There’s No Such Thing As Free Wireless

Wireless

If you’ve watched any of the recent Wireless Field Day presentations, you know that free wireless is a big hot button issue. The delegates believe that wireless is something akin to a public utility that should be available without reservation. But can it every really be free?

No Free Lunches

Let’s take a look at other “free” offerings you get in restaurants. If you eat at popular Mexican restaurants, you often get free tortilla chips and salsa, often called a “setup”. A large number of bars will have bowls of salty snacks waiting for patrons to enjoy between beers or other drinks. These appetizers are free so wireless should be free as well, right?

The funny thing about those “free” appetizers is that they aren’t really free. They serve as a means to an end. The salty snacks on the bar are there to make you thirsty and cause you to order more drinks to quench that thirst. The cost of offering those snacks is balanced by the amount of extra alcohol you consume. The “free” chips and salsa at the restaurant serve as much to control food costs as they do to whet your appetite. By offering cheap food Continue reading

Review: Dell’s slim FC830 server packs a heavyweight punch

Dell introduced the PowerEdge FX2 platform late in 2014 as its flagship entry into the converged infrastructure hardware market. With slots for up to four half-wide 1U server modules or two full-width modules, you could use the 2U FX2 enclosure to implement a heavy-duty virtualization cluster and/or software-defined storage solutions such as VMware Virtual SAN and Windows Server Storage Spaces. The PowerEdge FC830 FX server block is the latest addition to the FX2 family, packing four sockets of computing power and up to 1.5TB of memory into a full-width 1U module.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

iOS 9 FAQ: Everything you need to know about Apple’s new mobile OS

When you call “Hey Siri,” you want to know your phone is listening to you. But with the new proactive intelligence in iOS 9, Siri will start to anticipate your desires before you even have a chance to ask. That’s just one of the updates announced Monday at Apple’s Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Rather than adding a ton of new features, Apple focused on refining the experience of using your device. This time around, Siri can use your location, time, app usage and connected device data to forecast your needs. Several built-in apps get either updated substantially (Maps, Notes) or replaced entirely with more exciting alternatives (Wallet, News). And iOS 9 also brings two-apps-at-once functionalities to the iPad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How IBM Watson apps are changing 7 industries

Watson transforms industriesSince IBM opened IBM Watson to the world last year, it has been building a developer and entrepreneur community around the development platform. The community now consists of more than 280 commercial partners, as well as tens of thousands of developers, students, entrepreneurs and other enthusiasts that are generating up to 3 billion monthly API requests on Watson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 9

Apple shares a wealth of news on its big day, but few surprisesOnce a year, Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference, and the tech world gets a boatload of updates from the company. The ship’s not quite as leak-proof as it used to be, though, so there were few surprises in the mix. Tim Cook and company unveiled:— Apple Music, a streaming service, and an Internet radio station called Beats One;— an update to iOS 9 that features multitasking, a new, improved Siri and an actual “news” app;To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 9

Apple shares a wealth of news on its big day, but few surprisesOnce a year, Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference, and the tech world gets a boatload of updates from the company. The ship’s not quite as leak-proof as it used to be, though, so there were few surprises in the mix. Tim Cook and company unveiled:— Apple Music, a streaming service, and an Internet radio station called Beats One;— an update to iOS 9 that features multitasking, a new, improved Siri and an actual “news” app;To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

That appears Continue reading

VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

That appears Continue reading

Aruba and HP – The Ecosystem Is King

Aruba-HP-LogoNote: This is part of a multi-post series I am writing that compares Aruba to HP and how the integration of Aruba Networks into HP might play out. You can read my intro post here.

I am a HUGE fan of vendor ecosystems. A HUGE fan. I have written about them before. The last post I wrote on them can be found here. I really do think they are the key to driving a vendor’s success. One could argue that the large vendors have it easy. They have the resources to build those ecosystems. They can spend money that the smaller vendors cannot and can essentially buy loyalty from customers and partners. Of course, at some point, those large vendors were small ones. They did something different to propel them to the large vendor status. Their competition fell by the wayside and either drifted off into obsolescence, or just outright died.

Sorry. There is no TL/DR for this post. Buckle up. It’s a long one.

So let’s get a lay of the land when it comes to ecosystems between HP and Aruba. Let me clear about one thing. This is specific to wireless. This has nothing to do with the Continue reading

US wants to collect bulk call records for six more months

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to continue the bulk collection of call records for another six months, as the new USA Freedom Act allows for this transition period.The filing, made public Monday, was submitted to the court last Tuesday, the same day President Barack Obama approved as law the USA Freedom Act, which puts curbs on the bulk collection of domestic telephone records by the National Security Agency.The new legislation was passed by the Senate following the expiry at midnight of May 31 of the authorization of the bulk collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act. It leaves the phone records database in the hands of the telecommunications operators, while allowing a targeted search of the data by the National Security Agency for investigations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The basics – MTU, MSS, GRE, and PMTU

One of the truly fascinating things about networking is how much of it ‘just works’.  There are so many low level pieces of a network stack that you don’t really have to know (although you should) to be an expert at something like OSPF, BGP, or any other higher level networking protocol.  One of the ones that often gets overlooked is MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit), MSS (Maximum Segment Size) and all of the funs tuff that comes along with it.  So let’s start with the basics…

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Here’s your average looking IP packet encapsulated in an Ethernet Header.  For the sake of conversation, I’ll assume going forward that we are referring to TCP only but I did put the UDP header length in there just for reference.  So a standard IP packet is 1500 bytes long.  There’s 20 bytes for the IP header, 20 bytes for the TCP header, leaving 1460 bytes for the data payload.  This does not include the 18 bytes of Ethernet headersFCS that surround the IP packet.

When we look at this frame layout, we can further categorize components of the frame by MTU and MSS…

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The MTU is defined Continue reading

Apple moves to six-digit passcode in iOS 9

Apple plans to require six-digit passcodes to unlock its latest mobile devices that use iOS 9, its forthcoming mobile operating system. Users already have the option in iOS 8 of setting a much longer passcode than four digits, which is the current minimum requirement. Symbols and letters can also be used. Increasing the minimum number of digits to six means that there will be 1 million possible combinations rather than 10,000, which “will be a lot tougher to crack,” Apple wrote on its website. The move to longer passcodes is not likely to please U.S. authorities, who have expressed fears that stronger security measures, including encryption, may make it more difficult to obtain information for time-sensitive investigations, such as terrorism.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brace yourself for videos on Apple Watch

No screen, apparently, is too small for video, even the one on Apple’s Watch.Twitter’s popular Vine mobile video app will come to Apple’s Internet-connected wrist gizmo later this year. During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, demoed some new functions, including video, that will be possible on the second version of the Watch’s operating system, which arrives in the fall.During the demo, he showed a video of someone clinking drinking glasses on the Vine app. Vine later posted on its Twitter feed that its app would arrive on the Apple Watch later this year. Vine’s app lets people record and share looped videos up to six seconds in length.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brace yourself for videos on Apple Watch

No screen, apparently, is too small for video, even the one on Apple’s Watch.Twitter’s popular Vine mobile video app will come to Apple’s Internet-connected wrist gizmo later this year. During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, demoed some new functions, including video, that will be possible on the second version of the Watch’s operating system, which arrives in the fall.During the demo, he showed a video of someone clinking drinking glasses on the Vine app. Vine later posted on its Twitter feed that its app would arrive on the Apple Watch later this year. Vine’s app lets people record and share looped videos up to six seconds in length.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With Apple Watch OS update, apps are about to get a whole lot more capable

Expect Apple Watch apps to gain a lot more functionality now that Apple is opening its hardware sensors to third party developers and allowing apps to run natively on the device.The changes come with watchOS 2, an update that’s due in the Fall and will also bring new watch faces and other advances to end users. For developers, the highlight is that their apps will be able to make use of Apple Watch hardware features like the digital crown, accelerometer and heart rate sensor.People who use the personal training app BodBot, for example, won’t have to enter as much workout information manually now that the app can gather data from the watch’s sensors, said Sergio Prado, who co-developed the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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