I discovered a patent application (not yet granted) this week that gave me chills. Part of its claims* are performing Layer 2 and Layer 3 network topology discovery and display, as of October 2001. Huh? Network topology discovery and display was being done way before then. What's chilling about this...

I had the privilege of reviewing a neat paper, Network Topology Discovery , by Eric Siegel, a technical analyst at the Burton Group. His paper covers a many aspects of network topology discovery in 30 pages, sprinkled with details on how things work. I found it to be a very well written paper, covering...

Visualization of networks has been something that I've been watching for some time and have yet to see anything that looks really interesting. Many vendors use the Tom Sawyer Software package. Netviz had an interesting package but CA (which acquired them via their Concord acquisition) decided to...

I am regularly surprised by network redundancy designs that are either overbuilt or underbuilt. There seem to be two major themes that drive these designs. I'll address the first theme in this blog entry and the second theme in a successive blog entry. The first theme results in a network with excessive...

One of the security factors I’ve heard espoused about IPv6 is that the large address space (128 bits: 64 bits of network and 64 bits of host address) makes it impossible to scan the network for hosts. On initial inspection, this seemed like a reasonable thought. However, when you look at IPv6's use...