Recent Posts by Patrick Shuff

Yesterday we talked about what it would take to go from a bare metal solution or virtualized solution in your data center to a cloud vendor. We found out that it is not only difficult but it requires some work to make it happen. There are tools to convert your VMDK code to AMI with Amazon or VHD with Microsoft or tar.gz format with Oracle. That's the fundamental problem. There are tools to convert. You can't just simply pull a backup of your bare metal install or the VMDK...

One of the things that we talked about yesterday was uploading an image for a bundled solution into the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Partners can register to bundle and sell solutions on the Oracle Cloud by providing a bootable image and have that image run in the Oracle Compute Cloud. Some examples of this are JDE 9.2 Trial Edition by Oracle WordPress on Oracle Linux 6.7 by Bitnami Chef Server by Chef.io All of these solutions started with a base operating system and layered other...

The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a location where customers can discover partner provided applications and services that complement the Oracle Public Cloud services. It is also a location where partners can list and promote cloud based applications and services that extend, integrate with, or build on Oracles Public Cloud services. This is an interesting concept that has various ways of joining customers to partners and giving partners view into what customers are looking at,...

At OpenWorld 2013, Oracle announced the Cloud Marketplace. This is a place where customers can download or purchase solutions that are not stock out of the box images to boot from. For example, if you want a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) you could boot a Linux image, install the three other components as well as update the operating system with the latest patches. Alternatively you could search for LAMP in the Marketplace and get an image in a few minutes rather than...

Today we are going to wrap up our detailed discussion with networking. We will probably revisit network performance at a later time but we are going to get out of the weeds today and talk about things at a slightly higher level. Yesterday we looked at screen shots of the Oracle, AWS, and Azure security lists and rules. It is important to note that Azure only offers TCP and UDP as rules. You can't define firewall and routing rules for other protocols. Amazon allows for ICMP...

Today we are going to explore how to configure and setup the basics of networking for a Linux compute instance in the Oracle Cloud. If you would like to read more about network configurations you should refer to the Oracle Compute Cloud Services (IaaS) documentation. We are specifically interested in chapter 7, Configuring Network Settings. Terms like security list, security rules, and roles play a part of the configuration. By default security is locked down and no traffic...

For the last two days we have been going through TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I. We are going to shift gears a little bit and look at the OSI stack from the perspective of another book. Today we are going to look at VPN Illustrated: Tunnels, VPNs, and IPSec by Jon C. Snader. We are shifting to another book because the TCP/IP Illustrated is an excellent book for Computer Scientists who want to know the nuts and bolts of how computers talk to each other. Things have changed since...

We are going through the OSI 7 layer stack and looking at the different layers. Yesterday we stared the discussion by looking at Kevin Fall and Richard Steven's book TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1. In this book they describe the different layers and look at the how, what, and why of the design. Today we will focus on layers 2 and 3 the link layer and network layer. Alternate sources of information about these layers can be found at http://tcpipguide.com How Stuff Works - a great...

Back in 1998 I was working for Sun Microsystems and took an introductory class on networking. One of the big benefits of working for Sun is that it had a very strong affiliation with Stanford University and employees could take classes at no cost. An early rumor was that Sun really stood for Stanford University Networking since two of the founders of the company were living in the Stanford dorms during the early years of Sun. Stanford for years has offered CS 144 -...