By Brian Boyko

"D20 is a horrible menace and must be stopped!"

Yes, I've written those words - or something quite like them - and quite regret them. Partially because d20 is not a horrible menace, partially because it engenders a level of relative urgency and loathing that are absurd when talking about d20, and because no one outside of a subgroup of a subgroup gives a toss whether they know what d20 is or not.

But for a few years - years! - I thought that d20 was evil and horrible.

Most of you are wondering what the heck this "d20" is. Well, d20 is the base system behind a number of roleplaying games, most notably, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5th edition.

It is no secret that the technically inclined - geeks for short - are often stubborn, opinionated and do not move from an idea. This is doubly true either when discussing a technical solution or choosing a particular roleplaying game to play. For the same reason.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Dungeons & Dragons and IT Part II: Rules Lawyers and Tech-evangelists" »

By Dr. Cathy Fulton

In the beginning, Al Gore created the Internet. (Okay, I have to be fair, Vint Cerf has given Al Gore a lot of credit for his work in government.)

IP version 4 was created back in 1981, and in August of 1990, at an IETF meeting, three individuals predicted that the IPv4 Class B address space would be consumed as early as March of 1994, the “date of doom,” and that would cause all sorts of issues.

That stimulated a lot of publicity and action, on how the address space seed shortage would be handled. A working group was formed in December 1993 that published a request for whitepapers asking for solutions to the IPv4 problem – including next-generation IP protocols.

They were so worried, however, that they would run out so quickly, that they believed there would be no time for new features. The ALE working group was tasked with determining how long they had before the Internet collapsed, due to routers unable to keep up with the increased routing tables. Could next-gen IP add new features, or did they just have to implement an emergency measure?

The working group came back with an estimate in 1994, and said that the collapse of the net would be somewhere between 2005 and 2011. That gave the IETF time to develop a full protocol, add new features, and figure out where they were going next.

In 1994, technical criteria by which the IP next generation protocol would be judged were introduced. The current specification was proposed in 1998, and is now a draft standard – one step away from full Internet standard.

So, where’s IPv5?

(Continued...)

Continue reading "The Evolution of IPv6" »

By Brian Boyko

With all the (deserved?) hype over virtualized servers, and the consolidation of hardware in order to reduce underutilized servers or replace obsolete hardware, many are overlooking what might be, in retrospect, an obvious use of virtualization – the end-user client computer.

The benefits of virtualized desktops mostly deal with administration and reducing problems caused by user error.

First, virtual configurations are essentially files on the hard disk, and those files can be backed up and restored to the hard drive of the end-user. It’s not a secure form of data storage, but it can be a lifesaver when a malware infection strikes.

Second, it can shorten the “test and deploy” period for software updates, because virtual environments can be configured to be identical and even in a worst case scenario, where a deployed change manifests problems, you can restore from the aforementioned backup.

Third, multiple VMs can be loaded on one machine. This means that if a particular program hangs or crashes, or works fine but is a notorious RAM hog, the end-user can switch over and continue working on a secondary virtual environment until the IT team can get to solving the original problem.

A possible unintended side-effect, however, is decreased network performance – virtual machines simply don’t run as fast as full-fledged installs, and if you have the ability to back up every end-user’s configuration to the network, eventually you may find yourself having to do so. Those with consolidated data centers and a lot of traffic operating over a WAN might not find the prospect of backing up hundreds of computers, including operating system, drivers, applications, and data, so appealing.

Kept on the LAN, however, servers dedicated to doing backup should not be as daunting. Those servers can be maintained via SSH from the WAN, and would not need that much hardware. You could probably repurpose some of those underutilized servers you have lying around – the ones that became redundant when you rolled out virtualized servers.

WebPerformance: Load Testing a Virtual Web Application

Christopher Merrill takes an academic look and tests out the performance of virtualized servers. He notes that for the added ease of server administration, you are taking a performance hit, and can serve a fewer number of users.

We ran 4 load tests on the application. The first measured the performance of the web application running on a native Windows 2003 Server installation. The second test measured the performance of the web application running on a virtual Windows 2003 Server installation running within VMware Server 1.0.1. VMware ran on Linux (CentOS 4.4). The base hardware for both machines is a Dell Poweredge SC1420 with dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors. The virtualized server has the same memory available to it (2G) as the native server (which implies that the physical machine running VMware has more memory). Since the Intel Xeon processor supports hyperthreading, there was some debate as to the impact of hyperthreading on the virtualized machine. So we decided to run two additional tests with hyperthreading disabled for both the native and virtualized servers.

Merrill makes a point of stating that his own company transferred 7 underutilized servers to two machines with newer hardware and found an increase in performance and productivity – but that was mostly because those servers were underutilized. This is a test of peak performance.

Network World: Layer 8 – Cisco develops communication relay robots

Never a wireless access point around when you need one? Cisco may have solved that problem, albeit in a spooky way.

Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity…

Whether or not the systems has an enterprise application, it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army's Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority.

One thing is for certain. There is no stopping them. The Cisco robots will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new wireless robot overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their data mines…

When most people think of running Windows programs without Windows, they usually think of WINE, the API developed for Unix systems. But there's another project, called ReactOS, which is an open-source, GPL-compatible operating system designed to run Windows programs and work with Windows drivers - essentially, rebuilding Windows from the ground up without using Microsoft's code. ReactOS and WINE share quite a bit of code and contribute to each other's products, but Unix has its own TCP/IP stack. ReactOS's TCP/IP stack had to be built for ReactOS.

Art Yerkes's day job is working with Secret Level to work on the remake of the classic Sega Genesis hit "Golden Axe." But he's also known as the developer for much of the network code of ReactOS. We had a chance to talk with him, briefly, about his experiences.

"In a previous life, I had done a lot of work on media streaming, and so I got to be pretty familiar with TCP/IP itself during that time. I figured that much of what we had was good up to the packet layer, so I just started pulling the string on stuff I didn't really like. It started at the high level TCP and AFD implementations which were really kinda hokey and didn't respect IRQL at all. There are certain rules to coding NT drivers, and while I wasn't familiar with them at first, the [ReactOS] kernel [developers] people really helped me get up to speed and helped me write the drivers."

Yerkes's work didn't come in a vacuum. He explained that there was a partial network stack already in place, coded by Casper Hornstrup, but that it needed improvement.

"I imported TCP from the FreeBSD snapshot from OSKit… and I kept for the most part Casper's implementation of the packet-oriented protocols, but I cleaned them up and made the implementations a lot smaller and a bit sturdier."

While Yerkes improved the stability of the TCP/IP stack, he admitted that at this point, he's not concerned with transmission efficiency.

"It's much too early in ReactOS's development to think about that. The [operating] system, as a whole, isn't very stable. Leaving the TCP code in as understandable a form as possible is very desirable, if for no other reasons than getting a good stack trace when something breaks, so you can tell where the failure came from."

Yerkes urged newer developers interested in learning how Windows networking works to join the #reactos IRC channel on the freenode network to talk with people there about the project.

Correction: Art Yerkes name was incorrectly spelled "Yerkis" twice in this article. NPD regrets the typographical errors.

We’re having a Webinar today at 10:00 a.m. PST / 12:00 p.m. CST / 1:00 p.m. EST on “Evaluating WAN Optimization Options and Quantifying the Results.”

It’s co-hosted by Cisco and talks about what WAN optimization solution is best for your organization, and how to prove the effects of WAN optimization on application performance. Speaking will be Vijay Iyer, Product Manager for Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Dr. Steve Fulton, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at NetQoS.

We’ve set up this area on the blog to get attendees questions before the Webinar so that we can get to them in case the presentation runs long. Please enter your questions below. We moderate comments to keep out spam, so there may be a delay before seeing your question appear. If we don’t get to your question during the Webinar, we hope to produce a Q&A on this blog to answer your question.

(Edit: Thanks for participating in the Webinar. We're working with Vijay Iyer to answer the questions and should have the answers up sometime next week.)

By Beth McAfee

I spent my vacation visiting South by Southwest (SxSW) here in downtown Austin.

Besides the secrets to the success of tech stars everywhere, here are some interesting things I learned at the Interactive side of SxSW, and how they apply to network performance:

• People are considering putting broadband municipal internet over broadcast television channels. Bruce Sterling talked about this possibility in his annual rant. He mentioned a scheme developed by Reed Hundt, former head of the FCC, to sell 700MHz spectrum to emergency service providers and possibly for use as municipal broadband internet. I’m not sure whether this is a real possibility or just a random thought in a rambling, yet entertaining discussion, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.

  Network Performance Application: Municipal Broadband is also interesting for enterprise developers, who could then cheaply route non-critical Internet traffic over the Muni network, and remove that traffic from the WAN.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Notes on SXSW" »

By Brian Boyko

From the latest XKCD:

Where did those people in the distant future get the idea that bloggers wore red capes, goggles and blog from high altitude balloons?

The wind would blow papers right off my desk.

That’s why I blog from my secret volcano lair.

I’m hoping that other bloggers out there join me in helping set the record straight about this.

By Brian Boyko

“O, Canada,” I sang, “Our home and native land. True patriot love. And all thy son’s com—”

“Brian,” interrupted Andrea in the next office over. “What are you doing?”

The truth is I was working on this editorial, which is ostensibly about VoIP and traffic and networks and data analysis and all that stuff but it begins with me making a fool out of myself singing the (likely misremembered) lyrics of the Canadian national anthem.

So bear with me a bit.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "'I Swear, There is a Good Reason I'm Singing at Work'" »

By Joel Trammell

In the NetQoS offices, I can often be found out of my office, walking around and just talking to people in the different departments of the company. This practice has unofficially been dubbed “Joel’s management by walking around thing.” It seems to work. Employee satisfaction is high, employee turnover is low, and revenues are up.

In any management exercise, you have a number of things going on that you are, by definition, responsible for. This is true for both people management and network management. You couldn’t function if you didn’t trust your people or trust your tools to do something without you being there to make it happen.

But you do have to constantly verify (as in the Cold War phrase “Trust, but verify,”) that what you need to have happen actually happens. So, what’s the best way to do that?

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Management By Walking Around." »