- Old but frustrating problems all too easy to forget under Windows
- Ixia opens their iSim-City for business
- T-Punkt'ed in Germany
- Supermicro Water cooled blades
- Microsoft LiveWriter64
- Openmoko.org Portal Site
- Windows Mobile 6: Not going to kill the blackberry, yet...
- Listen to whale song live from Davey Jone's Locker...
- I have the Blue Tooth Blues
- A bit of ANCL History
April 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Old but frustrating problems all too easy to forget under Windows
As Windows ages and evolves, it's sometimes too easy to forget those little gotchas that creep up and become the bane of sysadmins. My scenario is working on the Interop iLabs (technology demonstration areas) on Unified Communication. I'm responsible for bringing up Office Communications Server so that our group can get both voice and presence status to transit a gateway to a Jabber server through a federation interface. But I lost a bunch of time on little nit-picky issues as I burned the midnight oil rushing to meet our ship deadline....
So for the newbies, take note and save some bookmarks. For the old timers, have a good chuckle and remember the pain you went through when you first got bitten.
- Are your machines all in the same time zone?
- Especially in Active Directory (or just about any directory service) the computers need to get at least within spitting distance of each other. My sin was accidentally not checking the daylight saving box during the unattended installation section. So all my new servers were a day off from the AD box.
- The dead giveaway for this issue is when machines can't join the domain but others can. Did you forget to set the date? The machines can't be too far apart or AD Logins no workie since it uses Kerberos...
- OCS and quite a few other Microsoft programs like storing all their info in SQL databases. After a while, however, you realize the SQL Express isn't going to cut it anymore and you move to a full version. Then you start getting SQL login errors. Use OSQL /L to list out network instances of SQL servers. This way you know if you fat-fingered the instance name during the install.
- Don't be a bonehead like I was; OCS currently doesn't run under x64 so the lesson here is to check the system requirements first.
- Too bad the OCS install Wizard doesn't check this before it starts populating the Active Directory and does a forest prep. I ended up re-genning my AD for the demo. This would be a BIG problem in a production environment, but this wasn't...
- Hmmm....this also sounds like I didn't pay attention to "best practices" and in my mad rush to get this demo built I forgot to backup my AD. STUPID STUPID STUPID!!!!
- Maybe next time I'll just forget about performance issues and go virtual for my demos...that way I could have just have done snap shots of everything.
- Read up first. I missed the 32bit-only portion in the planning guide and regret it now.
Yeah, not terribly revealing, but the Google ranking on these subjects has fallen over the years and finding the fixes, late at night while sleep deprived, wasn't much fun. Maybe this little refresher will bring the results higher in the list?
Posted by Brian Chee on April 14, 2008 12:15 PM
April 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Ixia opens their iSim-City for business
Opened on February 26, 2008, Ixia's iSim-City is a beautifully implemented facility that combines an executive briefing center with a large-scale proof-of-concept lab that can be used alone or with professional services. Located in Santa Clara, this city-scale testing facility is designed to meet corporate overflow testing requirements and will be used for some upcoming InfoWorld shootouts. In my case, I'll be showing up at the start of my test, but after the scripts and methodology are debugged, I'll be able to fly home and run all my tests remotely. With upwards of 5000 gigabit ports on demand, this facility should be able to fulfill whatever testing scenario you can dream up. Trust me, I'm going to see if I can build some shootouts that will stretch this lab's capability ... maybe ...
It was over some truly great curry that Ixia CEO Atul Bhatnagar and I started dreaming of just what an InfoWorld + Ixia testing partnership could do. So although we already have some Ixia testing gear in the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, what we don't have and can't afford is thousands of ports. One test we've always had to shy away from is that huge 10gig campus/colo/ISP shootout we've had on the back burner for the last couple of years.
The reality is that corporate America needs testing. You don't buy a car unless you've taken it for a test drive, and you don't just sit in the driver seat nor do you just see if the trunk lid opens. The point I'm trying to make is that network testing that runs synthetic traffic across a real network gives you that baseline performance metric with which to judge further upgrades. I've heard a multitude of horror stories about a shoot-from-the-hip guestimate going horribly wrong because no one knew how the network was doing as a system instead of a single device. Over the years I've tried very hard to stay neutral when it comes to test equipment but everyone has weak and strong points; Ixia's strength has consistently been the attention to the Human Computer Interface (HCI). It was just easier to run and thusly more approachable. The stigma has been that you had to be a super human network engineer to run these types of tests. Heck, I've heard some rumblings that you had to be super-human just to know enough to ask the right questions.
What I'm looking at doing is to work with test equipment vendors to publish testing scenarios. We've published out methodologies in the past, but I think it's high time that we flesh these out in more detail so our tests can more easily be duplicated by you the readers.
So to that end CEO Bhatnagar and I also dreamed of cooperative education projects and my dream of creating a coalition of advanced networking labs across the country. We're going to test the water by leveraging Ixia's experience and resources with my years of experience teaching kids about real world networking. I'm dreaming of this coalition graduating hundreds of students a year, helping to fill corporate America's need for the next generation of network engineer. Stay tuned; maybe this partnership between InfoWorld and Ixia will yield more than just cool tests. Maybe it will also result in a skilled workforce able to help you confirm vendor claims on performance instead of just trusting those glossies.
Posted by Brian Chee on April 10, 2008 03:30 PM
March 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)
So I'm having fun, T-Punkt is one of the German versions of a regular T-Mobile shop, but wait...not quite...because Deutschland's citizens can purchase DSL, home telephones, combo DSL+Wifi+Cellular routers all under one roof. My experience started as I started my quest to stretch the proverbial penny (or Euro in this case). With Hotel wireless hovering in the 20 euro per hour range, I just had to find something cheaper to satisfy my cheap nature. I had gotten lots of help from T-Mobile USA with a list of hotspots I could use my T-Mobile USA hotspot account on, but they just didn't work time and time again. So out of frustration, I blew 20 Euro on a 24hour card at the T-Punkt store in Celle.
ling. full stop [Br.]
Shamelessly borrowed from http://www.dict.cc/
So I happily started bragging about my new hotspot card to the rest of the American Journalist contingent....and found that it didn't work at the Hotel...or the Hannover Hauptbahnhof (aka train central), nor the convention center...feeling more than just a bit cheated...I was confronted by the biggest T-Mobile booth I had ever seen. Unique to the Hannover Fairegrounds are permanent booths/buildings for carriers like T-Mobile/Vodaphone and a few others.
After a short wait in the tech support queue/line, I found myself showing off my new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet to a 20 year old deutchlander who tried and tried but couldn't figure out what was going on...and as I got ready to just toss the 20 Euro card into the trash can, he tugged on my sleeve and asked me to follow him to the tier 2 tech support. Huh?! (This UberBang is actually called an interabang which is an emphatic query) Seems T-Mobile/T-Com has a permanent tech support facility just off to the side in a glassed in corner of the hall. We were seated at a diner style table (bench seats on both sides with a computer at the end) where a the tier 2 tech oohed and aahed over the Nokia and mentioned that perhaps here husband might buy one for her this Christmas. Well while she too couldn't figure out what was wrong with the account on the card, she was bright enough to realize that the purpose of the card had passed, and that an immediate refund was in order. However she didn't stop there, she pulled up a knowledgebase article and told me that to use the T-Mobile hotspots in Germany, I should append .US to the end instead of .COM for the account name. Voila...hotspot heaven....
Keep firmly in mind that your US T-Mobile phone will ONLY work here IF you signup for the service AND are willing to pay some roaming fees. The same goes for both mobile service as well as the hotspot service...but it's a lot better than ending up paying the ridiculous hotel fees.
/brian chee
Posted by Brian Chee on March 5, 2008 06:10 AM
March 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Supermicro Water cooled blades
It's already late in the afternoon and the snow has long melted from the ground of the Hannover Faire Grounds where the CeBIT 2008 technology conference is being held. This government sponsored super conference is trying to convince Americans to come across the pond to see what Europe has to offer. Those that do find folks trying very hard to make you feel welcome, but with a convention center the size of a small city I found myself in the gamers section when I thought I was heading into the Green Pavilion. Surprisingly, even with themed halls at CeBIT, I found myself wondering just how human computer interface software qualified for Green Tech?
The Hannover Fairegrounds are reachable by direct trains from the surrounding areas during large trade shows, with our group of American Journalists staying in the picturesque town of Celle. With even the trade unions playing ball, the strikers limited their train slow downs to 3am to 7am each day in order to limit their impact upon the bread and butter trade shows at the Hannover Messe (faireground).
While quite a few of the vendors will be familiar to Americans, there are also a HUGE number of vendors that I've never heard of. My trek across both the Pacific and the Atlantic was to find out how the rest of the world views our complex industry. Here in Hannover I've found that while there were certainly alot of copycats, there were also a majority rolling out some truly unique solutions.
So while no one in the Supermicro booth was able to tell me whether this water cool solution was European in origin or not, I do know that this water cool solution is new enough that only the engineering folks could get me details. (Soon to come) So what I could get from the folks there, was that this is their answer to how to cool high density blade solutions without putting a huge strain on existing computer room cooling systems. Exactly like the water cooling systems commonly used by gamers and other overclockers; the unique portion of this solution is a water manifold system that can distribute the cold water to each blade through PEX hoses and then back to a Mini-tower sized heat exchanger.
Some of the questions I really need an engineer for:
- Can I take a feed off of building chillwater?
- Just how far can I pump the water?
- They were showing a Rittal unit, but will it work with any cold water system?
- Just what kind of heat can this system shed?
- I'm assuming I can go colder or to glycol to get colder, but what are the limits?
- Just how far can I take this system and how crazy can I get on overclocking my blades?
- At what point do I start voiding my warranty?
- At what point do I risk the China Syndrome?
*NOTE: The guy in the booth made me promise to tell you that this temporary installation was only to keep the unit out of the aisles so that folks wouldn't trip over it.
Keep tuned, we're negotiating with the SuperMicro folks to do a hands on review by one of the InfoWorld Editors.
/brian chee
Please note: I have been corrected on how Supermicro would like their name used...here's the correction from them:
Pls note our company should be referred to in any one of two ways;
1. Super Micro Computer Inc (our formal business name)
2. Supermicro (our trade name, one word, NO capital "M" in the middle)
The phrase “Supermicro Computer Inc” is also an incorrect reference.
/brian chee
Posted by Brian Chee on March 5, 2008 05:20 AM
August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
First and foremost, many thanks to Joe Cheng of the Microsoft LiveWriter team for rushing through his burrito to help me out. LiveWriter for 64bit platforms (Windows XP 64, Vista Business, etc) installs a slightly different version of LiveWriter and while my 32bit versions were able to post successfully to Movable Type (our blog engine), the 64bit version would give me weird and wonderful errors.
New to the 64bit version is a richer selection of multimedia handlers (video, tags, etc) and more blog engine specific items (like the split post aka 'more') button that's oh so important in blog engines like WordPress to avoid clogging up your front page with long posts. Additional plugins are appearing rapidly.
So getting to the point, the solution is that the registry entries for LiveWriter64 are case sensitive (though registry entries normally are NOT case sensitive) due to some hashing algorithms. So fire up 'regedit' and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\some long alphanumeric value assigned to the particular blog\UserOptionOverrides
Then you need to change the subkey of:
UserOptionOverrides => subkey characterset => characterSet
You first MUST change characterset to something like 'foo' and THEN change it to characterSet otherwise it will give you a duplicate subkey error. The subkey MUST be blank/null so don't add anything.
Hope this helps out my fellow bloggers as they migrate from a 32bit Windows platform to one of the newer 64bit platforms.
Brian Chee
Posted by Brian Chee on August 22, 2007 12:21 PM
July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
With all the iPhone hype, I've just got to wonder just how open the iPhone platform is going to be? While I've been hearing about java sdk's for it, I've not seen a download link yet on the Apple site. Is this really a Mac OSx machine under the covers, and just how well will it support java app porting? (*NOTE: the Interop NOC team has been grabbing the iPhone up all over the world and so far all the Interop NOC team folks love it. I just can't justify that much coin on a phone when I have a mortgage to pay)
The NEO1973 is the answer for those that want a cool looking communications platform, but either don't like Apple, don't like the iPhone, hate locked phones, etc, etc, etc...
So while the NEO1973 and the iPhone may look similar, the hardware under the hood isn't. Some key technologies on the iPhone are: Multitouch, and Sensors (accelerometer, etc) missing in the first development platform on the NEO.
So before we jump to conclusions and outright say the iPhone is superior, let me point out that the NEO is currently in a "reference design" that developers can use as a starting point. Like most embedded Linux systems, the NEO uses a toolchain to manage its applications and core functions, however because of its openness we should see a huge collection of legacy Linux apps ported to the platform if developers really do get on the bandwagon.
So anyway, Linux geek that I am, I'm in line for a demo unit available this coming sept/oct timeframe with a classroom full of wireless java geeks drooling at the opportunity to hack at a new platform. A friend at the UH Department of Information and Computer Sciences has been involved with the Japanese DoCoMo revolution, and has been packing her classroom with kids all wanting to write the next killer wireless app.
So I mentioned some key technologies in the iPhone. Multitouch is huge...instead of a single touch point, multitouch allows you to use multiple fingers to resize, reshape, etc. If you really want to see a demo of just how different multitouch can be...check out the YouTube video on Jeff Han at the TED conference in Monterey. His demo is nothing short of breath taking.
Next, the sensors in the iPhone include accelerometers, and to understand just how significant that is, just look at how much fun those games are on the WII! My nieces and nephews don't care that the graphics are primitive and plastic; that bowling game is outstanding, and tennis was a hoot. Though their favorite game is still pile on uncle Brian.
No the NEO isn't going to kill the iPhone, yet...but because it's open, and community developed, I wouldn't count it out anytime soon. I'm really looking forward to playing with it this fall, and have been lurking on the development site to see what kinds of cool things I can download for it or cobble together myself. Who knows, since the design is open, we may see multipoint touch screens and accelerometers for it yet.
/brian chee
Posted by Brian Chee on July 10, 2007 12:48 PM
May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Windows Mobile 6: Not going to kill the blackberry, yet...
So I've been on a journey that started with a Blackberry 7100t from T-Mobile, had a false start on their new Dash (actually the HTC S620) that originally came with Windows Mobile 5, and just a little while ago T-Mobile offered up a software update that bumped it to Windows Mobile 6.
The Microsoft folks tried very hard to convince me that I was going to love the Dash, and I have to admit it sure felt good in my hand...however, I ended up with a list of complaints and features missing in my migration from the Blackberry to the Dash.
- No password vault! I ended up spending a few bucks on SplashID to replace the free version on the Blackberry
- No text editor
- No bare metal backup and restore
- Incomplete support for SSH
- Slow to switch applications
- 4-5 times daily crashing and forcing a battery'ektomy to get it to play nice again
- I actually had to do a registry edit (not the XP machine, but the phone itself) in order to get it to start the voice command stuff correctly for my Plantronics 510 bluetooth headset. It also required a phone reboot to get everything to take effect. See Randy's Rants for documentation on how to get the Voice Command stuff working over your bluetooth headset.
In it's favor, WM5 did have support for One-Note (as long as you have a full copy on your desktop) which I found to be FAR superior to a simple text editor.
So while I'm still not sure I'd concede to eBay'ing my Blackberry yet, the update to Windows Mobile 6 is actually making me consider never going back. Here's a list of new features that are doing their insidious work at making me feel good about this move...
- Voice commands, NOT just dialing...it actually does a pretty good job of reading my appointments and finding just about anything in my contact list. Though I should point out that if you mumble, your contacts may get waken up by misdialed numbers.
- Voice dialing: not just contact list stuff, but you can also voice dial individual digits for numbers not in your contact list.
- Office Mobile: MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint came with this upgrade. So now I have both one-note AND my most used MS Office applications.
- Live Search: You REALLY want an unlimited data plan if you configure this, cause it's pretty habit forming to have a search bar on the phone desktop. (hmm...maybe it's a brainwashing attempt by T-Mobile to get everyone to move to an unlimited data plan)
- Updated Windows Media Player 10 mobile: while it still doesn't support .ogg sound files natively (yeah, who cares except Oceanagraphers) it feels like a pretty hefty subset of the full desktop version. Though this version seems to have worked out some of the bugs in playing media streams from internet radio sites.
- It feels like it has a better power manager. I sure get much better battery life when using the WiFi features, but nothing quantifiable this time.
Most importantly to me is that I've now gone 3 days without a crash. One of the other folks that I chatted with at Interop mentioned that he never had a crash, but then again he didn't have ANY 3rd party software on it. I should point out that T-Mobile does seem to have an allergy to 3rd party apps, but get real. If companies like T-Mobile/Cingular/Verizon want to get better penetration into the corporate world, they'd better get used to it.
One thing that still bugs me is that I still can't cut-paste simple things like LONG ENCRYPTION KEYS!!!! Guys, this typing in AES 256bit encryption keys is going to get VERY old VERY fast. Someone PLEASE put the cut-paste into the menus, though if you take the time to setup a certificate authority, you can do an enroll once you've logged into the cert server. In fact, if your corporate wireless supports LEAP, WM6 also has a LEAP configuration utility in the expanded wireless configuration menu.
My last bitch only really applies if you're like me and administer a collection of Unix/Linux machines. I'd love it if something like Putty actually worked with the native keyboard (the native keyboard won't come out of numeric keypad mode) but if you use the Elekson Fabric Keyboard you have a mini SSH terminal perfect for command line changes to your Linux machine.
So while I'm not willing to call it a win...I am willing to say that this has finally become a horse race and that I'm willing to stick it out on Windows Mobile 6 for a while to see how it evolves.
/brian chee
Posted by Brian Chee on May 29, 2007 11:19 PM
April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Listen to whale song live from Davey Jone's Locker...
To say that I live a double life is an understatement. Part of the time I work with the editorial staff of InfoWorld to do big iron reviews of emerging enterprise gear. The rest of the time I work at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) as a researcher. One of the cooler projects has nearly a 20 year history of visiting the same spot in the ocean to sample the ecology. However, at roughly $15k/day to run a modern research vessel, this starts adding up. The long term answer was to reuse an old fiber optic cable that was pulled up from the ocean floor (recycling at it's best!) and to that end we now have the Aloha Observatory, cabled version.
The University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology has deployed an undersea cable to support an undersea science platform roughly 100kilometers north of the Hawaiian Island of Oahu at a depth of approximately 5000 meters. 
The Station Aloha Cabled Observatory is the latest in experiments at this particular spot in the ocean. To get the whole story, check out the
Station Aloha web page.
What I've done is taken the raw audio feed coming off the undersea equipment whose cable lands at Makaha on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and providing that live feed via an open source streaming audio server called Icecast.(Kudos to the folks at the UH SOEST Engineering Support Facility for modifying the older telephony repeater system for scientific purposes) So while this is live, we're purposely leaving it in its native format of Vorbis OGG to avoid adding any artifacts in the conversion process. This stream from a broadband hydrophone is being used for real science, but it's still pretty cool to be able to listen to whale song live from the middle of the pacific ocean, 5 kilometers down.
So to finally tie this back to the enterprise, the Icecast server is available on both the Linux and Windows platform and can provide both audio on demand and livecasting of events. It also has the ability to have rebroadcasting servers that could be setup for load balancing. You would actually use a minimally configured Icecast server to digitize through your PC sound card, and then stream that to a rebroadcast server configured to handle a larger load. Since you can digitize using different codecs (mp3, quicktime, etc) and at different sampling rates, it would conceivably be possible to stream over an EvD0 or EDGE cellular card on a laptop. (NOTE: doing such a thing at a live concert is NOT a good idea and is illegal...end disclaimer) The client end of this equation could be a free or commercial copy of Winamp or even the Windows Media Player. (NOTE: ogg requires a special .ogg codec from Vorbis OR you can just use Winamp's native ogg support.) Instructions for installing either a client or a codec is at the Station-Aloha server page.
So when you ask what your tax dollars are funding, this is an example of the collaborative science being done at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii.
by Brian Chee of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory and a Senior Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine.
Posted by Brian Chee on April 25, 2007 07:41 PM
January 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
It's the 40th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics show and two years since the first Blue Tooth proximity virus reared its head; and it's still too common to find mobile devices willing to accept a file transfer from anyone in the vicinity.
So while I was waiting in the press room my curiosity got the best of me and I did some simple scanning with my old iPaq H3900 with the older v1.0 Blue Tooth radio. (limited distance) With at least 2 dozen devices in range, 80% of these were willing to talk to me, 80% of those were willing to accept business cards and 10% were willing to accept a file. The sad part is that 100% of the Symbian devices in view were willing to accept a file, which would make them vulnerable to the Caribe virus specific to that mobile platform.
Information from CERT on the Caribe Virus:
So wake up folks, it's time to do just a few keystrokes to turn off the anonymous trust on your Blue Tooth devices. It's only a matter of time before someone tosses a nasty virus into the wild that targets your mobile device. It would be all too easy to cobble up a Java program that takes pictures at random times and upload them someplace. Or turns off the ringer, and turns on the auto answer speakerphone so that your employees carry the proverbial bug into your meetings.
I may have only been scanning for devices with an ancient iPaq, but a simple Pringles can antenna with a Bluetooth finder kit and you have a recipe for some long distance mischief. So time to update those phones and to at least make sure your phone prompts you if someone sends a file at you.
Posted by Brian Chee on January 10, 2007 11:08 AM
June 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
The Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL) was founded in 1995 by a combined effort of Brian Chee, Oliver Rist and Wayne Rash while we were all with Communications Week Magazine. I was serving with the GSA Office of Information Security (secure data+video+voice) and met with Wayne Rash for drinks while he was covering CommNet. Now at our permanent home with the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory is one of the largest labs in the InfoWorld stable, while also giving university students real world experience with cutting edge technology.
Oliver Rist just happened to join him and being a wonderful October in Washington DC we all got rained upon. While escaping into a hotel bar we had a conversation about wanting to do comparitive product reviews in Hawaii while sipping Pina Coladas under a coconut tree. (thanks Oliver) The short version is that I played straight man to Oliver's wise crack and soon I was calling a friend at the University of Hawaii.
Oliver then started looking seriously at this concept and after doing LOTS of spreadsheets on the actual cost of doing reviews, found that doing testing in Hawaii wasn't a boondoggle afterall. His cost comparison actually showed a significant cost savings over alternative sites elsewhere in the US. Approximately 8 months later we rolled in the door of the UH Computer Science department with $8 million bucks worth of ATM gear from folks like FORE Systems, Cabletron, NewBridge and 3Com. This set the stage for an arms race between magazines on who could do the biggest and baddest comparitive reviews in the industry.
10 years later we've gone from Communications Week to Internet Week and now InfoWorld. The really cool part is that InfoWorld's management has given the Reviews group the leeway to continuously set the pace for large scale enterprise simulations. From the very first ATM shootout at Communications Week, to the current Triple-Play simulation (data+video+voice) in the current 10gig Enterprise Switch shootout, ANCL and InfoWorld are leading the pack.
Speaking of which, our goal is to create simulations that are solutions based rather than speeds and feeds. No IS manager in their right mind would dare run their infrastructure anywhere near capacity, and we've heard the feedback. We actually send out test invitations that closely resemble a request for proposal that our readers might send. We fine tune it with feedback from the vendors to create the proverbial level playing field. We also work in close cooperation with the test equipment vendors to design the test methodology (now published in Lab Rat Magazine) based upon statistics sent by readers and associates around the world. We take this "real world" information and do "what if" scenarios sized to the target audience. (Large enterprise, SMB, SOBO, SOHO, etc) We consistently make every effort to mix in real data streams (ie. broadcast quality MPEG, SIP PBX's, etc) along with the synthetic data. This real data approach gives readers a way to identify closer with our simulations. We also tend to layer in the data streams all at the same time instead of one at a time like other reviews. Afterall, who runs ONLY data or ONLY voice on their network now? The watch word is convergence and we follow trends that our readers follow.
So, do you have a scenario that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear about it. Willing to share your firewall stats, ACL's or router stats? We'll keep it confidential and add it to the data we use to size our simulations. Have a bone to pick? Let me hear it, and believe me..we'll listen. Hey, we've even taken RFP's from some friends and ran with it. The point is that we can't possibly experience the world's variety of enterprise configurations and would really love to hear from you (either publically on this blog or privately and I'll remove company references if you wish)so that we can continue to help you hack away the spin and get down to reality.
Heck, we even have some special agreements with equipment vendors to see their product roadmaps under NDA so that we can tune our editorial calendar to coincide with new product releases. We scoop the rest of the pack because we listen.
Feel free to drop me a line. If you make it to the Interop Trade Show, come visit me at the NOC...I've been on the NOC team since 1995 and beebop between the wireless team lead, addressing (yup, a class "A" is a challenge) voice+video, etc...I also strongly encourage you to spend a bit of time at the InteropLABs where we demonstrate "not yet baked" technologies, and give you the chance to play around and talk to the folks that most likely sit on the standards committees.
/brian chee
Posted by Brian Chee on June 14, 2006 11:01 AM
June 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I founded the lab about 10 years ago in hopes of creating an environment where Computer Science students could get some industry experience to balance their ivory tower curriculum. What a concept, students that can be immediately valuable to a corporation, but with the firm science foundation with which to innovate.
The Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL) creates enterprise simulations based upon data sent by friends and associates around the world. We then use these examples to do "what if" scenarios sized to the target audience. Our main goal is to put ourselves into the shoes of our readers and to sweat the details of keeping the comparisons on a level playing field.
A bit of history...
I got involved pretty early in networking with a job as a student helper on the AlohaNET project run by Norman Abramson, PhD at the University of Hawaii. This DARPA funded project produced several papers, one of which was used by Bob Metcalf of Xerox PARC as the basis for Ethernet. I finally graduated and went to work for Xerox as an interfacing specialist, then moved on to a regional distributor to become one of the first ten Novell Certified Instructors outside of Novell itself. With stops along the way with folks like Fujitsu, I landed at the General Services Administration Office of Information Security in the '90s doing secure data/video/voice communications systems. I'm now the Director of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus in the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST). As the largest research unit at UH I get to work on projects like upgrading the fiber optic networks on our research ships (www.soest.hawaii.edu/agor26) like the Kilo Moana (top 10 most fantastic vessels in the world according to the Discovery Channel's SuperShips show ( http://www.parthenonentertainment.com/Pages/Programs/In%20Production/superships.htm ) and suboceanic cables connecting underwater sensor nodes back to the university.
Posted by Brian Chee on June 8, 2006 11:44 AM
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