Since we started Network Performance Daily, we had a number of goals that we wanted to achieve with it. I think we achieved some of them – but now Network Performance Daily has grown beyond what we imagined it would be. While we try to keep focused on IT, some of our biggest stories – Wafaa Bilal, Julie Amero, and others - have been a bit off that original path.
So what I was hoping to find out was – where do you – our readers, think we should go from here?
We put up a poll here so that you can give us feedback – and, of course, there’s always the comment section for more detailed commentary.
-- Brian Boyko
-- Editor, Network Performance Daily
Wafaa Bilal is a man being driven slowly insane, and I think I may have had something to do with it.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story - which we've covered previously - Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself in a room for 30 days with a paintball gun, which can be aimed and fired from an Internet Web site, by anyone who wishes to do so. He's done this primarily to make a point about distance, technology, and humanity - the idea that we are sending real bombs into a "conflict zone" from the safety of a "comfort zone" and how that makes us more likely to inflict pain, suffering, and death.
But his original plan might have been more than he bargained for. The article I wrote made it on the social news Web site, Digg.com and A-list blog, BoingBoing, where it was elevated to the front page. Network Performance Daily got over fifty thousand unique visitors from that exposure - I have no idea how many then went on to Wafaa's site. From the machine-gun sounds on his most recent video diary, I suspect quite a few.
Wondering what this might look like from a network perspective? Here's a video of experimental NetQoS' network monitoring technology that gives you an approximation of what that Digg/Slashdot effect looks like.
While we hope to have an interview dealing with the technical aspects of Wafaa's "Digging," - and they are considerable - up soon, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the human aspects. Wafaa has been putting up a video journal of the days inside the locked room as his time inside progresses. And on day 14, well - you can just see for yourself below what happened.
Wafaa is visibly shaken, and things have quickly become "insane." If Wafaa's intention was to create a microcosm of conditions in Iraq - a model, in effect, of what it is like to live in the combat zone, then what have I, and Network Performance Daily, become in this model? Certainly, Wafaa wanted attention for the project - and I don't doubt that's ultimately what he believes will do the most good - but through this exposure, I have to ask myself whether or not I'm acting in a manner consistent with journalistic ethics (Yes, this is a company blog, but we don't hide that, and I do take ethics very seriously). Ultimately, I must report the truth while seeking to minimize harm. Instead, through our promotion of the project, Wafaa Bilal was hurt physically and harmed emotionally - possibly endangering his mental health as well.
And in Wafaa's model of a war-torn country inside four walls, I've become part of the war. I've become the media hawks who overtly or tacitly call for the war, by promoting the site and giving people access to that virtual battlefield.
So yes, even I fit into this model that Wafaa has cooked up… and ultimately, the experiment is not occurring inside those four walls. Like Douglas Adams' penned fictional character "Wonko the Sane," Wafaa has locked himself "outside" of the real world where the insane people who cause people lasting pain for a few brief moments of pleasure. The experiment is truly not in the Chicago Art Institute, but everywhere but there. After all, it is not Wafaa who pulls the trigger on that gun. It is us, outside of the "asylum."
Later on, I hope to talk to Jason Potkanski, who helped set up much of the networking backend for Domestic Tension - but before I did so, I wanted to be able to get that off my chest.
The only reason that I went with the other Interop photo gallery first is because nothing in this photo gallery is actually on fire, though it's still pretty cool.
An example of this lacking functionality is the severe lack of any sort of package management software. Services such as Valve Software's Steam exist, but they are for closed-source software and are game-based to boot; they do not help the adoption of open-source software. I'd like to propose a system that will help us get open-source software into the hands of everyday, nontechnical users. In addition, the server portion of the project could be repurposed to create a Macintosh-based packaging system for F/OSS as well.
Truth be told there are many, many things I like about Windows that you just can't do in Linux. However, package management is one area in which Linux-based systems have leaped ahead. Adding a package manager to Windows is a big step towards simplifying the end-user experience in Windows.
Network engineers often overlook the "other half" of the equation - the application developers - when accounting for unusual traffic spikes and other network problems. This site points out some PHP techniques for better coding to survive bursts of traffic.
If a site is not fast enough to serve its pages, many simultaneous user accesses force the Web server to create more processes to handle all the requests. Consequently, more database connections need to be opened at the same time to generate the database driven content pages.
This is bad because it demands more server memory. Once the server RAM is exhausted, the machine starts using the virtual memory, making the server even slower, until it halts completely.
Everybody is getting ready for the Memorial Day Weekend and winding up from Interop, but I thought it would be cool to post some of the pictures I took of some of the strange things I saw while attending Interop.
Feel free to post your own captions in our comments section.
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The Interop globe in the lobby.
Of all the attendees, Bluecat, an IPAM solutions provider, clearly had the coolest booth.
We recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Bruce Clark, VP of sales at Network Instruments, and Charles Thompson, manager of sales and engineering at Network Instruments at the Network Instruments booth at Interop, where they talked about how they were working with the Interop NOC and talked about some of the experiences that they’ve had at Interop.
Network Instruments has a 8TB GigaStor appliance set up to obtain data from the Interop show floor – a sponsorship earned when they worked with Interop last fall in New York City, and they were able to look at the data going across the show’s Class A network, according to Thompson.
“The traffic level has been fairly consistent,” Thompson said. “A lot more BitTorrent than I guess I would have imagined at this particular showcase venue. It’s mostly Web traffic – some email traffic. A couple of the organizations seem to have SQL servers up and running, generating a fair amount of data across the network here.“
“We can dial in – I saw some MP3s going across, some people downloading music, random files, looked like there were some system images going across there as well.”
Bruce Clark talked a bit about the success they’ve been having at Interop as well.
Glenn Evans cheekily lists his title as “Supreme Ruler” on his official Interop badge. This is no delusion of grandeur. He’s the Lead Network Engineer for Interop, and we had a chance to sit down with him and ask him some questions about what setting up a major network installation in a conference center over a short period of time entails.
Glenn Evans: It takes about seven or eight months of the year just to get Interop rolling. We start with an RFP process about six of seven months out for the show. For example, for the 2007 show year, we started our RFP process in October of 2006. We send out a generic request where the basic design parameters are that you have to build a network that operates across the show environments – that’s exhibit floor and conference space – and it has to work and be capable of no downtime.
We ask the vendors, requesters, or whatever we want to call it – what can you bring to the table? We then get responses back from a number of vendors across all facets of the networking industry. We filter through those and make our final selections, and that’s who the sponsors are going to be.
From that stage, we go to the vendor design phase. In general, when we’re selecting the vendors, we put a basic design in mind, and we select vendors based around that. We then sort of go in and refine the design, streamline it. That usually starts about January of the show year with a general meeting in our offices in San Francisco, bringing the vendors together and hash everything out. I sort of explain my expectations, what I’d like to do, and then we all work together to bring them to fruition.
Greetings from Las Vegas, where the NetQoS team is getting ready for Interop, which starts tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.
After crossing the Southwest via airplane, and a slight snafu checking into my room, I was able to start taking a couple pictures to share with you guys from the Interop conference.
I recently interviewed Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American who teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. He's currently part of an exhibit there called "Domestic Tension." There may be a lesson there for those who work in consolidated data centers.
Bilal moved his entire living room into the gallery and now spends 24 hours a day, 7 days a week over 30 days in an enclosed space, and his only companion is a paintball gun hooked up to a Web cam, which can be aimed and fired by people who go to a Web page.
And over the past 13 days, there have been over 6,500 shots taken at him. Some near his head - which, because he doesn't wear any protection other than goggles, can cause serious injury.
Even though shooting a man with a paintball gun over the Internet probably won't kill him, it seems to me to be more than art - but also a psychological test about the human condition. People who choose to aim and fire the gun at him are doing so knowing that they hurt him - but either they show no remorse when they inflict pain - a hypothesis that I'm not keen to accept but would be foolish to dismiss - or because the distance and remoteness of the location "on the Internet" is dehumanizing, and people do things anonymously behind an IP address that they'd never do when people can see your face.
While it may not be as extreme as shooting paintballs at end-users, IT departments are notorious for having staffs that are removed from the concerns of the people who actually use information technology they provide, create, and maintain. But at least an IT staff usually worked in the same building as the people they served - now, IT staffs can be continents away in a consolidated data center. With the tyranny of distance creating a dehumanizing factor, it's just that much harder to remember that the end-user experience is really what matters in maintaining a network.
Ars Technica talks about a security flaw - long since disabled in IPv4 but re-enabled in IPv6 - that could lead to network traffic problems.
"Source routing" isn't exactly a new invention: it dates back to the original IPv4 specification. With this option, the sender of a packet can determine the route the packet follows through the network by listing a number of stops along the way. The packet is first forwarded to the first stop, then the second, and so on, until it eventually reaches its destination.
The (IPv4) Internet community has long since concluded that this option is more trouble than it's worth, so it's almost universally disabled. Not so in IPv6, however, so an attacker can specify the path packets take through the network, possibly circumventing firewalls, ending up at root DNS servers that normally serve a different part of the Internet, or ping-ponging back and forth between two routers, wasting network capacity.
To be fair to the IETF, this isn't the first time anyone's made the same mistake more than once. For example, my twice-ex girlfriend and I are dating again.
Microsoft's upcoming headless server package for home users is going to be available as an OEM product - meaning that we geeks will soon get home fileservers from our old computers without the need for mucking with Linux. Mucking with Linux may not seem like a big deal... until your 4 year old gets the root password.
This is a move that makes a lot of sense for Microsoft's target market, as it's much more cost-effective to reposition an older or secondary system as a home server than it is to justify purchasing an entirely new system specifically for that purpose.
Ah, my favorite type of ungrounded speculation. Ungrounded speculation based on advertising slogans less than five words long…
While its long been speculated whether or not Google has the chops to take on the 800-pound gorilla in the desktop applications market, Microsoft, with its Office suite of spreadsheets, word processing, e-mail and PowerPoint applications, Google's tagline metamorphous may well represent a shift in the company's emphasis.
The question now is whether Google has any inclination to enter the enterprise applications market that goes beyond the desktop to backend systems like ERP (enterprise resource planning), SCM (supply chain management), and CRM (customer relationship management)?
I'm not saying it's wrong - I'm just saying that it seems like EWeek is reading way too much into a tagline - sorta like storming GE's castle with torches and pitchforks because of the phrase "We bring good things to life."
By Brian Boyko
