• Articles and Books,  public speaking

    Dead Tech Books

    As an author of technical books, I’ve been very interested in the comings and goings of technical books for a long time. This new Instagram feed is an expedition into what once was and how quickly the times change. Feed is embedded into a page on krypted to make it easier to see. Curious how many of my books are now “Dead Tech Books”…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  Windows XP

    NTP, OS X, Windows, Cisco and You

    At this point, most Mac admins know to how to enable ntp on a Mac OS X Server and set clients to the server. Most Mac admins also know how to use managed preferences to set ntp as well. We all know that time is pretty important and most are using ntp at this point. Network time should, almost by definition, be continuous, which allows ntpd in Mac OS X can update clocks in small denominations. Thus, managing corrections with little overhead or impact to the system enables ntp to be an inexpensive method for managing clocks. But ntp is also built to keep things running smoothly even when there…

  • Network Infrastructure

    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 you wanting more information about managed preferences then this book is for you!

  • Network Infrastructure

    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 Routers. But then there’s the PIX and the Cisco IOS devices. It’s still a lot of different stuff to keep track of and while it’s a lengthy read this page may help with that as it goes through each one…

  • Business,  Consulting

    Cisco + Postpath = Unified Communications – Clear Strategy

    I’m just guessing that there are smarter people than me at Cisco working on this type of stuff.  Cisco has purchased Postpath. If integrated with WebEx it gives them an interesting new perspective on collaboration, but I’m still not sure that the industry is ready to get away from Outlook, Entourage, etc and to get into using something fully in the cloud. I think for a company full of younglings it might make a lot of sense, given they’re already going to be used to this kind of thing, but then I’m also guessing they’re likely looking toward something like Google Apps. Having said this, the good people of Cisco…

  • Network Infrastructure

    Fireplotter

    If you have a number of Cisco devices you’d like to monitor you might want to check out Fireplotter. Fireplotter is a visualization tool that shows open connections, traffic loads and other pertinent information about your Cisco deployment. The graphs are cute, but not as informative as some other tools that we’ve grown to know and love like MRTG, etc. But, what Fireplotter lacks in intensity it more than makes up for in ease of use and deployment. Also, you can use it in conjunction with other monitoring tools if you just want quick and real-time visual monitoring of bandwidth.

  • Consulting,  Network Infrastructure

    WAN Acceleration Magic Quadrant

    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…

  • Network Infrastructure

    The Changing Mac Switching Infrastructure

    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…

  • Business

    Partner Programs

    So I’ve been working on getting us into a bunch of new partner programs recently.  Some companies get it, others not so much.  Companies I rather like working with: Cisco, IBM, SonicWALL, CheckPoint, PGP