Terry's Blog - All Comments

re: Chilling Network Topology Discovery Patent Application

jennis — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:28:44 GMT

It is scary that something like this could gain patent protection because of a lack of prior art patents and no awareness on the examiner's part of all the prior art in existing products. Having been a designer for some of these products, I can tell you that some of the things they are claiming were not viewed back then as being sufficiently "novel and nonobvious" to be patentable given state of the art in the industry. My quick look through claims yields this list of things I believe are prior art that could be researched into something conclusive:

* Claim 1 was done earlier by at least Brix (now EXFO) and maybe NetQoS

* Claim 3 was done earlier by at least Brix and maybe Concord (now CA)

* Claim 19 describes what Concord E-Health has been doing since the earth cooled.

* Claim 21 was done earlier by at least Brix

* Claim 22 was done earlier by at least Visual Networks, NetQoS and Brix

* Claim 24 was done earlier by at least Brix

* Acterna (JDSU) and Spirent have been doing much of the synthetic stuff much longer.

I also managed to find this whitepaper from April 2002 describing what Brix was doing in space: phoenix.labri.fr/.../voip_wp_04-29-02.pdf. I bet there is a lot more documentation out there like this.

re: Vyatta Open Source Router

packetfish — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:56:19 GMT

I agree, this guy can't play in big carrier router-land currently -- ie- running sonet ports and such, but a few DS3s or gig ports?!? You bet... Since this isn't apples to apples (Cisco's are typically IPC based and distributed, whereas vyatta really isn't).... should they add IPC (something I believe XORP has and did quite well) into the mix for this beast and get it working reliably, have a few hardware vendors jump on board, then their might be some additional ground on this project in terms of usage. Vyatta really is a bundling of what has best of breed in routing land in open source, cleaned up some code, and made syntax a little more friendly. QOS is there, but not so much.

As far as monitoring, I think you are forgetting vyatta is linux based and while its not supported directly by vyatta per se, there is nothing preventing you from installing packages like NRPE and using a nagios machine to monitor logs, procs, or whatever else you might need to watch on your router....the beauty of an open platform.

If your running a business and need to keep costs and keep opex under control, you really can't go wrong I don't think trying this out for your application before blowing a huge wad of cash on a Cisco or Juniper. Really, how many offices or locations have much more than DS3s to begin with, or anything other than some type of metro ethernet drop where you're sub 100M are your rates any ways?

Case in point, Cisco 2821 with DSL and 2 T1 (+ 16 Poe + Poe PWR supply), about 10 k, vyatta replacement about 400 bucks (reclaimed older server, quad port NIC), add another 500 if you need the 16 poe ports. If 'd need DSL and not so many eth ports, 125 for a sangoma DSL nic, to be directly supported in CLI in the next release of vyatta in July.

I think there is much fear/bashing surrouding vyatta from the Cisco community of users as whomever has vendor certs, all of a sudden those become cheapened if their are a bunch of open source router jockies that can do it, but also much cheaper. What would be your take on devaluation of certifications given your a CCIE? ;-)

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The History of Ping

Netcordia Blog — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:35:47 GMT

Everyone doing networking these days knows about the ping program. What is often not known is how it

re: The Top 25 Network Problems And Their Business Impact

tslattery — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:02:26 GMT

Some people have asked if the number on each problem means anything. No, it is just a handle that makes it easy to refer to them without typing the name of the problem.

If you'd like to provide information ranking them in your network, we can make the number mean something.

-Terry

re: Useful Visualization

tslattery — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:25:46 GMT

Steve,

Thanks for pointing out Netcosm. I've seen that and haven't yet figured out how it would be useful to me in an operational network. The audio would be useful. There was a paper presented at Usenix many, many years ago about using syslog events to drive sounds. There's also SonicFinder, developed by someone at Apple. I don't have enough eyes to view the active things happening on the network, especially anything that's large enough to be really interesting (more than 50 routers and switches, plus all the servers). Having the sound of a brook bubbling in the background, augmented with crickets and birds for other events, plus the occasional boom of something big happening would be interesting.

It would be somewhat like watching a tail of syslog running in a window. While I might not have my eye on it all the time, I will probably get used to how it scrolls and notice when the scrolling is different, drawing my attention to it.

Probably useful as a blog topic...

-Terry

http://connection.netcordia.com/blogs/terrys_blog/archive/2007/10/28/the-history-of-the-cisco-cli.aspx

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:24:06 GMT

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http://community.netcordia.com/blogs/terrys_blog/archive/2007/10/28/the-history-of-the-cisco-cli.aspx

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:53:33 GMT

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http://connection.netcordia.com/blogs/terrys_blog/archive/2007/08/16/ccie-test-and-numbering.aspx

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:53:37 GMT

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