I've been talking to people who have built cloud services that communicate with on-premises equipment (like storage arrays or routers.) One of my questions has been: "can you give me an example of some difficulties, or customer requirements, that you've encountered about the device-to-cloud communication channel ( Read more... )

One of the Tintri SE's asked whether the advice here about tuning NFS was relevant to us: http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networking_2ndEd/nfs/ch18_01.htm (It is not ( Read more... )

More detail on Google+ than here on all of these...

NY Times article on Arista with some wandering comments about how networks need to be more robust and self-healing. But also about how Cisco is now using third-party chips like Arista did from the beginning? The column seems in search of a topic. (G+)

Lauren Weinstein points out that the .xxx ( Read more... )

George Ou presents an interesting networking experiment. He's trying to demonstrate that CDNs are a bigger "threat" to application fairness than routing and QoS policies would be. In evidence, he shows how a YouTube server located 47ms away gets a 2.3x faster TCP connection than another server located 105ms away. In isolation they could both ( Read more... )

"Privacy and the Quantum Internet" (in the October 2009 Scientific American) seems like a very cute and completely useless idea. The authors' proposal is to implement an eavesdropping-free "quantum private search" which makes use of quantum entanglement to allow the sender to verify that her query has not been observed. (See, for example, their ( Read more... )

These guys came by and put an encrypted data block on the Lowballgurus wiki:

http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/

Please accept our sincerest apology for any problems that our project may have caused. It was never our intention to maliciously deface sites, but instead were trying to develop a ( Read more... )

At dinner on Monday, we were bemoaning the disappearance of Ethernet "hubs". It used to be that if you went out and bought a cheap 5-port Ethernet device from Fry's, it would provide a physical interconnect but no L2 switching. As a result, you could use it to observe traffic going by on the network, which is useful for debugging and testing ( Read more... )

Good idea: When you copy part of a web page that has images (in Firefox, anyway), the text that gets copied has the alt-tags for the images. Travian (and problably other web sites I haven't noticed) sets things up so that the alt-tags transform back into the images in their internal forum. Elegant ( Read more... )

I'm somewhat surprised to find Andy Bechtolsheim coming down on the side of Infiniband. Andy made his 2nd fortune by betting on Gigabit Ethernet when the hot new thing was ATM ( Read more... )

Lauren Weinstein of PFIR asks are you being cheated by digital cable?The channel numbers you see when you get digital cable bear little resemblance to the frequency at which a signal is transmitted. The mapping may even vary from customer to customer. Some channels are broadcast both in digital and analog form. This lets the cable company pull a ( Read more... )