that our systems have recovered and are now functioning normally. Over the course of the morning, we had a network problem that caused disruptions in some of our systems. As a result of the incident, clients experienced interruptions in certain services. Our technical team took immediate steps to identify the cause of the problem and mitigate the impact on customers. Amadeus apologizes for any inconvenience caused to our customers.”

The fifteen-minute glitch

That was the time it took for the system to recover from the software glitch, but just like dominoes, systems worldwide had to synchronize with each other, causing intermittent failures which finally caused four hours of inconvenience.

“Airlines For Europe” is an association of fifteen airlines that has more than half a billion passengers in Europe and in its article of 27 July 2017 it ” announced ” delays of up to four hours due to the new immigration controls (the image at the top of this post is precisely the one they used in their warning campaign), but they never imagined that it would be ” software glitch ” which would ultimately trigger and make their prediction a reality.

The lack of human intervention implies the intervention of automated monitoring 24 hours a day, every day of the year, tirelessly, to search for possible failures or failures of the entire network at a global level. A software like Pandora FMS will always be ready to supervise thousands of nodes, and as it is written about free software it can be executed in GNU/Linux environment, operating system which can be used to create a cluster of computers to create redundancy in the monitoring and to have a tool of the same size and measure of what is needed to be monitored. For this cluster of servers, we can also set up “event correlation alerts” which we can receive by text message to our mobile phone or via social networks such as Twitter or Telegram.
Pandora FMS also has add-ons to monitor large amounts of data, as a specific example Apache Cassandra -which is a web server to directly serve the public- and always under the best practices -since we must follow an action plan if we want to implement any serious and reliable monitoring system-.

The nature of the problem raised

According to Bill Curtis, SVP and chief scientist at the software analysis company CAST, determining the exact causes of failure will take time: “Airline computers juggle various systems that must interact to control the door, reservations, ticket sales and frequent flyers. Each of these pieces may have been written separately by different companies.”

“Even if an airline has backup systems, the software running those probably has the same coding flaw. Tracking a software failure can be very difficult. It’s like investigating crime; there’s a lot of data you have to go through and then try to figure out what really happened.
In this environment of scattered data and apparent chaos we propose the Pandora FMS work method: we save all the information, collected directly or through agents, second by second, and it is stored in powerful MySQL databases (which we can also use in clusters and replicas to backup) and all this is available for future analysis: we are like the “black box” of airplanes before a “software glitch”.

Concluding remarks on “software glitch”

Although the computer applications will always have failures having a monitoring software that collects the chronology and conditions at the time of “software glitch” to take all this data in an excellent report well presented to the developers in charge will greatly shorten the search and correction in the future, avoiding “tripping over the same stone twice”.

“Altéa Suite” is a registered trademark of the company “Amadeus”, founded in 1987.

How does Iron Man monitor his suits?

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Jun 10, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Ironman and monitoring, two great words that work together

With over $2 billion in box office sales globally, The Avengers: Infinity War is everywhere at this time. And if you don’t know it from this one or from the rest of the stream of movies that Marvel Studios have been bombarding us with for the last 10 years, maybe you know it from the countless comic books they have been making since the 1960s. Yeah, he’s Iron Man.

The can of reddish sardines hides, as many of you know, one of the best-known superheroic playboys in the world of comics: Anthony Edward Stark. He is known as Tony Stark, a successful and famous billionaire who, besides being a remarkable child prodigy and possessing one of the most brilliant minds in the world, is also a great entrepreneur, engineer and technology fanatic.

Ironman and monitoring. The daily life of the big-headed

When Tony wakes up every morning and the world needs him, the first thing he has to do is to choose the armor that suits him or that he needs for his memorable intervention. In this choice he is usually assisted by J.A.R.V.I.S., the artificial intelligence computer programmed to serve him with a strong masculine voice with a British accent.

The level of coordination that exists in the technology of Iron Man’s entire devices, from his armor to the artificial intelligence that helps him integrate them, seems harmonized by a futuristic god. But it’ s just a matter of the right organization and monitoring. That’s why Tony knows what he has to do and what he needs. And the most important thing: he has the information, the data and the solutions in a very accurate and immediate way.

Let’s imagine that in Tony’s adventure today, he is troubled by his rival entity J.A.R.V.I.S. and Hulk or a similar creature, of the same height and power, is destroying the economic center of Murcia, Spain (we are fed up of New York). Well, Tony will wake up, cut out the coffee, and will go check the mega screen in his operating room or the one built into his helmet. It will show the data needed to take action: the number of people injured, civilian victims, economic damage, the rise in the price of citrus fruits (which is so important for the area), etc.

There you go, the J.A.R.V.I.S. monitoring system has evaluated all the data and found it necessary for Tony to wear the Hulkbuster armor today, perhaps linked to the Mark XLIII armor, the first one, as a modular suit, works from the inside, so we need to synchronize both and we’ll do it using the central computer and its monitoring superpowers.

Boom! Tony will leave his mansion in his Mark XLIII armor and will make the Hulkbuster module take off from Veronica Station. The two of them will meet over Murcia’s sky, join together and beat the bad guy up. Folks, all this wouldn’t have been possible without a very flexible monitoring software, wouldn’t it? A single tool that can monitor any device, infrastructure, application, service and process. All in one in order to defeat the evil.

Ironman and monitoring: Be your own superhero

And this is a work tool that is worthy for Stark Companies, S.H.I.E.L.D., and The Avengers but it can also be worthy for you. Do you know Pandora FMS? I belong to their international secret service and I can tell you a little bit about it.

Pandora FMS is software that is used to monitor and measure all kind of elements. Monitors systems, applications or network devices. It informs about the status of each element of a system over time as it has data and event history. Pandora FMS is aimed at large environments, and it allows managing several thousand systems with and without agents, so it can be used in large clusters, data centers and networks. Some examples of common resources that can be monitored with Pandora FMS are the processor load, the disk and memory usage, processes that run in the system, events determined in a log, environmental factors like temperature, light or humidity (through sensors), values of applications like certain texts in a web page, and in general any data or event that can be collected automatically. Do you see the similarities between J.A.R.V.I.S., the different Iron Man armor, and Pandora FMS, right?

If you’ve smiled as you realized that you could now fly a whole set of Marvel weapons and you’ve imagined yourself wearing it like a suit of armor in front of the thugs in your neighborhood, I have to say that you must put the brakes on. Pandora FMS is good for monitoring, but you would still lack the technology to become a leading character in comics. Although you can always look at Amazon to see what’s there.

After this article about Ironman and monitoring. Do you want to know what Pandora FMS can do exactly when it comes to monitoring? It’s so easy for you. Just send us a message with all your questions. You can easily do this by using the contact form at the following address: https://pandorafms.com/company/contact/ and don’t forget to take a look at the other articles we have posted on this blog, we’re sure you’ll like them.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Pandora FMS team, they will be happy to help you!

Internet history; from ARPANET to the future

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Apr 26, 2023 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

Internet history in just a thousand words

Today, we can now say that the Internet is one of the most disruptive technologies in history.

Like fire or a wheel, the Internet has changed our lifestyle so much that we can barely conceive a world without it.

However, it is interesting to take a look at the Internet History. Although we must travel back in time a few decades, it is not a very lengthy or tricky story. Instead, it is a rather short and explosive story, compared to other technologies of the same historical significance. And if we consider that, a few decades ago, computers did not even exist, we can realize that progress during the second half of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century has been breathtaking.

First years

The beginnings of the Internet date back to the early 1960s, in the environment of MIT and a United States government organization called ARPA.

We owe the first theoretical formulation of the Internet to J.C.R. Licklider, who in 1962 described his concept of the network of interconnected computers and the benefits it would bring at a social level, calling it a “galactic network”. Licklider, linked to both MIT and ARPA (he was the Director of Computer Research), would be an inspiration to his collaborators and successors in both institutions.

Shortly before, in 1961, Leonard Kleinrock had already published an important document on the theory of packet switching, which would make the network possible in its early stages. A few years later, in 1965, a successor to Licklider in ARPA, Lawrence G. Roberts, managed for the first time, together with Thomas Merrill, to connect a Massachusetts computer to another one in California via a telephone line, in the first long-distance connection by this method, which involved some technical complications that convinced its participants of the need to use packet switching.

However, the foundations for the development of the network were already in place and the process was going to be unstoppable. In 1967, Roberts published his plan for ARPANET. Interestingly, at the project launch conference, Roberts found, through the presentations of other colleagues from the UK (NPL and RAND), that they were doing similar work, which was a fruitful exchange of ideas.

During the following years, more work was done, giving rise to the first nodes, and the exchange of messages began, mainly in universities, all of them in the United States. At the end of 1969, 4 hosts were connected to ARPANET.

In the late 1970s, another milestone was reached, with the first host-to-host protocol, called NCP (Network Control Protocol), being developed, which allowed the first application developments to take place. ARPANET would soon be ready to go public.

This would happen in 1972, in a very successful demonstration at the ICCC (International Computer Communication Conference), when a new application that you all know would also be introduced: e-mail, by Ray Tomlinson. Thus changing the Internet History.

Years later, however, the need to continue changing the network would arise. The NCP protocol, too rigid and designed only for ARPANET, had to be replaced by another one capable of supporting the specific features of an open architecture network environment. This is how the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, also known as TCP/IP, was created by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf. As a result, TCP/IP was implemented in ARPANET, and a simultaneous transition considered as “historic” was carried out on 1 January 1983. A few years earlier, in 1979, the first NewsGroups, or discussion forums, had been created by American students.

The leap into the world

Although during its early years of development the Internet had barely left the academic environment, many saw its potential there. In the 1980s, the PC concept was on the rise. Something as strange at first as having a computer in one’s own home was beginning to make a lot of sense.

Hand in hand with the PC, and concepts and technologies such as LAN, Ethernet or DNS, the expansion of the network had been following its unstoppable path in previous years. During the 1980s, important state programmes such as NSFNET (United States) or JANET (United Kingdom), which were highly funded, gave a strong boost to the network through measures such as the creation of transoceanic circuits. In 1990, ARPANET ceased its service. By then, the IP protocol (simplified as the Internet) expands into a world where more than 100,000 computers are already connected. Thus changing the Internet History

New audiences demand new needs, and in 1991, at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee created a data storage and retrieval system called the World Wide Web (WWW).

The ease of use of the WWW triggered it to the success that you know today. The first web browsers were immediately developed for use, the first being “Mosaic” by Marc Andreesen, who created it shortly after Netscape.

Discussing the history of the Internet from here would probably mean going to places known to almost everyone. Once the Internet, the WWW and browsers became common, a new world was developed with enthusiasm. Hundreds of thousands of web pages were created, putting all kinds of knowledge within the reach of millions of people and interconnecting “navigators” from all continents. The first search engines appeared, while applications such as email jumped from being used by a few to becoming massive phenomena.

Around the year 2000, the bursting of the.com bubble led some people to question the future of the Internet. However, it emerged stronger from the phenomenon, going from being a fashion of uncertain future to a profound change in our way of life, until today.

The future of the Internet

As you can see, the Internet history has been mind-blowing. In just a few decades, it has gone from an academic research environment to perhaps the most influential technology in history. And its journey continues unstoppable, causing changes that we can hardly see yet.

Nobody knows what the future holds, but in this blog we have tried to figure out the future of the network.

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10 “unwritten” technology laws

by Pandora FMS team | Last updated Jun 10, 2021 | Community, Geek culture, Tech

10 technology laws that you will not find in any legal code

Technology rules our world. We may not have been aware of this until a few years ago, but we are becoming more and more aware of this.

The laws that we will discuss have not been written by human beings to regulate our coexistence. They are not laws of the physical world either. They are not given to us by Physics, and therefore are not fixed, and may even be inaccurate or imprecise. But they provide us with a sense of how technology evolves and how it influences our lives.

Let’s take a look at 10 technology laws that you won’t find in any legal code. Let’s go!

Moore’s Law: perhaps the most popular of them all, we have already written an article about it in this blog.

Moore’s Law, the work of Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, determines that the number of transistors contained in a microprocessor doubles every 2 years or so. This is a rather prosaic observation, but it has set the pace for the microprocessor industry to improve its products over decades, and it suggests a conclusion with much deeper implications: the improvement in technology comes at an exponential rate.

Kryder’s Law: heir to Moore’s Law, Kryder’s Law, written by engineer Mark Kryder, focuses on the capacity of hard disks. Thus, the capacity of these is only doubled every 12 months.

If Kryder’s Law were to continue to be enforced over the next few decades, some of the problems of “everyday” storage space, such as film storage, would go down in history. In fact, in just a couple of decades we would be able to store in a laptop all the knowledge that, today, human beings have at their disposal…

Kaku’s “caveman” law: it is very different from the previous ones, it appeals to our most primary instincts. Created by the famous physicist and scientist Michio Kaku, it establishes that when our primitive desires come into conflict with technology, it is the first ones who are the winners.

This is not a reflection of the value or strength of the technology, but of its ability to adapt to our desires. The more a technology evolves, the more natural and adapted to our instincts it becomes.

Wirth’s Law: It makes things a little more complicated. Stated by scientist Niklaus Wirth, he states that while the rate of progress of hardware is getting faster and faster (as predicted by Moore’s Law) the rate of progress of software is slowing down, which hinders the advancement of technology.

As a result, the increasingly large and complex programs are not progressing at such a fast pace. This is why there are easily visible developments, such as the fact that many of today’s programs work at a similar rate as that of similar programs a few years ago, even though they run on much faster machines.

Kranzberg Laws: These were written in the 1960s by the historian Melvin Kranzberg, and are six observations that focus mainly on the social impact of technology:

• Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral: it is a clear conclusion to put an end to any debate about the goodness or badness of technology. This depends on the context and the use of it. And besides, when used by humans, it will never be completely neutral either.
• The invention is the mother of need: this statement suggests that each new invention brings with it the need for the development of new technologies that complement or facilitate its use.
• Technology comes in large or small packages: there are different degrees of influence of technology. Sometimes they will completely transform society; sometimes they will bring about small changes.
• Technology depends on non-technical political decisions: with this statement, Kranzberg argues that technology does not follow its own or “natural” rhythm, but is guided and driven by political or cultural decisions that often have nothing to do with technical principles.
• The whole history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most important: no matter how relevant the events that move the future of human history, the most important of them are those that refer to the history of technology. History moves technology but, above all, it is technology that moves history.
• Technology is a human activity: by itself, technology lacks emotions or will. It depends entirely on the human being, and its use will be for human reasons.

As we said at the beginning of this article, we cannot consider these “technology laws” to be written by physics, but rather they are the result of observations that some relevant figures have made throughout history.

Like all laws created by human beings, they have an expiration date, they do not always have to be complied with, and you can even disagree with them.

In this regard, what do you think of these unwritten’ technology laws? We are very interested in your opinion, and it would be great if you could share it with us and with all the readers of this blog. You can also do this very easily by leaving a message in the comment section right at the end of this article.

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Don’t forget to leave a comment below in the comments section, what do you think of these technology laws? We want to hear from you. And we will be happy to answer all your questions. See you soon! And don’t forget that…

You can also take a look at the other articles that are published on this blog! These may be interesting for you.

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