Hooray for all the individuals who don’t want everything they post online automatically associated their actual identity!

Google social vice president Vic Gundotra said Google+ will begin allowing people to use pseudonyms. While the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared victory, after having lobbied against Google’s requirement that people use their real names, Gundotra did not actually say when pseudonym support will be enabled.

via Google shifts stance on Google+ anonymity, will support pseudonyms.

It’s funny, because just the other day I glanced over at my old O’Reilly X Window System books, and wondered when was the last time I needed them.

Happily, it’s been a while.

xkcd: X11
.

Ironically, I couldn’t see this at work, due to the content filter: 1.00 FTE – We Are Not Bad People.

New Solaris 10!

Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 features include:

• Advances in the Oracle Solaris ZFS provide customers with new tools that make it possible to standardize on ZFS as a root file system across all their Oracle Solaris 10 systems while delivering industry leading data management with unique built in features like de-duplication, snapshots and cloning.
• Ability to install a system from an Oracle Solaris ZFS Flash Archive, either on bare metal or with Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade, providing additional options for fast deployments and disaster recovery.
• Faster reboot for SPARC systems which can reduce system maintenance planned downtime.
• Significant improvements in Oracle Database 11g startup time and shutdown time for customers using large amounts of IMS (Intimate Shared Memory).

via Oracle Releases Oracle Solaris 10 8/11.

If you use Google Apps and have Linux machines you access via SSH, this is a handy method to add two-factor authentication to your environment:

When Google introduced two-factor authentication for the Google and Google Apps accounts, they also created a pluggable authentication module PAM for Linux. This is great news for people running Linux servers who want to protect their remotely-accessible SSH accounts with two-factor authentication. For free.

via Two-factor SSH authentication via Google secures Linux logins | TechRepublic.

Thank you Google, on behalf of my employees who get married and change their names.

The ability to rename a user’s email address is now available in the administrator control panel.

How to access what’s new:
Go to ‘Organizations and users’ > Select the check box next to a user > Click ‘Rename user’ under the ‘More actions’ dropdown

via Google Apps update alerts: Need to change a username? Ability to rename a user’s email address is now available.

Excellent new feature, and easy to use!

We recently released the ability to recover a deleted site in Google Sites. If an owner of a site accidentally deletes a site, it will be immediately removed from view but they may recover it by visiting its URL within 30 days. Once 30 days have elapsed however, it will not be possible to recover the site under any circumstances and it will be permanently deleted.

via Google Apps update alerts: Accidentally delete a site? Owners can now recover a deleted site in Google Sites.

This will be useful to know how to do:

Ethernet-based storage networks, such as those providing iSCSI or NFS disk resources, may be the last frontier for the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Should these networks need to be updated, now is the time to verify all of the pieces and parts are supported and work as expected.

In this gallery, I’ll go through configuring an ESXi host to an iSCSI LUN over IPv6. Be sure to reference VMware KB 1010812 for more information on this configuration.

via Verify IPv4 to IPv6 transition | TechRepublic.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available to download for all Google Apps domains. With this plugin, you can now share, backup and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint®, and Excel® documents with co-workers without the need for sending attachments back and forth.

Handy!

via Google Apps update alerts: Teach your old docs new tricks with Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office.

2-Step verification is now available for Google Apps (free) edition. When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account. A mobile phone is the main requirement to use the second form of identification. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering a password, a verification code is sent to the user’s mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an application they can install on their Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device.

This makes it much more likely that it is the user accessing the data: even if someone has stolen the password, they’ll need more than that to access the account. Users can also indicate when they’re using a computer they trust and don’t want to be asked for a verification code from that machine in the future.

via Google Apps update alerts: 2-Step authentication now available to Google Apps (free) edition.