If you weren't able to come to the NetQoS Networkers after-party at the House of Blues in Anaheim, we uploaded this short video which shows you what it was like inside our Netcosm Immersion Experience. Enjoy!

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Heather Havenstein at ComputerWorld just released a story online about corporate blogging - about how corporate blogs sound less like re-hashed press releases and have started sounding - well, more like humans. More like people. More like… us.

July 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- NetQoS Inc. is a vendor of network performance management software. But you'd be hard-pressed to figure that out from some of the online posts written by Brian Boyko, the Austin-based company's designated corporate blogger.

In April, for example, a Boyko post about the Interplanetary Internet project - which is designed to extend the Net into outer space - prompted Internet luminary Vinton Cerf to post a comment on NetworkPerformanceDaily.com, the NetQoS blog.

And over the course of several months this year, the blog gained national attention after Boyko posted multiple entries about the case of a Connecticut school teacher whom a jury convicted on charges of risking injury to a minor for allegedly exposing students to pornographic images that appeared on a classroom computer.

Well, thanks, ComputerWorld! I'm glad that you consider NPD a major driving force in the world of corporate blogging. Ah, the life of a blogger! Women want me, men want to be me…

More seriously, I figured I'd use this as an excuse to talk about some of the points in the article - not to disagree with them but just to give you my view. The main thesis of the piece, which I overall agree with, is a good place to start:

Companies such as NetQoS, which launched its blog nine months ago, are eschewing Corporate Blogging 1.0 tactics that often result in blogs being used merely to post static marketing materials as an extension of companies' Web sites. Now, a growing number of businesses are opening up their blogs to provide an outlet for the same kind of uncensored commentary and interaction that have made personal blogs such a popular medium on the Web.

I'm not sure I like the nomenclature of "Corporate Blogging 1.0." We're very much in "Corporate Blogging 0.9 beta" - those early efforts are probably best recognized as early alpha builds - if you're going for the version number metaphor. There is so much - so incredibly much for us to learn! I have trouble understanding why our story with Vint Cerf wasn't picked up by Slashdot when a "filler" editorial I did on Dungeons and Dragons was. I have trouble figuring out how one story on Slashdot netted over 100 comments, yet another story on Slashdot netted only 10, and neither of those stories got as many comments as there were on Slashdot, talking about the same story.

While I know more than most about this field on the theoretical level, what I know has not seen a lot of field testing yet, compared to more established areas of expertise, and there are going to be better ways to communicate with the audience that simply haven't been found yet - blogging is just so new.

And there is this paragraph, near the conclusion:

"It has to be a realistic discussion about industry trends and issues that are important, potentially even issues that are antagonistic or troublesome," Fishkin said. Otherwise, "you look even more ridiculous than if you never attempted it."

I'm not sure about that. I can look pretty ridiculous anyway…

That's "Sysadmin Appreciation Day."

If you happen to be a regular reader of Network Performance Daily that also doesn't happen to read at least one of the following: Slashdot, Digg, Network World, HardOCP, and numerous other publications, you'll be glad to learn that today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day.

Similar to Secretaries Day, SAD is a day, celebrated on the last Friday in June, when we remember the gifts of the people in the basement IT rooms, consigned to live a life away from the sun, who keep everything running but are almost never seen unless something goes wrong.

Sorta like shoe-maker's gnomes, only with routers.

Mcox.com: New Ethernet Standard both 40Gbps and 100Gbps

In a move worthy of the wisdom of King "Split 'em" Solomon, the IEEE has decided that the next generation of Ethernet will support both 40Gbps and 100Gbps.

The higher speed required more expensive and power-hungry equipment… Unable to come up with a consensus the HSSG decided to standardize both 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds as the IEEE 803.23ba standard. Each speed will use different connection equipment.

Which begs the question, how standard is a standard that requires two different sets of equipment?

Ars Technica: Deep packet inspection meets 'Net neutrality, CALEA

An absolutely amazing, in-depth article about Deep Packet Inspection.

Imagine a device that sits inline in a major ISP's network and can throttle P2P traffic at differing levels depending on the time of day. Imagine a device that allows one user access only to e-mail and the Web while allowing a higher-paying user to use VoIP and BitTorrent. Imagine a device that protects against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, scans for viruses passing across the network, and siphons off requested traffic for law enforcement analysis. Imagine all of this being done in real time, for 900,000 simultaneous users, and you get a sense of the power of deep packet inspection (DPI) network appliances.

Don't be too proud of this technogical terror you've constructed. The power of deep packet inspection is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

ComputerWorld: Law firm's IT staff gives flimsy excuse for not whitelisting

Many people, in their effort to fight spam, often forget that it's more important to let good communications in than to keep the bad spam out. Such as a network administrator at Azar and Associates, a law firm that missed a court date because they forgot to whitelist e-mails from the U.S. District Court as "not spam."

Sure, this is a problem that's not likely to happen twice, but it shouldn't have happened first to begin with. This paragraph from the article makes an important point that all network professionals need to keep in mind:

The business process of the law firm was not understood by the admin. Obviously the CTO didn't relay to the admin the importance of these emails. He used to be a lawyer, so he should understand the criticality and do something to ensure this does not happen (the excuse above sounded like just that - an excuse). I'm not sure how often the domain of the district court changes, but it would be my guess that adding it to their whitelist would not require a lot of maintenance.

NetworkWorld Layer 8: Sand, sun, and RFID?: The high-tech networked beach is coming soon.

I grew up on the Jersey shore, and remember the days of fun down on the boardwalk. When I was little, we went to Funtown in Seaside Heights, then we grew into Casino Pier (especially when my cousins, Chris, David, and Michael were in town) and then to Jenkinson's in Point Pleasant when we moved from Brick, NJ to Clifton, NJ.
I digress. Ocean City is a South Jersey shore town with beautiful beaches and boardwalks as well - and they're planning to implement a municipal wi-fi system. (And an RFID beach-tagging system, but that's not the part I'm interested in.)

A wireless network will let Ocean City expand economic development and control the cost of local services. Wireless allows the City to save on cell phone usage, T-1 lines, and it adds efficiency. By maximizing connectivity, there are a variety of ways to enhance education, library services, and emergency management services, city executives say on their Website. The provider of the Ocean City wireless network has not been determined yet and the City meets this week to possibly select a service provider but it is on track to have wireless coverage by early 2008, according to the City's Website. The wireless net would be free to resident and $6 a day for tourists.

The optimist in me believes that you can get work done while your family plays in the beautiful waters of the New Jersey coastline. The cynic in me believes that you will be working while your family plays in the beautiful waters of the New Jersey coastline.

Wired: Martha Stewart Geeks Out for Wired's Annual How To Guide

You'd think that as the reigning queen of old-fashioned country-time beautification, Martha Stewart would be technophobic. Amazingly, that's not the case - she's technophilic, as this interview with Wired shows.

Stewart: I'm working on Marthapedia right now, which is my version of Wikipedia. If you know how to take red wine out of a white cloth napkin better than I do, that's good to know. We'll be editing user content, and it won't be as freewheeling as Wikipedia. Because a lot of this - you have to really monitor it.

And of course, Martha's got her own, better version of the gadget closet. It's a good thing.

Stewart: I have something called the servery. It's a room with two long white marble counters on either side and lots of plugs. That's where everything is - I have my cameras, a lot of batteries, everything.

Google.com: the Speed of Light in Furlongs per fortnight

the speed of light = 1.8026175 × 10¹² furlongs per fortnight

I'm sure that will come in handy if you ever need to calculate propagation delay in imperial units.

Tuesday Links On Wednesday: Coverage from the NetQoS/Cisco WAAS announcement, and other stuff.

First, here's what people are saying about yesterday's NetQoS/Cisco announcement:

• ZDNet UK: IT pros get to grips with WAN reports
• EWeek: Cisco, NetQOS Prove WAN Optimization Gains
• Network World: Cisco adds security, monitoring to WAN optimization gear
• Search Networking: Cisco adds monitoring to WAAS
• Network Computing: Cisco and NetQoS Partner for WAN Optimization and Performance Monitoring
• Techworld.com UK: WAN optimisation breaking app monitoring

And… some other things may have happened…

Wired - 27B Stroke 6: ISP Seen Breaking Internet Protocol to Fight Zombie Computers

ISPs, taking action against botnets on IRC, have been redirecting attempts to reach certain online IRC channels. The plus side: It does take care of some bots. The downside - breaking the DNS protocol prohibits access for all users.

"Specifically, Cox's DNS server is responding to a domain name request for an Internet Relay Chat server. Instead of responding with the correct IP address for the server, Cox sends the IP address of its own IRC server (70.168.70.4). That server then sends commands to the computer that attempt to remove malware."

What I'm worried about is the legal aspects - if ISPs can "edit" the type of material passing through the network by breaking DNS, do they lose a common carrier legal status? That is, of course, assuming this type of redirection is even legal.

In related news, some ISPs have been inserting advertisements into web pages - this site from the University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute should help you determine if that's the case on your network.

The big problem with WAN Optimization and Application Performance Monitoring was that there simply wasn't a WAN Optimization solution on the market that preserved end-to-end performance data, nor a monitoring solution that would work in an optimized WAN.

This problem has been solved.

At Cisco Networkers in Anaheim, NetQoS gave a presentation to hundreds of attendees to make the announcement that we've been working with Cisco to develop a management interface for accurate end-to-end application response time measurement that works on optimized networks. (In addition to the people mobbing our booth, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, stopped by for a chat and review of what we do.)

Through integrated software on Cisco Wide Area Application Services devices (WAAS), TCP header information is exported to NetQoS SuperAgent (an end-to-end application performance monitoring module) before optimization occurs - preserving that information. Finally, IT organizations can accurately validate the results of WAN Optimization deployments.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Tracking The Optimized WAN: NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization" »

By Brian Boyko

At the NetQoS symposium last April, Jim Metzler focused his keynote speech on the idea that in enterprise networking, you're either developing applications or delivering applications. That struck a chord with Carl Duhnoski at PSS/World Medical, who began to put together a plan to merge the application and network operations teams into one unit - the "application delivery" team.

We had a chance to talk to Mr. Duhnoski, now Director of IT operations at PSS, about this change.

"At the NetQoS conference we listened to a keynote by Jim Metzler," Duhnoski said. "He was perhaps oversimplifying it, but he focused on the fact that in IT, you're either developing applications or delivering applications. He used that term, 'application delivery" a couple of times, and it got me thinking about this team, and the fact that we really do want to foster that client-focus"

"As an admin of systems - whether hardware, software, or otherwise, your primary job is to deliver an application. You're not administering a piece of hardware or software and measuring vital signs to make sure that it's all working. It's really a holistic approach to the system that results from the various components that you're delivering to the end user."

"Sometimes, you kinda get these guys sometimes who, even if only in the back of their heads, think, 'Well, as long as the server's up,' or a DBA that says 'Well, as long as the database is up.' [Changing the name] is a constant reminder that it's not just about making sure that machinery is functioning, but that the applications that you've been charged with delivering to our users everyday are in fact, functioning. That's not always apparent by green lights on the front of a server."

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Application Delivery: Merging Applications and Network Operations into "Application Delivery"" »

During a recent NetQoS - Cisco WAN Optimization Seminar Series, and to some extent at Interop, NetQoS launched a survey regarding WAN Optimization. We found some interesting things:

Over 90% of the survey respondents said that it is either important or very important to be able to quantify accurately the results of WAN optimization.

Over 80% say it is important/very important to have integrated WAN optimization and performance reporting.

We also found that most respondents – 60% - believe that the most relevant measure of WAN optimization impact is in application and network latency. 30% believe that link utilization is the most relevant measure, and 10% believe that the two are equally important, with a handful of respondents saying that protocol distribution is the most important.

What this tells us is that many enterprise IT organizations do not want to deploy a WAN Optimization solution that is going to break their application and network performance monitoring. However, WAN Optimization devices perform local TCP ACKnowledgements, thereby confusing performance monitoring and making it near impossible to accurately quantify the results of WAN Optimization.

We go into this challenge more in “WAN Optimization’s Dirty Little Secret” and John Mao and Ben Erwin have uploaded some videos in Network Performance Daily’s Whiteboard Series to illustrate the points, but basically, many WAN Optimization devices (WOD) split a TCP/IP session between a client and server into three separate sessions – a client segment, a WAN segment (or “channel”), and a server segment. But data center-resident passive network monitoring tools assume only one TCP session between the client and server – which means that when WAN optimization is deployed, they only have visibility into the server segment response time – between the server and the data center WOD. So, visibility into all the components that make up end-user application response times, including network round trip time and data retransmission time, is lost.

If ultimately, IT is about application delivery – the reliability and speed with which you can deliver applications to the end-users – then forgoing application and network monitoring is not an option. We’ll have more on this problem next week. In the meantime we look forward to seeing you at Cisco Networkers in Anaheim.

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More information:

On Quantifying the results of WAN Optimization

Dark Reading: Attackers Hide in Fast Flux

Criminal organizations behind two infamous malware families -- Warezov/Stration and Storm -- in the past few months have separately moved their infrastructures to so-called fast-flux service networks, according to the Honeynet Project & Research Alliance, which has released a new report on the emerging networks and techniques.

So what is fast-flux?

Fast-flux is basically load-balancing with a twist. It's a round-robin method where infected bot machines (typically home computers) serve as proxies or hosts for malicious Websites. These are constantly rotated, changing their DNS records to prevent their discovery by researchers, ISPs, or law enforcement.

"The purpose of this technique is to render the IP-based block list -- a popular tool for identifying malicious systems -- useless for preventing attacks," says Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies at security vendor Cloudmark.

Well, crud.

InfoWorld: Confessions of a former spammer

This is buried near the end of the article, but I think it's the most important line.

As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VoIP calls or sending out videos, Ed said. The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible.

The problem with fighting spam is that we are going after the middle men, not the people who provide the supply - unscrupulous peddlers - and those who provide the demand - people who fall for spam.

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Correction: This article was originally posted as "Tuesday Links", despite the fact that we wrote and posted it on a Thursday. You ever have one of those days that... actually turns out to be another one of those days? -- ed.

At this year's NetQoS invitation-only Networkers After-Party at the House of Blues in Disneyland Anaheim, we're going to bring you what we call the Netcosm Immersion Experience.

The Netcosm Immersion Experience will take our Netcosm tech demo and project it on the inside of a walk-in cube on the dance floor of the House of Blues - 25 feet by 35 feet, 10 feet tall. (Okay, that's a not exactly a cube, but why get pedantic?)

It will be a full immersion video experience with sights, quadrophonic sounds, colors, and the digital pyrotechnics, navigable with a gyromouse. And the experience will be enhanced with "Netcosmopolitan" drinks. (They're just like regular cosmopolitans, except blue, with a dash of portmanteau added for flavor.)

If you're attending the NetQoS Networkers After-Party, you'll be able to literally walk inside a living model of an enterprise network.

(We do not suggest partaking of any illegal narcotic substances before or during the Netcosm Immersive Experience. The Netcosm Immersive Experience is simply enough to blow your mind and alter your reality without any pharmaceutical assistance. Besides, the last stoner I knew who went to Disneyland still has nightmares about "six-foot-tall rats".)

(Continued...)

Continue reading "You don't know what's in / Anaheim. / Why don't you come with me (little girl) / on a magic carpet ride?" »