One of my favorite quotes is the old chestnut about laws and sausages: the less you know about how they are made, the better!

Unfortunately, more often than not, the adage is also perfectly apt for technology endeavors. Any IT pro who has been involved in a major upgrade or development project knows all too well just how many ‘additives' go into such an effort.  read more »

When it comes to finding problems on the network, the key is learning to listen to what the network devices have to say. And just polling for SNMP data isn't enough.  read more »

People have been speaking of self-healing networks for years, and we can all retire if they ever reach the real world. In the meantime, network administrators are still hunting for tools that tell them what is going on in the network so they can solve those problems themselves. One old standby which is often underutilized is NetFlow.  read more »

This fall, comedian Drew Carey took over from Bob Barker as hosting The Price is Right, a show that has aired fairly steadily since 1956 in the U.S. with local versions produced in 30 other countries. While contestants on that show have to guess at the correct price for different products, when it comes to software, the "Right Price" is often zero: Linux runs on everything from mainframes to mobile phones; Snort is the most widely used Intrusion Detection System (IDS) software; and Open Office is
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A mesh network is a way to route data, voice and instructions between nodes.1 Using that definition, the Internet is a giant mesh network. We will focus on more modest-sized wireless mesh networks in this article.  read more »

Scope

We're going to look at the process of creating a Web site from scratch. We'll cover the things you should plan and do to create a commercial "show and tell" site. When we're done, you should be able to do a lot of the legwork of designing the site yourself before calling in a Web site specialist. After all, his time is your money.  read more »

Hurricane Katrina is still a recent memory for most of us-and enterprises have taken stock of lessons learned, applying them to "bullet-proofing" their disaster recovery plans.  read more »

It’s not always easy to find the source of network slows. Maybe the network is the problem, or maybe it’s an application issue. In some cases, a major bandwidth overhaul is required and in others a local issue needs to be addressed. Much of the time, though, it’s hard to tell, and finger-pointing can be the result.  read more »