Category Archives: Network Management

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Planet-Lab … planetary-scale applications platform
While looking around at some interesting monitoring software (Ganglia link below) I came across an Intel Research sponsored project that I hadn’t seen before … PlanetLab. The home page of their web site states:

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. PlanetLab nodes support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

This is a very impressive project, and I downloaded a lot of their documentation and courseware to read through. I can only imagine what is going to occur as we all contribute our computers into communities of machines like this!

The link below is the distributed monitoring system that I was checking out …

Ganglia 2.5.6 (Monitoring core). A scalable distributed monitoring system. [freshmeat.net]

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Visualizing Social Networks
While working with network management software I always enjoyed creating ways to visualize the networks, and more importantly their traffic patterns and flows. I am hooked on visualization. This is a very cool tool written to visualize the social networks on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels. Very good work …

Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on IRC. By using an IRC bot to monitor the activity in an IRC channel, it is possible to infer a social network that connects the users in the channel. Visualizing these social networks is not only interesting, but has a variety of potential applications. [Advogato]

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Access Points with intelligence!
I am very impressed with this project, and like to see technology like this hitting the commodity mainstream. Linksys has implemented an Access Point with a mini-Linux running inside. These guys have now started to create distributions of additional tools, etc. that can run inside the AP.

What I really like about this is the possiblity of putting additional authentication code inside of the AP for controlling access through it. I am currently involved in a project where we require a PC dedicated to provide this type of functionality. The PC siots between the Internet and the Access Point and provides the authentication and access control. If we could embed our code inside of this AP, we could eliminate the cost of the Access Point.

I might have to go buy one of these and take a look at what’s possible!

Linux on the Linksys wrt54g 0.2. A Linux distribution for the Linksys wrt54g wireless access point. [freshmeat.net]

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A nice Network Management Tool
I use MRTG for monitoring and graphing many of the devices on my personal network, and also on our 80211.net wireless network. MRTG is a very simple, yet powerful application. I happened to come across this project the other day, and we’re about to give it a test. It appears to be a very good extension of the capabilities of MRTG without getting too complex.

NetMRG 0.10pre2. A network monitoring, reporting, and graphing system. [freshmeat.net]

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Domains, Domain registrars and Internet property
I have to admit … I hate the Internet “tax” that comes in the form of “domain name registrations”. I remember when I experimented with my domain servers to add the Alternic name space to our servers. It’s amazing to me that with all of the “peer to peer” development going on around the net, that someone hasn’t come up with a good, distributed alternative …

My main purpose in bringing this up is that I “lost” some domain names by not paying in time. It’s an amazing process, and I had given up hope of recovering these names. As of today, I again own my WarBlading domains, and I have found that I “lost” my NoizCast domain.

In the future … I’ll be watching much more closely to ensure that I do not loose these again!

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Peer to peer secure connections …
It is great to see more and more work on VPN solutions being developed in the public domain. I truly believe that these are the technologies that are going to provide a freedom in communications between communities and their members, communities and other communities, and between individuals.

LinVPN 2.4 (Stable). Allows you to create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) from Linux to Linux. [freshmeat.net]

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Visualization of the collective brain …
I have always been a visual thinker … and so I always like to find solutions for producing visual representations of what is going on in the net. I worked for years in network management and still have ideas for solutions that would display the real activity going on in the infrastructure.

The more that I have been working on memetics and Web Services, the more I have started to look at how the real-time activities of “humans on the net” can be represented in a graphical manner.

This is a very cool article and web site that provides a very cool way to render the traffic of visitors at a web site.

Visualizing Crowds At Web Sites [Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

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Why our 80211.net project can rule!
I spoke with Stewart at one of the Telecosm conferences, and we talked about the subject of viable business models. At that point I suggested that both Metricom and Mobilestar were on interesting paths that I could not see sustainable. Both of these organizations have run into extreme trouble. In my opinion Metricom went off track with it’s proprietary solution, and Mobilestar was never going to be able to finance the deployment of an “owned” infrastructure.

My team and I have developed a much different business model … and we are looking to deploy the first tests around the time of the Olympics here in Utah. Keep watching http://www.80211.net

Stewart Alsop: “Wireless rocks! Wireless stinks!”  [Scripting News]

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A levelheaded viewpoint on 802.11b WEP security …
This is one of the first good articles that I have seen on the whole WEP security issue. Use the same technologies that you already use for wired networks! VPNs were designed to deal with this exact issue … and they work over wireless!

Internet Week: Security Flaw Isn’t Death Knell For WLANs. But instead of scrapping wireless networks, experts say, enterprises should extend authentication and encryption techniques used on wired networks, carefully examine access procedures and consider keeping sensitive data off the WLAN. [Tomalak’s Realm]