Have you read all of the recent hype-ware from the 'big 3'? (Cisco, 3Com, Bay) Find anything in there you could actually buy or use? Not me. These companies are all hardware vendors, not software vendors. I wonder sometimes if they need hype to push boxes.
What about Microsoft?
Don't you get tired of hearing that? I know I do. It reminds me of IBM twenty years ago. I think that Microsoft does an amazing job of making the desktop fun to use (OK, now you know - I love Outlook and Office 97. I used to be a Mac weenie. I've shed that addiction. Outlook is for me. I'm going to dump Meeting Maker and my HP 100 for Outlook and a USR Pilot. You heard it hear first.
But back to the top. Microsoft is a desktop O/S company. Despite what they say they're not a network company, not a data center company and not an enterprise company. You only have to ask any Fortune 100 IS person to learn the truth. They make a great desktop but don't ask them to federate your enterprise naming.
I read an interesting article (no doubt written by someone at IBM) that shipments of IBM 370 architecture machines has never slowed down (now called S/390). I remember writing PL/1, COBOL and BAL for those giant fossils. I also remember seeing an emulation running on a 486 laptop that ran faster than the original machine.
Somehow I'm not buying this. I know there's a "y2k" play here somewhere but I don't quite see it yet.
Have you noticed that SNMP statistics are not very interesting? Me too. I want network events. And only interesting network event need apply.
Why don't more servers send SNMP traps? It seems like the only thing which will cause a trap on my network is the T1 going down. Thats like the little red light on my dashboard lighting up when a wheel falls off the car. I would like some traps from servers when problems happen.
DHCP, ARP and the Integrity of the LAN
Is it just me or is ARP a huge security problem on the LAN? It seems to me that anyone with Linux or FreeBSD can take down an entire segment just by publishing the IP address of the local router in their arp cache. Hummm... Perhaps what I want is an ARP server tightly coupled with my DHCP server. Perhaps the DHCP server should populate the ARP caches.
But then, I'll want authentication in my DHCP server. I'd like the DHCP servers to have a X.509 certificate and have the clients verify out before believing the server.
Between routing and the workstation is the corporate identity I see an emerging layer of control in large network architectures (don't get me started on the topic of out of band signalling of routing information - I'll get to that next time). There's routing on the bottom and workgroups on the top. Cisco owns the routing and Microsoft (OK, I took the pill) owns the workgroup. But in the middle there's this notion of one's "corporate identity". Like, how does your email get from the Internet to your desktop? And who are you anyway?
Microsoft does not do well here and neither does Cisco. It's a whole new market to me.
Have you read all of the recent hype-ware from the 'big 3'? (Cisco, 3Com, Bay) Find anything in there you could actually buy or use? Not me. These companies are all hardware vendors, not software vendors. I wonder sometimes if they need hype to push boxes.
What about Microsoft?
Don't you get tired of hearing that? I know I do. It reminds me of IBM twenty years ago. I think that Microsoft does an amazing job of making the desktop fun to use (OK, now you know - I love Outlook and Office 97. I used to be a Mac weenie. I've shed that addiction. Outlook is for me. I'm going to dump Meeting Maker and my HP 100 for Outlook and a USR Pilot. You heard it hear first.
But back to the top. Microsoft is a desktop O/S company. Despite what they say they're not a network company, not a data center company and not an enterprise company. You only have to ask any Fortune 100 IS person to learn the truth. They make a great desktop but don't ask them to federate your enterprise naming.
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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!)
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.