Picks and Pans

Just in case anyone was wondering, I was stupid and got a Skytel
2-way pager. I lived the dream for six months before I woke up.
It never worked right. Let me repeat - It never worked right.
The really weird thing is that in Boston it was completely unreliable
but on the show floor of Comdex in Las Vegas it worked perfectly
for three solid days... Guess I should move to LV.

Also, to add to the frustration Skytel's Internet gateway was setup
via UUCP (hey, wake up guys - UUCP went out 10 years ago) and their
customer support was just plain bad. Their billing people were
even worse. Never again. I got a PCS phone instead.

I like my PCS phone. It works. The audio artifacts are a little
strange but it works better than the analog phone I had before.
The cool thing is that the PCS phone will also do AMPs if thats all
it can find. (and they claim it will be a pager also, but I've
yet to see that service)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I never understood ATM. I must not be part of the target audience.
Now that 100base-T is here, I get it even less. I heard a speaker
from the ADSL forum lately who claimed that ADSL would eventually
be all ATM. That does not make sense to me.

Sometimes I wonder if the phone companies of the world have been
tricked into believing that they want ATM only to find out that
what the customers want is large packets (not 48 byte payloads)
and that their networks are setup all wrong.

I'm planning to look into wireless-ATM next, just because anything
that sounds that twisted might actually be interesting.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been debating moving some servers over to 100base-T. The idea
is to put them behind a switch that will clean up the network
and aggregate high use servers on a high speed link.

Adapter cards are easy to find these days. It's getting hard to buy
a card from 3Com which does not support 100Base-T. Switches, however,
are a bit more confusing.

Why don't these switches do basic IP routing?

It seems like everyone and their mother make an IP switch these days. Trouble is, none of them make the right switch. All I want is a 8-16 port Ethernet switch with two 100base-t ports and basic IP routing in the switch. The basic switches don't have 100base-t and don't do VLAN. I would not waste my time with them. The mid-class switches do 100base-t and have small VLAN capabilities. Basically they will partition your net into 1-4 VLANs. This is pretty useless, however. Remember that a switch is functionally just a multi-port bridge.

(one might ask oneself why we are taking a giant step backwards to bridging when we just got done tossing all the bridges out in favor of routers, but that's a topic for next month)

All of the 1-4 VLAN switches claim you need a router also to route between the VLANs. What load of guano that is. It would no be that hard to put basic IP routing in the switch. It does not have to be wire speed (perhaps that's what holds the product marketing people back). Just basic routing. Still, none that I could find will route. None do DHCP either. Bogus.

My perfect switch

My perfect switch would have 16 10base-t ports, 2 x 100base-t posts, support 16 VLANS, DHCP and do basic IP routing between the VLANS at a rate equivalent to a cisco 2500 (i.e. 68030 class routing). It would also support RMON and RMON-2 as I need to know who's talking to who to make adjustments in the network after it's installed.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You have to ask yourself, why would someone leave Sun Micro right now
and go to Novell? I can only guess that money was a factor since
technology and leadership was clearly not part of the equation.

In 1995 it was easy to see that the only out Novell had was to embed
the Java runtime in Netware. The trouble with Novell (ok, one of the
many troubles) is that they move at a glacial pace. Plus, they promote
things with the excitement of clump of dirt. They should be creating
thousands of cool Java apps which would make people burn to get the
Java run-time on their netware servers. Instead they push InternetWare
which no on seems to understand except that it seems to have something
to do with Groupwise, which seems interesting. Maybe it's just me.

It's not hard to figure out why no one develops for Netware. Perhaps
Java can fix that. Or maybe it's too deeply ingrained in body Novell.

Novell should change the name of NDIS to LDAP. No one ever understood
NDIS anyway (despite the fact that it is reasonable technology). If they
did this and put a simple SMTP & POP/IMAP server (written in Java) in
every server, they could make a very good case for intranetting existing
Novell sites. Instead they will ceed the internet email cause to
Microsoft. My prediction is that all non-Internet email will be
dumped for standards based Internet (i.e. tcp/ip) based email. I love
what I can do with Netscape Communicator 4 and HTML. Microsoft email
never let me do that. (now if I could just get Excell to save those
charts as .gif's!)

Copyright 1997 J Bradford Parker

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)