Planned server outage backfires

A planned computer server outage over the holiday weekend went awry for the US' Internal Revenue Service (IRS) when the tax agency could not bring the system back into operation, according to AP.

The glitch came four days before the deadline for filing 2009 returns for taxpayers who got extensions in April.

So far, the shutdown of the IRS 'modern e-file' system does not appear to be causing huge problems.

Research In Motion (RIM) unveiled an 'interim security update' for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0 Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino, writes NetworkWorld.

The move was made following to a vulnerability that could have potentially allowed a hacker or other malicious person access to organisations' BES infrastructure. That flaw could have also been used to execute Denial of Service attacks, according to the BlackBerry maker.

It affects not just the full version of BES, but the free BES Express, as well. The BES security flaw is currently ranked 7.6, or 'high severity,' on a common vulnerability scoring system scale of zero to 10, with 10 representing the most critical flaws.

IBM has refreshed its CloudBurst products for building a virtualised private cloud, adding configurations based on its Power7 processor on top of the x86-based systems it already offers, says Computerworld.

CloudBurst integrates IBM servers with a variety of software components, the company says, including storage, network and orchestration software, to make it easier for companies to deploy and manage a virtualised infrastructure in their data centres.

The company says the system also includes a self-service portal where end-users can reserve their own computing resources, and software for automatically provisioning and managing those resources.