I have already written about AIOps and machine learning methods in working with IT incidents, about hybrid umbrella monitoring and various approaches to service management. Now I would like to share a very specific algorithm, how one can quickly get information about functioning conditions of business applications using synthetic monitoring and how to build, on this basis, the health metric of business services at no special cost. The story is based on a real case of implementing the algorithm into the IT system of one of the airlines.

Currently there are many APM systems, such as Appdynamics, Dynatrace, and others, having a UX control module inside that uses synthetic checks. And if the task is to learn about failures quicker than customers, I will tell you why all these APM systems are not needed. Also, nowadays health metrics are a fashionable feature of APM and I will show how you can build them without APM. 

We describe the implementation of a custom Domain Name System (DNS) by using C socket programming for network communication, together with SQLite3 database for the storage of Internet Protocol (IP) for Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Then we provide a performance analysis of our implementation. Our code is available publicly [1].

In this topic, I will tell you how to dynamically parse and deserialize only part of the whole JSON document. We will create an implementation for .NET Core with C# as a language.

For example, we have the next JSON as a data source for the report. Notice that we will get this JSON in the runtime and at the compile step we don't know the structure of this document. And what if you need to select only several fields for processing?

Hi, My name is Alex and I am a DevOps engineer at Altenar. “No Windows, no problems.” - that is the answer I got by asking a guru of Ansible "How do you manage Windows?" on one of the local Ansible meetups. Although we have been running a modern stack (k8s, helm, .net core, etc) in production for about two years, that’s not how it has always been.

PVS-Studio user support often receives clients' suggestions on product improvement. We are happy to implement many of them. Recently one of the users suggested refining the automatic notification utility for developers (Blame Notifier). They asked us to make Blame Notifier extract the date/the code revision to which the analyzer issued a message using blame information from the version control system. This feature allowed us to expand the utility capabilities, which we'll discuss in this article.

"How much longer are you going to build it?" - a phrase that every developer has uttered at least once in the middle of the night. Yes, a build can be long and there is no escaping it. One does not simply redistribute the whole thing among 100+ cores, instead of some pathetic 8-12 ones. Or is it possible?

FTPS - is FTP with SSL layer, please don't mess it with SFTP. FTPS uses regular FTP protocol underneath, but all commands and data is encrypted using SSL. So mechanism of work is pretty same as in HTTPS: old protocol encapsulated in security layer. But that's breaks a lot of traditional FTP clients you are used to.

So here is 2 dead simple solutions I've tested with many FTPS servers, which setup could be much more correct then it actualy was. You can encounter FTPS servers configured in 2 ways with ports 20 + 21 and 989 + 990 used.

Filezilla

Filezilla is a GUI client available for both linux and windows. It has pretty specific interface. It can correctly handle wrong certificates, unusual ports and so on. Can be downloaded here. Just enter host, username, password and port(only if needed) and press Connect.

Mounting FTPS under linux

There is a an utililty called curlftpfs. It works under linux/*bsd and allows to mount remote FTPS(S) dir to you local directory. So in the simpliest ways on the ubuntu/debian it will look like:

sudo apt install curlftpfs

mkdir /tmp/ftp-mount

curlftpfscurlftpfs -o ssl ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME:21/ /tmp/ftp-mount

If server you connecting to has wrong or outdated SSL certificate you can try:

curlftpfs -o ssl,no_verify_peer,no_verify_hostname ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME:21/ /tmp/ftp-mount

If you need to change port from 21 to something else, remember, you can change port only in connection string, maybe via .netrc, but NOT with curlftpfs ftp_port option.

If you know a solution that allows to mount ftps folders under Windows, please mention it in comments.

Smoothly the era of mesh-networks is upon us. At the very least, the term is appearing more and more often in the information sphere. What attracts the attention of networkers? Let's try to understand the question, taking Yggdrasil network as an example as one of the most promising prototypes. The article is intended for a wide range of readers.

Hey, hey! I am Ilya Kalchenko, a Data Engineer at NIX, a fan of big and small data processing, and Python. In this article, I want to discuss the benefits of hybrid data lakes for efficient and secure data organization.

 To begin with, I invite you to figure out the concepts of Data Warehouses and Data Lake. Let’s delve into the use cases and delimit areas of responsibility.

The year 2021 started on such a high note for Qrator Labs: on January 19, our company celebrated its 10th anniversary. Shortly after, in February, our network mitigated quite an impressive 750 Gbps DDoS attack based on old and well known DNS amplification. Furthermore, there is a constant flow of BGP incidents; some are becoming global routing anomalies. We started reporting in our newly made Twitter account for Qrator.Radar.

Nevertheless, with the first quarter of the year being over, we can take a closer look at DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for January - March 2021.

In this article, we benchmark the performance of MySQL 8 default configuration vs. innodb_dedicated_server enabled configuration vs. the configuration recommended by MySQL Performance Tuning Service.

Types of smart traffic lights: adaptive and neural networks

Adaptive works at relatively simple intersections, where the rules and possibilities for switching phases are quite obvious. Adaptive management is only applicable where there is no constant loading in all directions, otherwise it simply has nothing to adapt to – there are no free time windows. The first adaptive control intersections appeared in the United States in the early 70s of the last century. Unfortunately, they have reached Russia only now, their number according to some estimates does not exceed 3,000 in the country.

Neural networks – a higher level of traffic regulation. They take into account a lot of factors at once, which are not even always obvious. Their result is based on self-learning: the computer receives live data on the bandwidth and selects the maximum value by all possible algorithms, so that in total, as many vehicles as possible pass from all sides in a comfortable mode per unit of time. How this is done, usually programmers answer – we do not know, the neural network is a black box, but we will reveal the basic principles to you…

Adaptive traffic lights use, at least, leading companies in Russia, rather outdated technology for counting vehicles at intersections: physical sensors or video background detector. A capacitive sensor or an induction loop only sees the vehicle at the installation site-for a few meters, unless of course you spend millions on laying them along the entire length of the roadway. The video background detector shows only the filling of the roadway with vehicles relative to this roadway. The camera should clearly see this area, which is quite difficult at a long distance due to the perspective and is highly susceptible to atmospheric interference: even a light snowstorm will be diagnosed as the presence of traffic – the background video detector does not distinguish the type of detection.

I manage a team that designs and introduces in-house Kubernetes aaS at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. And we often see a lack of understanding as to this technology, so I’d like to talk about common strategic mistakes at Kubernetes implementation in major projects.

Most of the problems arise because the technology is quite sophisticated. There are unobvious implementation and operation challenges, as well as poorly used advantages, all of those resulting in money loss. Another issue is the global lack of knowledge and experience with Kubernetes. Learning its use by the book can be tricky, and hiring qualified staff can be challenging. All the hype complicates Kubernetes-related decision making. Curiously enough, Kubernetes is often implemented rather formally – just for it to be there and make their lives better in some way.

Hopefully, this post will help you to make a decision you will feel proud of later (and won’t regret or feel like building a time machine to undo it).

In some projects, the build script is playing the role of Cinderella. The team focuses its main effort on code development. And the build process itself could be handled by people who are far from development (for example, those responsible for operation or deployment). If the build script works somehow, then everyone prefers not to touch it, and no one ever is thinking about optimization. However, in large heterogeneous projects, the build process could be quite complex, and it is possible to approach it as an independent project.If you treat the build script as a secondary unimportant project, then the result will be an indigestible imperative script, the support of which will be rather difficult.

In this note we will take look at the criteria by which we chose the toolkit, and in the next one — how we use this toolkit. (There is also a Russian version.)

Author: Sergey Lukyanchikov, Sales Engineer at InterSystems

What is Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI)?

Attempts to find a “bullet-proof” definition have not produced result: it seems like the term is slightly “ahead of time”. Still, we can analyze semantically the term itself – deriving that distributed artificial intelligence is the same AI (see our effort to suggest an “applied” definition) though partitioned across several computers that are not clustered together (neither data-wise, nor via applications, not by providing access to particular computers in principle). I.e., ideally, distributed artificial intelligence should be arranged in such a way that none of the computers participating in that “distribution” have direct access to data nor applications of another computer: the only alternative becomes transmission of data samples and executable scripts via “transparent” messaging. Any deviations from that ideal should lead to an advent of “partially distributed artificial intelligence” – an example being distributed data with a central application server. Or its inverse. One way or the other, we obtain as a result a set of “federated” models (i.e., either models trained each on their own data sources, or each trained by their own algorithms, or “both at once”).

Distributed AI scenarios “for the masses”

We will not be discussing edge computations, confidential data operators, scattered mobile searches, or similar fascinating yet not the most consciously and wide-applied (not at this moment) scenarios. We will be much “closer to life” if, for instance, we consider the following scenario (its detailed demo can and should be watched here): a company runs a production-level AI/ML solution, the quality of its functioning is being systematically checked by an external data scientist (i.e., an expert that is not an employee of the company). For a number of reasons, the company cannot grant the data scientist access to the solution but it can send him a sample of records from a required table following a schedule or a particular event (for example, termination of a training session for one or several models by the solution). With that we assume, that the data scientist owns some version of the AI/ML mechanisms already integrated in the production-level solution that the company is running – and it is likely that they are being developed, improved, and adapted to concrete use cases of that concrete company, by the data scientist himself. Deployment of those mechanisms into the running solution, monitoring of their functioning, and other lifecycle aspects are being handled by a data engineer (the company employee).

Read this article to learn how to disable password request when booting Windows 10, 8 or 7. How to remove an account password and have Windows boot automatically and right to the desktop screen, without having to enter logins and passwords.

Read this article to find out what to do if an antivirus removed important files and how to recover them. What is a quarantine and how to configure exclusions for an antivirus? Learn more about causes of data loss and available effective methods to restore missing user files.

By the beginning of 2021, Qrator Labs filtering network expands to 14 scrubbing centers and a total of 3 Tbps filtering bandwidth capacity, with the San Paolo scrubbing facility fully operational in early 2021;

New partner services fully integrated into Qrator Labs infrastructure and customer dashboard throughout 2020: SolidWall WAF and RuGeeks CDN;

Upgraded filtering logic allows Qrator Labs to serve even bigger infrastructures with full-scale cybersecurity protection and DDoS attacks mitigation;

The newest AMD processors are now widely used by Qrator Labs in packet processing.

DDoS attacks were on the rise during 2020, with the most relentless attacks described as short and overwhelmingly intensive.

However, BGP incidents were an area where it was evident that some change was and still is needed, as there was a significant amount of devastating hijacks and route leaks.

In 2020, we began providing our services in Singapore under a new partnership and opened a new scrubbing center in Dubai, where our fully functioning branch is staffed by the best professionals to serve local customers.

In this article, we collected the most widespread BIOS signals (beepcodes) used for troubleshooting in case of any PC issues. Yet if your computer gives a sound signal which is not listed below, consult the motherboard / PC user manual to identify what kind of hardware error it is.

If the disk space in your computer is incorrectly displayed, or free disk space decreases, or the overall disk performance deteriorates, all that may happen for a number of reasons. Read this article to find out how to restore original capacity of a hard disk and recover the missing disk space.