June 2004 Archives

If you have no gmail yet and looking for someone to invite you, please drop me a line.

update: no more invitation for now.

When Yahoo! Messenger gets excited:

Tony Li has left Procket a while ago. He was a former employee of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks before joining Procket in 1999. Currently he is working at Verio, playing ISP as he says.

In his latest interview with CNet News.com, he gave some insight into new trends he sees in the IP routing market and the Internet in general.

I would much rather be in a start-up than a large company. My style is much more about getting things done, and I prefer the freedom rather than the many layers of process that are usually necessary in a big company.

Remember rumors about Procket and Cisco? Now its official.

You may have seen a lot of errors while hanging out in orkut. But I bet this one is very original:

Not enough storage is available to process this command

A quick search in google will take you to this page from microsoft.

A note to Google guys: Haven't you been famous for being huge fan of Linux?

Damn. This is why people should not rely on a single solution: Akamai DNS Issue.

And we are suffering from the same problem here. Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Fedex, all the big sites, you name it. Everyone is off the net now.

Akamai is down, internet is down.

update: Akamai DNS Outage Messes up Net

What Juniper is doing?

After completing the acquisition of NetScreen, Juniper is ready to make the next big moves. First of them is introduction of J Series of low-end routers (codenamed Pepsi). And the next important move (which is not confirmed by juniper yet) is acqusition of Extreme Networks.

This would be very important for Cisco Systems, since Juniper was only a competitor in high-end routers market, but after recent acqusitions and new products, they will enter the low-end router market as well as switching area.

And what about Cisco?

On the other hand, Cisco Systems is not sitting aside. Cisco is also trying to beat Juniper is high-end routing market by releasing the brand new CRS-1 (up to 92 Tbps. enough for your network?) which is a revolution from Cisco. CRS-1 is not based on old school IOS software, but on brand-new shiny Cisco IOS XR operating system. IOS XR itself is based on QNX RTOS.

And at last, "Cisco is acquiring certain assets and intellectual property from router start-up Procket Networks for about $80 million", according to NWFusion article. I was not lucky enough to have a Procket router, but I should admit their products look very good.

NOC Engineers don't like to answer phone calls while they are busy with their daily jobs or especially when they are working on a complicated problem and recovering their network traffic.
In this case they expect customers to contact them via Trouble Ticketing system. So the NOC engineer won't waste any time on phone and will take care of the problem. Another benefit of using TTS is that you can archive your conversation and refer to them later on. It can also be used in SLA uptime and service quality calculation.

Most Trouble Ticketing systems come with a simple web interface as well as an email parser. So the customer can send email or use a web browser to open or update a trouble ticket.

Some good TTS software that I know:

• Crafty Syntax Live Help
• Help Center Live
• osTicket - Open Source Support Ticket System
• PHP Support Tickets Manager Application
• Support-Logic
• Support Services Manager
• PerlDesk - Customer Support Help Desk Software

You know it's out for public test before the final 0.9 realease.

I have only one thing to say: The new theme is aweful. It's not a Windows theme. It doesn't feel like a windows theme. Qute was way better.

Firefox team is making their own decisions without listening to the community. At least, I think so.

There are many simple and complicated Netowrk Management and Performance Monitoring softwares available out there, for free or commercially. From commercial softwares, I have very good experiences with HP OpenView, CiscoWorks, and from free ones, Nagios, Cacti, JFFNMS and NMIS.

But most network engineers prefer their own set of tools which is almost a combination of MRTG, RRDTool, SmokePing and Net-SNMP.

Most of the ready-to-use NMS software packages does not fit our needs. It's always a good idea to make your own set of monitoring scripts in conjunction with existing tools such as rrdtool, net-snmp or fping.

I use Cacti and JFFNMS for different tasks in our NOC, and also have my own set of scripts that adds more capabilities to the system.

JFFNMS has too many features but lacks a user friendly interface. One of its best features is supporting SLAs. So you can measure the uptime and quality of service against predefined SLAs. It also supports syslog and TACACS+ authentication which is a very handy feature in service provider environments.

Cacti is much simpler and easier to use, and is a great tool for NOC operators to have an overall look on their network performance.

An extensive set of tools for network management and monitoring, named COSI-NMS is available at http://cosi-nms.sourceforge.net/.

I am not a Mac enthusiast, but I love their innovations.
And the latest innovation from Apple is Airport Express.
It really took a while to find out what it really is. A tiny device that plugs directly into the power plug, which has an Ethernet (10/100Base-T) port, a USB port and, a Headphones jack, and built-in 802.11g transceiver. All for $129.

It supports OS X and WinXP natievly. So we should expect a new open source project (OpenAirPortExpress.SourceForge.Net maybe) with some crappy Linux drivers soon. :-)

FreeBSD 4.10 is the newest child in 4.x branch.

I was lucky that I could give it a try in production environment. In fact, I installed a 4.9 and upgraded to 4.10 (cvsup, make world, make kernel, mergemaster, reboot).

I noticed following important changes:

- OpenSSL was upgraded to 0.9.7d from the buggy 0.9.7c.
- BIND8 was upgraded to 8.3.7 ( I am using 9.2.3 though )
- dcons was added to ttys to provide remote console via firewire using dconschat utility.
- USB driver now supports some basic USB2 devices

And it's stable and solid as it always was.

Just a quick note:

Please think twice before forwarding a piece of crappy email to all people in your address book.