Good Evening, Network EnginSNEERS and System DEFENESTRATORS! It is I, The NOC Keeper, with a tale of ghoulish fright.

So keep on reading this Web BLARGH, and be prepared for

NETWORK HORROR STORIES!

Bill Alderson:

(This story is lightly embellished.)

An organization long ago experienced a problem with a server mysteriously in the middle of the night at about the same time. After much ado, an investigation was launched and two candidates were chosen (drew the short straws) to spend the night in the “troubled facility” one Halloween.

Alas, about the time expected the two huddled technologists noticed a beam of light mysteriously approaching. Soon they heard steps and an old man with a deep scratchy voice coughing. Both technologists now standing in a “puddle of p*** with snot bubbles blowing from their noses” heard a loud clank come from the area of the server.

Scared to death, they called out with a scream, leaping toward the night watchman as he turned grabbing his chest noticing the pair wide eyed in the corner of the office.

The watchman placed his huge magnetic flashlight each night on a metal case in the office allowing him to focus the light beam down the long cubical area as he made his appointed rounds. The watchman had no idea it was the departmental server he was disturbing each night.

Loyde Hales:

(This is a true story, delivered first-hand by the seaman involved.)

Serving on a USNS aircraft carrier as the senior computer/network specialist, our Heroic Seaman was regularly called to one of the operations centers to fix an errant piece of hardware. As the case happened, this particular equipment had the tendency to “cautiously predict a problem,” causing failover to less sophisticated systems. No, it was not designed by a large company in Redmond, Washington. After the couple of failures, our Heroic Seaman detected a pattern, which he promptly recorded in the logs for future evaluation. Any time he reported to “repair” the equipment, he made a point to explain to the department’s watch what had happened and the very simple way to fix it.

Weeks go by, and he’s still getting regular calls at all hours for the same issue. One late night, he decides to at least enjoy being called from his bunk. Grabbing some accouterments to aid in his “debugging”, chiefly in the form of bells and feathers, he proceeds to do a “voodoo dance” (his words) around the equipment in the room. In one of the passes of the room, he surreptitiously touched the reset button, causing the system to check its state and resume primary function. He then remarks that “that should do it” and nonchalantly leaves.

The Navy, however, was not amused. By afternoon, he found himself before the Brass to have explained loudly
that the Navy would not have a voodoo dance in the log or the resolution report, and he’d better amend his position immediately.

Jim Duster:

My first high tech company in Austin was ITMasters, and we were officed out of very small rental offices on Pond Springs road. We had to keep two oscillating floor fans going in the server room to keep the servers cooled. You had to be careful not to plug the coffee pot AND the microwave into the same socket as the HP server. Brownouts were normal. One day, 4pm, sun in the sky, we had a complete all lights out dark episode. The whole building went off the electrical grid. We found out it was caused by a squirrel who had climbed the telephone pole outside the server room and stretched a long stretch between the hi-line wire and the actual transformer coupler. One of our programmers described it as “first you saw this huge blue arc, then you saw the squirrel going one way and his tail going the other way”. Took us several hours to get power restored.

Subtraction: If it looks like a cow, swims like a dolphin and quacks like a duck, it must be enterprise software

One of the main problems with enterprise software design is that the person who decides whether to buy the program is usually not the person who ends up having to use it. That leads to poor UI in enterprise software, compared to the consumer equivalents.

…[E]nterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn't benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release.

Not to mention that if you work for a company in data entry for $10 an hour, you probably really need the job. So you're not likely to complain. Because they don't hear any complaints about the software, the decision makers in the company aren't likely to worry about it.

Seriously, I'm still scarred from my one-year stint at A&P supermarkets just out of college when I was doing Retek data entry. *shudder*

Slashdot: Google Caught in Comcast Traffic Filtering?

There have been quite a few stories about Comcast and blocking BitTorrent, but it looks like those same reset packets used to block BitTorrent are now showing up when trying to connect to Google.

"Comcast users are reporting 'connection reset' errors while loading Google. The problem seems to have been coming and going over the past few days, and often disappears only to return a few minutes later. Apparently the problem only affects some of Google's IPs and services. Analysis of the PCAP packet dumps reveals several injected fake RSTs, which are very similar to the ones seen coming from the Great Firewall of China [PDF]. Did Google somehow get caught up in one of Comcast's blacklists, or are the heuristics flagging Google as a file-sharer due to the heavy traffic?"

I have a theory. Dark wizards have infiltrated Comcast are interfering with Google so no one can find out what their plans are for Halloween.

I didn't say it was a good theory.

And now for something completely different, two stories on Vint Cerf:

MSNBC Internet pioneer leaves oversight group.

After fending off an international rebellion and planting the seeds for streamlining operations, Cerf is stepping down this week as chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers.

"My sentence is up," Cerf said with his characteristic sense of humor, which he and others credit for helping him steer the organization through several high-profile battles from which it emerged more stable and stronger.

You know, I've always wondered whether Vint Cerf would be cool as a Sesame Street Muppet, as part of CANAL - Corporation of Assigned Numbers and Letters. (There's precedent - there's H. Ross Parrot, after all.) "Vint Surfer" could be a surfing computer dude, and could talk about the shortage of available letter addresses in the alphabet. "See, there's only 26 letters in the alphabet, but because the alphabet has gotten so popular, there's more than 26 sounds, so sometimes we have to have letters doing double duty. Let me show you. The letter A can be pronounced 'Ahhhh' like in 'car'. But it can also be pronounced 'Ayyyy' like in 'play'"

Or he could just continue to do what he's doing and warn about the ending of the IPv4 address pool.

BBC News: Warning over Net Address Limits

While modern computers, servers, routers and other online devices are able to use IPv6, internet service providers have yet to implement the system.

"The reason they haven't - which is quite understandable - is that customers haven't asked for it yet," said Mr Cerf, adding, "my job, whether with my ICANN hat on or not, is to persuade them to ask for it.

"If you don't ask for it, then when you most want it you won't have it."

Not that I'm in the loop or anything, but NBC and Fox's parent companies have banded together to create an on-demand television show streaming video site. They called it Hulu.com, (which just goes to show you that all the good domain names are already taken.)

It's a YouTube competitor with one thing going for it: Legal viewings of NBC and Fox shows. And that may be grand and glorious, but I remember back in the 1990s when every record label put out a separate music download service - and were trumped by iTunes which sold records from all the labels. But I digress.

The point is, if even the major networks are saying that it's time to start shifting product from the television to the Internet, it means there is a significant trend shift.

And indeed, looking at traffic patterns, there certainly have been. Previously, Peer-to-Peer traffic was considered the number one way that files got moved around on the Internet. But lately, P2P's position as Internet Bandwidth top dog has been replaced by the HTTP protocol - streaming video likely has quite a bit to do with that shift.

There's an article in Ars Technica which shows that HTTP traffic takes up 46% of the Internet - at least from broadband users, while P2P takes up merely 37%, putting it in second place.

This is problematic from a network performance standpoint. Peer to peer traffic does indeed have its place - BitTorrent transfers of Linux CDs and large file versions of Microsoft patches come to mind. But it is easier to identify and not usually as work-critical to segregate that traffic. With the video traffic from YouTube coming in over HTTP, you can't just block off HTTP. You need to be able to figure out the type of data in the payload - not just the protocol of the traffic.

Now, there are business applications of YouTube (we use it quite a bit in our marketing department) and other such bandwidth-heavy hogs, and an outright ban would be counterproductive. So how do you have your YouTube viral marketing campaigns while still maintaining that the business data goes through in a timely manner? The answer is probably to put a QoS policy in place for streaming video, but in order to implement it, you need to have visibility into your data.

A few weeks ago, we wrote a story that got a significant amount of pickup from several sources called “Ad-Block: Adapt or Die,” where we posited that the technically savvy would – and in some cases even should – use the Ad-Block tool, despite the fact that it is disruptive to the advertising business model.

One of the network management programs out there that we don’t talk about much is the Spiceworks IT Desktop – a SAAS-based network management and general IT organizing tool for small businesses. It’s downloadable for free but supported by advertising.

First let me say that Spiceworks is not competitive to our own products. For starters, they only support networks with 250 devices or less. However, we were privately skeptical, at the time, that this business model would be sustainable. After all, aren’t the same people who work with complex IT problems also the ones most likely to download tools such as Ad-Block? (Which makes me think – can you use Ad Block with Spiceworks?) Aren’t they the ones most annoyed by advertisements and wary of any ad-based revenue model for software? (Most of us tech geeks got hit with Kazaa’s spyware infections back during our late teens, after all.)

And indeed, Spiceworks is now offering a version of the software without ads for a subscription fee. By offering that option, they’ve opened up an alternative form of revenue from technical people who can’t stand to bear ads.
So, to answer a number of questions, I do believe it is possible and viable to adapt away from an advertising-based business model. I think Spiceworks, by offering an ad-based and subscription-based model, is offering the best of both worlds for small businesses.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The Net Neutrality debate can often be overzealously couched by supporters and detractors of Net Neutrality legislation as an apocalyptic fight between good and evil.

Weirdly, they’re right. But not in the way you think.

See, at the core of Network Neutrality issues are appliances or programs which conduct traffic shaping. In traffic shaping, some packets are prioritized, others are held back. This prioritization can be done on the basis of content (what type of data is being transferred,) on the basis of application (what program is transferring the data) or on the basis of IP address (which computer is sending the packet, and which computer is receiving it.)

Now, here’s the rub: Traffic shaping can help improve network performance, decrease latency, and increase bandwidth by delaying those packets deemed to be of a low priority. Sounds good, right?

Not so fast. Traffic shaping can degrade network performance, increase latency, and decrease bandwidth… by the same means.

It all depends on who is controlling the traffic shaping and what packets they choose to prioritize. Traffic shaping, like guns, can be used for good purposes: A gun can be used for family protection, hunting dangerous or delicious animals, and keeping the King of England out of your face. And like guns, traffic shaping can also be used maliciously.

So, yes, Net Neutrality is very much a contest of “good vs. evil.” It’s just that the potential for good or evil depends entirely on who has control over determining what packets get priority, and for what purpose.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Traffic Shaping and Net Neutrality: Good Versus Evil" »

ComputerWorld: Opinion: VMware, Cisco say data center OS is on its way

John Webster at ComputerWorld waxes philosophical on events at VMworld 2007.

"As hard rock throbbed and steam rose from the main stage, I sensed tectonic plates shifting."

(Is this a networking editorial or a romance novel with Fabio on the cover?)

VMware Inc. President and CEO Diane Green sees a data center operating system coming. … one has to admit that VMware is much more than a hypervisor. And if VMware sees a data center operating system on its road map to the future, then an operating system is what VMware will surely become. …

Speaking the next day at this event, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers preached the virtues of data center fabric on the horizon. What's that? Recall those early depictions of Ethernet as a cloud. Now imagine a data center cloud populated by servers, storage and Cisco's "intelligent" networking gear, all managed by Cisco and its partners -- starting with VMware. As proof, Chambers ran a demo of Cisco's VFrame provisioning virtual machines under VMware. So adding the data center operating system and the intelligent data center fabric yields "The data center is the computer," I guess.

Great. We used to say "the network is the computer." Now "the data center is the computer." Why can't we let the computer be the computer? What's wrong with the computer that the computer can't even be a computer? Why must you always judge the computer? Why can't the computer just be itself instead of trying to hold to some arbitrary standard that the computer's parents came up with? What if the computer doesn't want to do binary math all day? What if the computer wants to do stand up comedy, performing at comedy clubs in the East Village? Maybe the computer doesn't need its entire future planned out for it! Maybe the computer just needs to figure out what it wants to be in life, Computer's Dad!

Why does no one understand the computer?

InformationWeek: Web 2.0 Summit: U.S. Becoming Less Relevant in Global, Internet Economy.

In a speech on technology trends, Mary Meeker, managing director of Morgan Stanley's global technology research team, said the U.S. has become less relevant over the years to the global economy.

The U.S. share of the global gross domestic product has declined steadily since 1999 to 19% today from 22%. While this has been good news for other countries, it hasn't been a favorable trend for the U.S.

In Svedeesh:

In a speech oon technulugy trends, Mery Meeker, munegeeng durectur ooff Murgun Stunley's glubel technulugy reseerch teem, seeed zee U.S. hes becume-a less relefunt oofer zee yeers tu zee glubel icunumy. Bork bork bork!

Zee U.S. shere-a ooff zee glubel gruss dumesteec prudooct hes decleened steedeely seence-a 1999 tu 19% tudey frum 22%. Vheele-a thees hes beee guud noos fur oozeer cuoontreees, it hesn't beee a fefureble-a trend fur zee U.S.

APC Magazine: Device Driver updates causing Vista to deactivate

After weeks of grueling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA -- something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation. …

So pirates haven't been slowed down at all, and the rest of us -- the legitimate purchasers -- are left to live with Windows Activation. You really need to ask the question - who's benefiting here? Certainly not users, and given the amount of discontent this is likely to cause, arguably not Microsoft either.

When I reviewed Vista for HardOCP, it didn't even take updating the device driver to trigger deactivation. The thing rebooted on me when I breathed on it funny…

Echo is a troubling problem. Most of us have suffered through some call where we had to try to talk with a lot of echo on the wire. It’s very distracting and makes it hard for most people to think straight and talk at the same time.

VoIP does not create echo, but due to the temporal aspect of echo, VoIP systems can and do increase the amount of echo heard when talking.

In any conversation, a certain amount of your own voice is part of what you hear, whether you are talking live, sitting in your office, or on the phone. This “hearing your own voice” is not echo and is referred to as “sidetone.” It’s a normal aspect of talking and listening.

Your own voice becomes echo when it comes to your ear with a significant delay from the time you spoke – longer than 25 milliseconds. But 25 to 150 ms is a typical delay range for international calls and this is why echo cancellation is necessary. Voice over IP calls have a delay budget also in the range of 150ms.

So, what causes echo?

First, let’s look at what doesn’t cause echo. Because delay is a necessary condition for echo, it is virtually impossible for components that are close to the speaker, e.g. on the speaker’s site, to cause echo. Even if part of the transmitted signal is being reflected back in the return channel, the propagation delays will be so brief that it will never be heard as echo.

Also, there is no way for the digital stream of packets in one direction to “bleed into” the digital stream of packets in the other direction. The same is true for the digital parts of the PSTN TDM network. While the underlying electrical signals carrying the bits are, indeed, analog, the corruption of those signals results in digital noise or other problems, not in echo.

So, strictly speaking, echo is never caused by voice over IP. In fact, what happens is that the longer delays introduced by all voice over IP systems reveal echo that was imperceptible with the shorter delays of the PSTN. By delaying existing echo signals more, they fall outside that 25ms window and become audible to us.

Echo is always analog and always at the far end of a conversation.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "VoIP Notes: Echo Echo In Voice over IP Systems Systems" »

We were able to catch up with William Hurley, chief architect of open-source strategy for BMC software. He's also the founder - so much as it has one - of BarCamp, an "un-conference" for IT professionals to exchange ideas, "organized" through a Wiki.

We asked him about BarCamp and community building in IT. You can find the interview below.

ComputerWorld: MySpace adds Skype VOIP to popular social network

From the people who brought back pages that load music the instant you visit them from the dark days of the 1990s Web, MySpace has decided to team up with VoIP network Skype to provide voice service to MySpace's IM client.

The new capabilities will be available in November. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Adding Skype voice services to MySpace's IM system will not require MySpace users to download additional Skype software.

Finally! Some real competition against AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, IRC, Google Talk, Gadu-Gadu, Groupwise, QQ, SILC, Simple, Sametime, Jabber, XMPP, WLM, Paltalk, PSYC, eBuddy, Xfire, MXit, Meebo, and IMVU.

In the meantime, I believe my views on MySpace can be summed up by nerd-core gangsta ("Nerdsta?") Terp 2 It.

NetworkWorld: Pump-and-dump spam goes Top 40

When they started filtering text spam, the spammers switched to image spam, which took up more bandwidth and space. Then when they started filtering image spam… they went to MP3 files which took up even more files.

Oh, those wacky, bandwidth-hogging good-for-nothing spammers.

But the MP3 files are recordings of a monotone voice telling recipients to buy stock in a little-known company, giving the stock ticker symbol and directing them to read about the company in the news. With pump-and-dump stock spam, spammers blast messages persuading people to buy a penny stock, then once the stock price goes up the spammers sells their shares at a profit.

According to Sophos, which reported this blast today, the recorded voice is randomly altered so that antispam filters can't detect it.

I would not be surprised if spammers started sending video files next.

BoingBoing Gadgets: Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 Makes Remote Pen-and-Paper Play Easier

Joel Johnson talked to people from Wizards of the Coast about the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons revision, 4.0 - and the changes are major indeed. Part of D&D 4.0 will be the inclusion of computerized character creation - both character sheets and character models - and a VoIP enabled Internet-compatible client. Not to be confused with the Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG, this allows pen and paper gamers to play the table-top game online.

This quote is particularly insightful:

"I think the real target of this are people who can't play D&D anymore. Like myself. I have two kids and I don't have time to get together with friends anymore. I only have a few hours after they go to bed. I will finally be able to shelve MMOs and play the game I love again." What defeats most heroes, simply, is time and its little henchman lack-of-access. … Pushing D&D in this way is both an admission of the problems of modern (adult) living while using modernity to circumvent it.

Basically, D&D 4.0's biggest feature is a telecommuting/teleconferencing app… that happens to play a fantasy game. A herald for things to come in business communication? Perhaps.

"In fact, I was talking with someone the other day," said Jim Metzler. "I don't need to be dramatic, but he said to me, 'Jim, I look at Web 2.0 the way I look at global warming. We're just beginning to realize how serious global warming is and take some steps now. We're not there yet on Web 2.0, but it will have a dramatic impact."

We talked a little bit about how broadband is causing end-users to expect more from the Web apps that they use for work, but here's a basic recap: If a user is used to waiting less than 5 seconds for a YouTube video, they may not be as willing to wait 30 seconds for a database. Things are getting faster, and as such there should be a new emphasis on providing performance.

We are used to information in real-time. Our growth of interconnectedness - indeed, the growth of community - has driven us to new expectations.

So we talked to Jim Metzler about whether Web 2.0 is creating new requirements in network performance.

"I think they will once they get more broadly deployed. I actually think that things like SOA and Web Services, Web 2.0, are going to significantly rachet up the need for a more dicisplined performance management, but I don't think people realize it yet…. I think we're still kind of kicking the phrases around. People are saying, 'Oh, Web 2.0, that's all marketing hype, no one knows what that means, yadda yadda yadda' So I think we're still in the denial stage. But I think that, over time, it will have a significant impact on the need for performance management and how we do performance management."

So, what can companies do about Web 2.0?

"I think where's there's SOA Web services, the bottom line is, for starters, we can't chart a course to improve, if we don't know where we're going. It's as simple as that on one level. So we need to continue to educate ourselves as to what exactly Web 2.0 is. And you're not going to be able to get a very precise definition, but you begin to read and see some commonality. 'Is my company heading in that direction? If not Web 2.0, how about these SOA Web services?'"

"I think that on the infrastructure side, to understand the evolving application disciplines, architectures, whatever you want to call it, not, so to speak, just in general but as their company is evolving to it, to figure out what that means for them - Initially it just comes down to guessing at the high level picture and then coming down closer to the ground. As you have some of the monitoring tools that people are deploying, they begin to place more emphasis to understanding the flow of data in an application."

"Becoming more application aware today, not just what applications are running on the network, (that's a good starting point,) but how do they actually transfer data and where are the performance roadblocks? So, it's kind of getting a handle on today while beginning to understand where we're going to evolve to over the next one to five years."

When asked if there was anything else he wanted to mention, Jim Metzler said: "Let's hope the Red Sox can beat the Indians."