• Network Infrastructure

    OpenDNS

    January 2, 2008

    Many people still use 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.1, 206.13.28.12, 206.13.30.12, or some other arbitrary set of DNS servers.  But, these are ISP DNS servers and so subject not only to filtration of source IP addresses at the will of the ISP (which happened back in the old Mindspring days) but also subject to spikes in traffic making someone’s Internet connection appear dog slow.  So I’ve been putting people on internal DNS servers for a long time.  But even they need to point somewhere for their DNS… Enter OpenDNS.  These guys use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.  They’re free for just doing Internet lookups and if you find you want them to do more for you, they…

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  • Consulting,  Network Infrastructure

    WAN Acceleration Magic Quadrant

    November 28, 2007

    WAN Acceleration has been a hot topic for some time.  But over the past couple of years the cost of acceleration technology has dropped drastically due to its emergence as a full-blown market.  Riverbed has jumped to the top of the leaders circle for a number of reasons, with Juniper, Blue Coat, Cisco, Packeteer, etc in its wake.  For the most part, all WAN accelerators are going to have a few things in common.  There are a pair of appliances, each with a disk that can cache files going between two points.  To some degree, the purchase of accelerator appliances should be driven by the protocols to be used.  For example, if you’re a…

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  • Mac OS X,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Windows XP

    Slow Browsing

    July 15, 2007

    Slow browsing issues can often be caused by poor wireless reception.  Sure, a lot of poor performance should be linked to this but few are as obvious to an end user as browsing around on the web really, really slowly.  If you’re finding that pages are taking awhile to load then consider checking out the signal strength and see if speeds get better the closer someone moves to a WAP (provided signal strength increases as you get closer of course).

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  • Network Infrastructure,  Xsan

    Will Any Old GBIC Work?

    July 8, 2007

    You have two switches and you’re thinking that you’ll use the GBIC from your old switch on you new switch.  You have an Xsan and you have a bunch of GBICs laying around and you want to know if they’ll work.  You have a fiber run and you want to use a transceiver.  Etc. This is a tricky question.  The GBICs should all work.  The general rule of thumb though is, if you use the same GBIC on both ends then you shouldn’t have a problem.  But, it’s also important that (for whatever reason) some manufacturers do require certain GBICs either to actually interface or just to support an interface.

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  • Network Infrastructure

    The Changing Mac Switching Infrastructure

    June 27, 2007

    No one ever got fired for buying Cisco.  But, I recently saw a shop where they went from Cisco to Enterasys (thanks for showing off your backbone Todd).  I must say that I really liked the Enterasys switches. I looked them up and they are about 1/2 the cost of Cisco.  They have great tech support and are very easy to configure, even though it’s a command line interface.  The only complaint I have about them is the web interface is good for reviewing your setup but inadequate  for configuration – but is good for looking at the switch configs. Maybe in time this will mature…  I don’t know if they can go to the 10,000+ environments…

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