By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

For many years, Slashdot has been the gold standard of technical news online; the most successful blog that pre-dates the word "blog." (By about two months, actually…) It has been a haven for the geeky and the nerdy and a cultural meme over the past decade. We spoke to the creator and editor of Slashdot, Rob Malda, (also known as CmdrTaco,) previously as part of our coverage of Slashdot's Firehose. Now, as Slashdot reaches its 10th anniversary, we speak with him again about the Web site's past and its future.

How would you compare your experiences from 1997 to 1998 - that first year running Slashdot, compared to running the site today? (This post from January 1998 is fascinating and it showed how quickly the site grew!)

Rob Malda
--Credit: Derrick Story/O'Reilly Network

I guess the difference is that back then it was a hobby. I'd do it in my living room instead of going out at night with friends. Now it's a job - I do it in an office with my friends. Of course back then there were no business pressures except my time. The hardware was simple (one machine sitting under my desk!) and the software was almost entirely written by me. These days I manage a good number of people to accomplish essentially the same stuff.

You've mentioned that the coolest story was the day you proposed to your wife. What was the lamest?

We've posted like 80,000 stories... I'd never be able to choose from among the thousands of lame stories which one is the lamest. ;)

In 1997, posting a bunch of short articles with links in reverse chronological order was rare and novel. Nowadays, there's an entire blogging industry. How do you feel about Slashdot's role in the evolution of blogging; and consequently, the role of Slashdot in advancing Western Civilization. (I'm only half kidding about that last one.)

Well, there is a lot of content on the intertubes every day.

Slashdot's role is to act as a content filter for all of it. To sift through a thousand rocks and find a dozen nuggets. There are a number of ways to do this task- you can have a single person do it, or let a thousand people vote on it, but we use our own particular method which I think has a lot of advantages. Individuals have taste. They can prevent mob rule. They can enforce editorial or stylistic standards. As for Western Civilization, I choose not to limit us to this hemisphere.

Well, that's kind of my question - to take the metaphor further, when you started searching for the nuggets, there were few places that did. Now you've got a gold rush of hundreds of thousands of bloggers - not even including the social news sites. What do you feel Slashdot's role is - how did your being first to the gold mine influence those who came after you?

Our role is to be a content filter worth having. There's more content now than there was in '97, so there's more need for good filters with integrity and a sense of what matters. We still do that today just as good as we did then, and by many measures, better than anyone else.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Rob Malda on Ten Years of Slashdot" »

Have you ever thought to yourself: “Gee, I really wish there was some way to get a bunch of news from a variety of sources compiled in the same place, where people vote on what they believe to be the most newsworthy stories of the day.”?

Well, if you have, then you’ll probably be happy to know there are now 27 billion Web sites which do exactly that. (How you missed them for so long, I’ll never know.)

Network Performance Daily is proud to announce its adventurous venture in to this horribly overcrowded marketplace with our own “Social News” site catering specifically to enterprise networking – The Pipe @ Network Performance Daily.

Want to share a story with the world? Submit it. Like someone else’s story? Digg Er…Drip it up! Comment on the news. Comment on comments on the news. Comment on comments on comments on the news. Wacky Recursive Commenting Fun for the Whole Family!

We even have an introductory video for you:

In the end, there’s no experience like going to see it for yourself. Check it out at http://thepipe.networkperformancedaily.com.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

A couple of months ago, KEYE-TV in Austin, Texas (where this blog is based) did a story on the Texas Legislature. That story found its way to YouTube and got to the front page of Reddit, which is where I heard about it.

In the Texas legislature, when it's time to vote on a bill. Texas has an electronic voting system - Congressmen press one of three buttons on their desks to register a Yay, Nay, or Abstention, and that vote is shown on the electronic board at the front of the chamber.

What the video shows is that representatives - both Democrat and Republican - are actually voting more than once on bills. They rush around like it's a free-for-all, pushing not only their own buttons but, it seems, as many of their colleagues' buttons as well - voting up to four times on the same bill.

Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) justified it as saying that since there's no bathroom breaks or breaks for lunch, that it's a matter of necessity - despite the fact that it's clearly against the House's own rules.

But the idea of politicians voting more than once on a bill came as a shock to many people - including myself. This is because, though the Lege, (as we call it here in Texas) is monitored on cable TV, the view changes and does not actually show the members voting when they do. It took a different type of monitor - the KEYE-TV crew - to actually show what's really going on.

It's a matter of deploying the right monitoring equipment in the right places at the right times - a matter of making sure you have the ability not only to view all of the information from end to end but to be able to drill down and see what's going on with individual instances. This is why monitoring is so important.

Or rather, if you just looked at this from a "fault" perspective - those red and green lights in the Lege still lit up fine. If you didn't actually see what happened when the legislators on the floor, you'd have no idea anything was amiss with the legislature's performance.
Louis P. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, famously remarked: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

The same can be said of network monitoring - you need to know what's happening on your network, otherwise things that look fine on the outside may actually be all screwed up.

Special Editorial Comment
By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Since we started this blog in October of 2006, I've been consumed with three questions: 1) "How can I help inform my readers?" 2) "What would my readers like to read about?" and 3) "Can't anybody find me... somebody to love?"

I still can't find the answer to #3, but I think we've done a very good job with the first two. And this is the 300th post on Network Performance Daily.

Yay us!

In all seriousness, we've covered some amazing stories over the past 300 posts. And just like the "Golden Girls" got suddenly nostalgic whenever there was a writer's strike, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the events of the past year.

Let's start with one of our earliest posts, Manish Chacko's "God Help The Help Desk"

Imagine a man walking into a hospital, saying that he doesn't feel good, and doctors around the country are immediately called in, starting with the cardiologist, who rules out heart trouble. The man is next wheeled to a podiatrist, who rules out any problems with his feet.He's then wheeled to a gynecologist (But I'm a man... Ma'am, I'm a doctor. I think I should make that determination - and only after the tests come back.) If your diagnostic process is trial by error, you're not, technically, diagnosing.

Remember this post from Carol Shiraldi, on "Why enterprise developers (generally) use Java and game programmers (generally) use C++"?

Gaming programmers are performance-oriented to the extreme, because if you release a game and it's slow, no one is going to use it no matter how cool it is or how many features it has. Other programmers often code first for functionality, and at the end of the cycle, start to worry about performance issues. Game programmers need optimized performance from the get-go. This means game programmers are willing to forgo certain things. For example, the enterprise side of the software world was very quick to move to Java when it first came out, but the game programmers didn't.

The first time I knew this blog would be big was when we got on Slashdot for our series on Windows Vista TCP/IP stack, including Ted Romer's "Vista's 'Next Generation' TCP/IP Stack and the Enterprise," and again for Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher's "Vista TCP/IP Promises and Perils".

There was also the day that Lowell Heddings, of Dzone, asked us "Aren't routers boring?" and we responded.

Routers are designed to be boring. You don't want any one router to get "interesting" because it's probably having a host of issues - buffer overrun, CPU pegged at 100%, memory, etc. Like a war zone, it's a good day when nothing happens. In the networking world, it's a good day when no alerts are sent concerning any one router.

Probably I'm most proud of our coverage of the Julie Amero case, including this interview with Herb Horner. Without overstating our role in her eventual exoneration, I'm glad that we were able to help get her side of the story out in the blogosphere.

Our most controversial post has to be Jim Sampson's "Ten years of pushing for Linux adoption in the workplace (and why I gave up.)" With over 100 comments, it certainly was an eventful day.

We've been on BoingBoing, Slashdot, Digg, but sometimes, there's just something about when your story gets on Fark... as it did when we first announced Netcosm.

Another story that got on Fark was when Wafaa Bilal gave an interview regarding his art project in which he was confined to a room with a paintball gun controlled by people on the Internet.

We've had our share of experts and celebrities chiming in, from Linden Labs' Joe Miller talking about VoIP in Second Life, to the day we were "schooled by Vint Cerf," the day we interviewed the man who invented the flying car, and when I got to speak to a teenage-geek-hero of mine, Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, editor of Slashdot.

Of course, to top it all off, ComputerWorld decided to interview us for a story they were doing on corporate blogging.

What a long strange trip it's been.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Slashdot recently linked to an article from MacWorld showing that the amount of time that people spend watching online video has steadily increased. (In other news, water is wet…) Google's YouTube and Google Video served up over a quarter of all internet videos.

I think we can assume that a fair percentage of them were watched from corporate networks. Not just because of recreational use but because video is a very compelling medium that can convey work-related information, sometimes more quickly and more accurately than text alone.

For example, our Whiteboard Series was created with the expectation that people would watch our videos on WAN Optimization and VoIP from work, where they would find the information most useful.

One really can't just block YouTube, or Veoh, or Yahoo Video and expect blocking it to solve the problem of tying up vital bandwidth, because video is increasing not just as a 'bandwidth hazard' but as a method of communication. And it's only going to get more bandwidth heavy - and more useful - as MPEG4+ACC "Moviestar" Flash Video, or WMV using Microsoft's Silverlight increase the quality of online streaming video.

Don't think there won't be content producers - like us - taking advantage of this as well. High definition full-fledged video cameras cost less than $1000 these days. A flash-video "YouTube camera" can record 720p HD for less than $200.

The way to prepare for this is to have good QoS policies in place, so that the day-to-day business data transactions aren't interrupted or slowed when people access online streaming video - which is quickly becoming a necessity.

One big thing that complicates this is hard shut-off date for the end of all analog TV transmissions in the U.S. on February 17, 2009. It is possible to use a converter box to use an older TV with the ATSC standard - but most people will probably get a high definition television instead. High-definition television will prompt high-definition content. That includes home movies.

Right now, High Definition home video cameras are sold to computer geeks, early adopters, and indie filmmakers. They will be more widely adopted when most families have a high definition TV set and want to play back home movies. And as many YouTube videos are harvested from the ranks of home movies, it is possible to then imply that there will be demand for a high definition video hosting service.

That's going to mean more bandwidth usage. QoS policies become crucial.

Editorial, By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Sun Tzu once wrote that "the general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend"

Last June, the Chinese military hacked into the Pentagon and U.K. military computers. This fueled speculation that the next major conflagration (not that any of the current conflagrations aren't major) will be fought with information warfare. Coupled with yesterdays' anniversary of the gruesome attacks six years ago, and the general fear of the unknown (except for a smart few, computer hacking qualifies as "the unknown,") and you start to deal with fear. Fear of China shutting down military defenses. Fear of a terrorist network intentionally disrupting the computer infrastructure behind the U.S. economy.

I've never liked fear. Fear can lead you to stupid conclusions. Fear can lead you to bad decisions. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

So, how do you deal with fear? First of all, you "know yourself and know the enemy."

Battlefield advantage can be found by destabilizing a military computer, it's true, but military computers are well defended with the near infinite resources, manpower, and budget of the Dept. of Defense. But if someone - whether a large state or rogue group, were to attack, they would probably choose targets which would do the most damage with the least effort and risk. Those might be corporate systems.

While it is impossible to predict what a terrorist will do - because there are many different types of terrorists with different motivations even within the same terror group - it is possible to anticipate what a rational attacker would do. Ts`ao Kung said that an effective attacker "Emerges from the void, strikes at vulnerable points, shuns places that are defended, attacks in unexpected quarters."

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Is Enterprise Networking The Next Battlefield?" »

Editorial, by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily.

Volume 2 of our semi-annual magazine, Performance Edge Journal, is now available in print and downloadable online.

This issue is the first by our new, brilliant, editor-in-chief. He is highly respected by his peers, with lifetime accomplishments and a knack for getting hard interviews and writing in a way that changes minds. His academic and professional credentials speak for themselves.

In other words, I'm the editor-in-chief. But never mind that.

In it, you'll find a number of in-depth articles on VoIP Performance Monitoring and WAN Optimization, as well as NetQoS CEO Joel Trammell's look at the future of network performance management, results from a survey on recreational network use, a look at Cisco IOS NetFlow vs. Cisco IP SLA, and more.

Here's a quick excerpt from "The Future of Network Performance Management - A look into Joel Trammell's Crystal Ball."

Over the years, computer and communication networks have grown in size, scope, and complexity. Since the early days of DARP, the internet's predecessor-almost 50 years ago!-as much research and development has gone into the network itself as into the research it supported, resulting in a technology that now spans the entire globe. We have become dependent on that technology in ways we couldn't have imagined even a decade ago because of that dependency. The need to manage networks has become more and more important to everyday work and life.

The discipline of network performance management is much more critical today as more and more people rely on application services delivered across farflung networks. Industry Analyst Jim Metzler asserts that there are two main functions of IT: Application Development (which includes both work done by internal development teams or contractors, as well as licensed commercial applications and software as a service), and Application Delivery (how those applications are made accessible by end users, including customers, employees, and partners).

From this vantage point, network performance management must mature to encompass application delivery management, and move away from being as functionally compartmentalized (in terms of network management, server management, application management, and so forth), as it typically is today. IT organizations must evaluate the processes and tools they use today to understand if they are sufficient to ensure reliable delivery of applications, measure service and application response times that users experience, optimize the network for service delivery, troubleshoot performance issues, and so on, within large, increasingly complex IT infrastructures.

Not surprisingly, the job of network professionals is going to get more complicated over time as:

• network bandwidth continues to increase
• more services and applications use the network
• more varied types of traffic traverse the network

To read the rest of this article, you can pick subscribe at Performance-Edge-Journal.com

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

It seems that everyone is up in arms over Adblock, a FireFox plugin that enables users to block any ad with a right click or the downloading of a filter file that lists the most common advertisers. This has put fear into the hearts of Web content providers who make their living from advertising, with some calling it the "Nuclear Plug-in" - an "evil predator" that is "quietly eyeing all the businesses it would happily devour." - a plugin that is, even in the New York Times, regarded as an "extreme menace to the online-advertising business model."

One Web designer was so adamant about the Adblock plugin - he said that when you read the content without viewing the ads, you're "stealing" - that he blocked Firefox browsers entirely from his Web sites.

Criminy! Get some perspective.

First, from an enterprise network performance standpoint, there's absolutely no downside to not just encouraging Adblock in the name of both bandwidth conservation and network security - but to actually make it mandatory. The most annoying ads - flash banners, pop-ups, etc. are the ones that usually take up the most bandwidth and are more likely to have nasty malware payloads which cause more bandwidth and network security problems.

Relying on end-user action to prevent network performance problems can be futile, but encouraging users to use less bandwidth by doing something that they'd probably like anyway will do nothing but help.

So where does that leave people who earn a living, in part, from online advertising? Whatever the case, the Mozilla Foundation and Adblock does not "owe" advertisers a living. They didn't steal from advertisers any more than companies that make bank vault locks "steal" from bank robbers, or, more aptly, people who make earplugs steal from car-alarm manufacturers.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Adblock: Adapt, or die." »

At NetQoS, we have a number of different people blogging about their side-projects, about their personal lives, and I thought I'd take a moment this Friday to tell you about a few of them.

If you're a regular reader of the blog, feel free to leave a comment linking to your blog, and I'll be happy to write about it in a future post. (Assuming, of course, it's work-safe.)

So here are the blogs:

Ted Romer: Shoulda Gone With Cisco.

Ted Romer is one of our quality assurance network engineers, and in his spare time, his blog, "Shoulda gone with Cisco" deals with the technical aspects of selecting, using, and configuring Cisco hardware. On it, he's been helping people with questions about Cisco certifications - Ted teaches CCNA at high schools and local colleges in his spare time. He posts about once a week.

Some of his latest posts:

• Minimize Fragmentation!
• Best CCNP Lab? Part I
• Q&A: Gearing-up for the new CCNA

Russell Wilson: DexoDesign

Russell Wilson is our resident User Interface Design expert. His official title is Director of Product Design. Not surprisingly, his blog deals with visual design. DexoDesign.com talks about "information aesthetics" and goes into detail about conceptualizing and designing user interfaces.

…Consistency does not mean sacrificing usability for the sake of code reuse! Again, I am a practical designer; I understand the various business and engineering considerations (time to market, cost, etc.). I'm not advocating reinventing the wheel. But I certainly don't think that a bicycle, motorcycle, van, or high-performance sports car should all share the same wheel design either!

Here are some of his latest posts:

• Consistency and Conceptual Integrity
• The politics of design, by Paul Rand
• The problem with sketching.

Tina Vaziri: The Adventures of Tina and Mr. Bee

This is the personal blog of illustrator Tina Vaziri, one of our graphic artists. It's mostly personal reflections but there are some of her illustrations on the site, including Mr. Bee, an anthropomorphic bee.

Some of her latest posts:

• Death Signs
• Dog Jobs
• Free Textures

Carol Schiraldi: Carol's Little World

This is a photoblog from Senior Software Engineer Carol Schiraldi. Her work has even been talked about in her hometown paper, the Hill Country News. In addition to her photographs and photo illustrations, she also tends to delve into such things as her dislike of Dreamweaver and the idea of how people develop who tends to post photographs and photo illustrations pretty frequently, as well as delve into such things as her dislike of Dreamweaver.

Here are some of her latest posts:

• Unfinished
• What's Up?
• One Bad Bunny.

Jennifer Sparks Harriman: Sparks Studio Blog

While Steve Harriman, our VP of Marketing, doesn't have a blog, his wife Jennifer Harriman, does. There are tons of cute, professionally shot photos on the photoblog, and some tips on what to look for when hiring a professional photographer.

Here are some of her latest posts:

• Book Review: Baby Proofing Your Marriage
• The Photo Session
• Professional Photographs

And of course, I've got some side projects of my own. (What, you think that as a professional blogger, this would be my -only- blog?)

I write for GeeksAreSexy.net - don't be fooled by the title, it's safe for work - on general technology issues, such as when my hard drive crapped out. I also operate a "metablog" about all my blog projects (including my current big project, an indie documentary to be filmed in New Zealand).

Hope to hear from you about your projects and blogs. If you don't feel like leaving a comment, you can always e-mail me at brian.boyko@netqos.com.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

There are numerous influences on the value of the U.S. dollar [USD], from the trade deficit to the housing market. (CNBC business news pundit Jim Cramer certainly has some opinions on the latter.) If I tried to analyze why the dollar is dropping in value, I'd probably make a naïve, amateurish mistake and get it completely wrong. It would take a Ph.D. in macroeconomics in order to get it completely wrong with any authority.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the dollar is dropping in value, and for IT departments of U.S.-based multinational corporations, that can mean quite a bit of upheaval.

If you've got an overseas branch with its own IT department, each one of those servers, in dollar terms, costs more. If you pay your IT department in the native currency, their salary costs went up. If you pay your IT department in USD, you risk losing your best and brightest to those companies within the country they're located, who can pay them in the native currency and keep up with their cost-of-living.
In either case, resources invested in IT departments overseas - human and capital - become strained in a low USD value environment.

As such, it provides an additional compelling factor (besides taking advantage of virtualization technologies,) to bring as many servers and as many IT team members back into the home office datacenter. The less people and equipment overseas, the less you have to worry about the unstable exchange rates between currencies. What a difference from the days when you moved IT operations overseas because it was cheaper!

Server consolidation and moving operations back into the data center from the branches only works, however, if the wide area network and server infrastructure can handle the load and make the transition as transparent as possible to the end-user. This causes a push for network performance monitoring solutions - to verify the ability of the WAN to handle the new traffic - and WAN optimization devices, which may improve performance by reducing the amount of traffic on the link through caching, data reduction, compression, and TCP optimization technologies.