Articles about Server

My favorite platform for shuffling media around my home and, most importantly, getting it to my Google TV, today gets a bit better. Okay, actually a lot better. Plex announces updates rolling out to its Media Server platform, bringing it to version 0.9.8 -- one step closer to the fabled 1.0 release.

While the software has not yet reached that 1.0 threshold, do not get the impression it is not ready for your home. The service has been full-featured for sometime now.

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Before you think that Hewlett Packard is joining the Jeff Bezos-Elon Musk space race, I should clarify that the new HP Moonshot is actually a server that the company unveiled today. HP hopes that this new architecture will be a revelation to the current server market with a number of new features.

First, HP promises, not the moon, but that Moonshot will use 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and cost 77 percent less, compared to traditional servers.

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Microsoft announced the first major update for Exchange Server 2013, the software giant's server for calendars, contacts and email. Called Cumulative Update 1, it brings along a number of new features and improvements as well as a couple of bug fixes.

Cumulative Update 1, build number 15.0.620.29, touts improvements for monitoring and high availability, as one of the most noteworthy changes. The update introduces support for auto-reseed for disks encrypted with Bitlocker and Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack for Systems Center Operations Manager (also known as SCOM), Best Copy Selection algorithm compatibility with MaximumActiveDatabases, a streamlined Get-HealthReport cmdlet and refreshed probes, monitors and respondents.

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There are plenty of benefits of living in the cloud, but some major downsides too. Nearly five months ago an Amazon Cloud outage took down BetaNews' group chat service, alongside Heroku, Flipboard, Foursquare and Reddit among others. And, two days ago, Microsoft users went through a similar ordeal which mostly affected Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive -- three of Microsoft's more essential cloud services.

Microsoft's vice president, Arthur de Haan, has chimed in on the matter in a blog post which links the outage to the upgrade process from Hotmail to the new out-of-beta email service Outlook.com. Since 13:35 PM PDT on March 12 until 5:43 AM PDT on March 13, de Haan says that "a small part of the SkyDrive service, but primarily Hotmail.com and Outlook.com" suffered from a service interruption caused by a firmware update which failed "in an unexpected way".

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Most people probably didn't turn a glance at Microsoft's other big recent release, Windows Server 2012. Server operating systems rarely get much attention, and appropriately so; their appeal and importance really only extends to the rank and file of server administrators and other similar decision makers. And plus, with Windows 8 and Surface making the public rounds, there's plenty of fanfare to go around.

But there's something most obviously missing from the latest Server 2012 lineup, and that is a subsequent Small Business Server release.  Redmond Channel Partner magazine first brought this to my attention. Not only did SBS get the axe, but Microsoft also went on to kill off Windows Home Server as well. The last public version of WHS was version 2011, which happened to be the second and final release in this platform's short lived history.

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Ubuntu fans, be prepared to upgrade! Canonical, parent company of one of the most popular Linux distros available on Thursday released Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" in desktop and server variants. It's labeled as a suitable alternative to Windows 8, coincidentally just before the October 26 launch of the latest consumer-oriented operating system from Microsoft.

On the desktop forefront, Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" brings integration between cloud and desktop environments and integration with popular web-based applications, which Canonical claims is the next evolutionary step in the transition towards a cloud-based, multi-device world. The server variant includes the Folsom release of OpenStack, as well as deployment and management tools touted as a time-saving solution for developer teams that deploy distributed applications.

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For those of you still pining for Small Business Server, you'll have to settle for its successor, which is available now for evaluation following its RTM. Microsoft expects the software to be available in "all channels" by November 1 -- or after Windows 8 launches in 17 days. However, preloaded systems will likely come later, but before year's end, while server manufacturers conduct final testing and create system images.

Unlike its predecessor, Windows Server 2012 Essentials adds more cloud utility around a straightforward concept: Provide small businesses or sole proprietors with access to their important information anytime, anywhere and on anything.

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Santa Clara County Superior Court on Wednesday ruled that Oracle is contractually obligated to port its software products to HP's servers that utilize the Intel Itanium platform, despite Oracle's move to drop support for the 64-bit server platform in early 2011.

Intel's Itanium first began losing software support in 2009, when Red Hat announced Enterprise Linux 6 would not include the architecture, and then in Spring 2010, Microsoft announced Windows Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of the operating system to support Itanium, which was characterized as the industry's first CISC-based multithreading architecture.

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If your organization’s website runs on Apache, and many do, you might wonder if the webserver’s .htaccess controls are securely configured. If you believe the demo we saw on July 27 at Black Hat by Matias Katz and Maximiliano Soler, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ What Katz and Soler describe in their session is not some rare “corner case” hack that could only possibly occur in a lab with billions of automated attempts, this is easily testable in the real world, and the tools to exploit it are freely available.

It turns out that Apache, the most commonly-used web server in the world, has an arrangement where it hands off PHP-based requests within .htaccess to PHP itself, which has worked fine on millions and millions of websites for years. But with .htaccess, you can specify what requests get sent to PHP to try to interpret. The usual methods are GET and POST, but if you feed the .htaccess process some non-standard input, PHP automatically (unless otherwise instructed) treats it as a GET request, and allows the utility to start saving the PHP files on a webserver to your local filesystem.

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Late in 2011, Hewlett Packard announced "Project Moonshot," an initiative to shrink data center size and energy consumption by using "hyperscale" low-power servers.

Initially, HP announced the project's low-power server design codenamed "Redstone" was based on Calxeda's ARM-based EnergyCore processors which used just 1.5 Watts of power per SoC. At the same time, ARM announced it was getting into the server business with its first ever 64-bit architecture. The excitement for ARM servers was high.

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