Archive for the ‘Network Infrastructure’ Category

Free Junos

For some time, Juniper has been agressively trying to win converts from Cisco. Not only in terms of sales, but also the hearts and minds of the engineers who influence purchasing decisions. Aggressively going after engineers has meant that for years, Juniper has made their certifications essentially free for those of us who were certified [...]

Posted on August 28, 2010 at 7:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

A Little Light Reading

The last book (far right, Enterprise Mac Managed Preferences) is fresh, exciting (to me at least) and unique in that it is the most comprehensive information regarding managed preferences you can find. Management en masse of Mac OS X is very lucky to have this compendium. If the chapter in our Enterprise Integration book left [...]

Posted on August 6, 2010 at 7:17 pm by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , ,

Symantec Acquires PGP & GuardianEdge

Today Symantec announced that it is acquiring PGP. I certainly hope they treat the Mac PGP client better than they’ve treated some of their other Mac clients. This move brings Symantec squarely into the encryption space. They encrypt full disks (including the boot volume of Mac OS X), portables, file servers, jump drives, Blackberry and [...]

Posted on April 29, 2010 at 8:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac Security, Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , , , , ,

NAS, Clouds & Backup

NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are a popular alternative to providing centralized file services to smaller environments. This includes devices such as the Seagate BlackArmor, the DroboShare NAS and the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. These are inexpensive as compared to an actual server, they require less management and they often come with some pretty compelling features. But [...]

Posted on October 27, 2009 at 9:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Testing Speed

www.speedtest.net is a nice site that allows you to test the speed of your Internet connection for free. They also have a free companion iPhone app that allows you to test the speed of an Internet connection without actually opening up your laptop.

Posted on October 21, 2009 at 10:53 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure, iPhone · Tagged with: , , , ,

Simple Networking Commands

Troubleshooting the network is faster and more thorough when it is done using the command line. Here are some simple command-line utilities that can perform a variety of tasks that can help when administering many services and multiuser environments: Whoami lists the user you are currently logged in as from the command line. Who lists [...]

Posted on October 10, 2009 at 11:33 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Network Infrastructure, Ubuntu, Unix · Tagged with: , ,

The Cisco ASA 5500

I’ve been a fan of the Cisco ASA since it was introduced but always seemed to have a problem figuring out all the different models. Cisco now has a snappy little model comparison that can be found here. A little less helpful, but nice nonetheless is the comparison page for the 1000 Series Aggregation Service [...]

Posted on October 7, 2009 at 11:02 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , , , ,

Adding DHCP Options in Mac OS X Server

Mac OS X Server comes with a number of DHCP options available; most notably the options available in the GUI. But what about options that aren’t available in the GUI, such as NTP. Well, using /etc/bootpd.plist, the same file we used to define servers allowed to relay, you can also define other options. These begin [...]

Virtual Private Clouds

VPN-Cubed was a solution that Amazon listed for some time, allowing users of EC2 or S3 cloud services to VPN their resources in Amazon’s cloud to their own offices. But Amazon recently went a step further with their own offering and now provide the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Pricing is based on a per-VPN connection, [...]

Posted on September 3, 2009 at 12:07 pm by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure, Unix, VMware, sites · Tagged with: , , , ,

MiFi

MiFi, a product from Novatel Wireless, is a credit card sized device that provides a 7 Megabit connection to the internet as a portable wireless hotspot. It’s GPS-enabled and it can serve up to 5 devices using WiFi. Nice little device overall. In my testing it was about twice as fast as my Sprint USB [...]

Posted on August 15, 2009 at 2:35 pm by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Network Infrastructure · Tagged with: , , , , ,