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CellStream BLOG
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| Date | Title/Topic |
| 2/6/08 | Winds of Change for Regulated Services |
| 1/9/08 | A Difficult Decision In Legal Case |
| 12/9/07 | AT&T Outage Should Disturb You |
| 11/15/07 | Router Simulators for Cisco Certification |
| 10/26/07 | Two Needed College Software Engineering Classes |
| 10/23/07 | Traveling Light |
| 10/15/07 | A Great Tech Podcast and Web Site |
| 10/8/07 | Our First Experiences with MS SharePoint 2007 |
Winds of Change for Regulated Services
2/6/08
Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) has pretty much been considered part and parcel with other Internet services like email, web browsing, and file transfer. In this way, the regulators have considered VoIP as an unregulated service. This is where VoIP service providers like VONAGE, Google Talk and Skype have been hiding. For most of us, we understand that this is a deeply fought issue with many facets and complications and no clear answers. [heck - if I had the answers would I be blogging them here?]
On January 30, NECA (National Exchange Carrier Association www.neca.org), the group that administers the FCC's charge access plan, issued a paper called "Providing Local Exchange Telephone Service Using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology Reporting Guidelines". This paper essentially re-writes the rules on providing VoIP services for incumbent providers, finally allowing carriers to continue to receive regulated charges while really providing the service under the Internet Protocol.
The meaning of this is fairly simple, great news, and very late in arriving: the telephone companies, especially the independent and rural ones, can now use the latest IP-based voice technologies and not be penalized by loss of NECA funds (pooling, cost study, and universal service) as these services remain in the regulated realm. This means they can in some cases lower their costs, expand their services, and stay in business! The paper clearly underlines the value of softswitches and gateways as being the way forward to providing services expansion.
Hopefully these are the early winds of change in this area that are sorely needed. What this paper does not solve is the issue of VONAGE, Skype, and Google Talk. These remain safely in the unregulated arena under the "naked DSL" umbrella. Clearly there is more to come.
A Difficult Decision In Legal Case
1/9/08
Recently, an interesting legal issue has arisen as to whether a suspect can be compelled to reveal a computer hard drive's encryption password. I am no lawyer, but as explained to me, you can be required to turn over a key to your house so it can be searched, but the same does not apply to a combination for a safe that you may have in your head. Consider then usernames and passwords. Like combinations to unlock a safe, these are in your head. So in question is whether the alleged individual must turn over the password to their encrypted files which may or may not contain child pornography.
Some will argue that this is a human rights violation, or violation of privacy should the law be changed to require folks turn over passwords. They will likely cite that you could accidentally go to a XXX web site and therefore end up with accidental pornography somewhere on your computer. This is entirely possible, but possession of pornography is not necessarily against the law - the issue here is child pornography, and as I understand it, due to its illegality this is much harder to get hold of, and is highly unlikely to just appear on a average persons' hard drive.
Other will argue that the law must catch up with technology, and these passwords and keys are simply the new digital age keys, so they must be turned over in the light of sufficient legal suspicion. After all, they will say, if there is nothing to hide, who would care.
Let's face it, pornography has found a new outlet in the internet, and those of us who are parents have battled the issue since day one. Recently, Australia banned all pornography on their culdesac of the internet except when someone demands it from their service providers, placing the responsibility on the service providers to block the illicit traffic somehow. I have discussed that subject with many people I know, and all seem to like the idea here in the States.
Bottom line on this one is it is a complicated issue that hopefully the lawyers and the judges will properly analyze and reach reasonable conclusions. We all await in interest how this item turns out.
12/9/07
If you haven't heard by now, AT&T had a huge outage on its network in its BellSouth region. When I say huge I mean really huge. Here is what AT&T had to say: "On Monday evening, AT&T experienced a disruption in its Internet service in the nine-state Southeast region which impacted customers' ability to surf the Web. The root cause of the disruption is still being investigated but appears to be an equipment impairment. Network technicians were able to restore service slightly before 11 p.m. We continue to monitor the situation, but it this point it appears that service has been successfully restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing customers."
Come on now. Later in the day they claimed is was "an isolated router failure" (these quotes are from Brad Meyer, AT&T's spokes person. They blamed everything on the DNS services, and then also said they accidentally did something on the backup in Washington DC. All very cryptic at best.
By the following week, it was evident that AT&T had also suffered from a complete failure of it customer support system that apparently clogged for hours without any help to users.
Why is this disturbing? Well, on the one hand you could say that you get what you pay for: you want cheap internet service where the service provider can barely make any money, then don't expect a customer service liaison per customer in a massive outage situation. On the other hand, it is a warning to all service providers of how intertwined the internet usage has become for many people. If something fails you have to have backup plans, and clearly AT&T, as well as others I am sure, has some Grand Canyon level gaps here. Thirdly, I have heard rumors that the outage was really an optical network failure inside the AT&T network and had nothing to do with a router or DNS server. If this rumor is true, it confirms something I have felt about the optical cores of networks for a long time: It is time to re-engineer them.
Most people don't know that the optical cores of all networks are essentially provisioned. This means that people create large cross connect tables mapping an input channel to an output channel. None of this is automatic (like IP routing where backup paths are selected by software applications running in the routers). For redundancy purposes, the folks who do this work, build backup scenarios (alternate cross connection maps) that are executed by the optical switches should failures occur, or they try to design networks in ring topologies so if one direction fails, traffic can be sent the other way around the ring. On the surface this is all very convincing, but the bare honest truth is that these methods are only reliable if plenty of spare bandwidth is available in the backup scheme, and as the network grows or is modified that these plans are updated and verified. One example where things fall apart quickly is if you protect one fiber with another, and never test the backup, will it work if the backup is needed? The network is ready for a complete overhaul of the core design processes and how automation can be inserted into this process.
Hopefully, now that we have had a major wreck at the intersection, someone will install a traffic light.
11/15/2007
I am often asked about acquiring simulators for certification on Cisco platforms. There really are a number of choices:
http://routersimulator.certexams.com/ccna-simulator-download/download-router-simulator.html
http://www.gold-software.com/CertCCNARouterSimulator-file6843.html
10/26/07
I have had the wonderful pleasure of speaking to new graduates entering the technology business as software engineers. It is 2007, and spam, viruses, worms, Denial of Service attacks and all other forms of malicious attacks on networks, servers and hosts are daily occurrences. It is technological terrorism albeit at many different levels. The expenses associated with this are well documented on web sources. You would think that leading schools producing Software and Computer Scientists with degrees would have significant training and exposure to these subjects.
So as I spoke to new grads, I asked for a show of hands: "How many of you understand what it means to write secure code?" So far not one hand has been raised. "OK, how many of you have studied network security issues, and how basic security breaches occur in systems?" Again, no hands. Well, that is a fib, I actually had one say they took a class on it outside university.
If alarm bells are going off with you, then good, because they are with me too. So here is my advice to the Universities who pride themselves on producing degreed engineers ready to take on today's distributed computing and networking challenges: You need to have security as a secondary qualification to every software engineering degree you offer. You also need to have secure coding as a fundamental skill regardless of language.
Once upon a time, humans built large walls around their cities to make them secure. Live inside the castle wall you are safe. Outside the castle wall, you die. We don't live that way today because we evolved technologically with tools and methods that made the walls unnecessary. The same needs to happen with computing and networking. That means that these universities need to wake up and get current.
If your university has already done this - we would love to hear from you.
October 23, 2007
No, this is not about packing less on your next trip. This is about spending less. Yeah, yeah, yada yada you say. But give me a few more sentences. For the past two years, we have been striving to lower our travel costs at CellStream - this in light of rising prices - especially in hotels and rental cars. If you do a lot of travel, you know what I mean. To this end we think we have done pretty well lately although we are not satisfied yet and would love to hear what others can add. So lets get right to our proven methods to date:
1. Start all your travel planning at one web site: www.kayak.com . This is the best travel search engine out there. It searches even the Travelocity's and Expedias. We could go on and on about what we like about kayak, but that is not the point.
Start with the plane travel. We love the way you can quickly adjust dates and times through their user interface. This tip alone will save you hundreds - even thousands if you are a road warrior. Now go to the hotel and rental car searches - get baselines for all this.
Join every frequent flyer program you can. If you fly a lot, you can select the least cost air fare and earn privileges. This can be helpful when flying stand by, getting upgrades, and getting preferred access to seats, check in, and boarding.
When checking in - always ask about how full the flight is. If you are willing to move your seat - you might get a empty seat beside you. Remember that all the seats take off and land at the same time!
2. Once you have your flights, now go to Thrifty or Dollar sites to compare rental car prices to that of the Kayak search. We sometimes find their web site to be cheaper. We seem to end up getting the best deal with a fair number of locations from Thrifty. They also have a Blue Chip Rewards program that we urge you to join. Rent X number of days and you get a day free. They send you certificates and there is essentially no restriction - you can use the certificates on any car. We have found good rates on Expedia as well.
Certainly you can find cheaper alternatives to Thrifty and Dollar, but they usually require you take a shuttle as they are not in the airports we frequent, and if schedules are tight, this can be problematic. This does not mean that using Hertz or Avis is a good idea because they are convenient. Quite the opposite. They cost more - even the corporate programs! We often save 20-75% by avoiding Hertz, Avis and National.
3. Do the same for hotels. Check the sites of your favorite chain, then compare to kayak search results. Whatever you do - join a hotel rewards program. The nights add up and you get free nights after a while. Honestly the free nights aren't the best deal. Once you reach upper tiers you will get better rooms, amenities thrown in and preferred treatment. It is a no brainer.
That said, be careful. We know people who will only stay at a given hotel chain "for the points". Nine of ten times, they pay a price for this, and the price is not worth it. Make sure you look at it with a spreadsheet!
4. Consider transport not a rental car. Here is a great example: when traveling to Atlanta, you could rent a car for $35/day for 3 days or you can take the Marta train for about $3 a trip, a taxi from the Marta station to your hotel or business runs less than $10. For the cost of one rental car day, you can get around for all 3 days using alternate transport. Ask hotels about options like this at your destination.
5. Travel is stressful and many people satisfy the need for a good feeling by eating. This can get costly and unhealthy, so the next two tips are about food:
Don't eat at the airport. A little planning and you can avoid this - even make it a challenge. Plus it is healthier. We tend to get on a plane and eat. Or to get to the hub and eat. Brown bagging your lunch and switching off the "I have to eat" thinking will save money and inches on your waist. We burn no energy sitting in a seat for 3 hours. This does not apply to delayed flights of course.
Don't eat at the hotel or at least not if you can avoid it. Ok, some hotels have great restaurants, but most are over priced. Ask the front desk for a restaurant list, or check into a hotel that has a suite kitchen so you can make your own.
We hope this helps someone, and welcome additional thoughts.
10/15/07
For about three months now, we have been regular watchers of the (nearly) daily podcast from www.webbalert.com . Delivered with enthusiasm, an animated Ms. Webb presents important industry news and commentary that keeps us up to date on the tech industry. Since Webb Alert is without huge sponsorship, they tend to call things how they see them, and we like a little irony and sarcasm, if at least for the entertainment value. Then again, some of the stinging quips are well earned. All this in less than 5 minutes of your valuable time. Plus the site has great links to current events. Someone is going to grab the rights and sponsor this site and then it will become sedate and probably boring. So watch now while it is fresh and fun.
As those of you close to us know, we have been big fans of Microsoft's SharePoint concept since initial release several years ago. We have, in fact, recommended it to every small/medium business owner that will listen to us! The entire CellStream back office became converted to this online database system. Was it perfect - well, not exactly. There were areas that needed improvement and we had high hopes MS would continue to expand the capabilities and functionality.
Earlier this year, we got wind that MS was not only planning a major revision to SharePoint, but also that a new feature they call PowerPoint Library was going to be supported. Let's explain a little on this feature. PowerPoint is a fine Office tool, but honestly has never gone beyond writing presentations in nearly 2 decades. Office 2007 was a major improvement in our opinions, but PowerPoint continued to miss an important feature: the ability to reuse slides in a managed database method. As those of us who create presentations know, when you create presentations, each one has a complete slide set, and normally people cut and paste slides. This causes tremendous repetition in the presentation files, and as a slide is improved, it is very difficult to know where the latest version of any given slide is. This can lead to bizarre moments where presenters suddenly don't have a new version, or when authors search for a particular slide that they need...which presentation was that in? It is possible to purchase software that does this, but it does not come cheap, and we had heard horror stories. So when MS offered up the SharePoint solution we were listening.
So the new feature was earmarked as being able to create slides in a database fashion, and then build presentations from the database! This means you can create slide histories, know where updates are, and minimize the management of large numbers of slides. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it? We were anxious to see this feature and this feature alone prompted us to jump into SharePoint 2007 this September.
Research revealed that the upgrade procedure was complicated. We think MS better fix this as the average small/medium business owner is not going to try this on their own. We were told to purchase a SharePoint 2007 book from MS that detailed all the possible issues and stages of the upgrade. Naturally, with the entire back office system running on this tool, there was no room for errors or loss of data. So the first very important step was to image our server so in the event of catastrophe, we could return to "Go". We urge anyone attempting this to do the same. The 1155 page book is called "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Administrator's Companion". Second, we ran the entire process on a simple offline server just to verify we had all the necessary software packages (you don't just use the MS SharePoint 2007 DVD, you need .Net 3.0 and many other tidbits thankfully, if not poorly explained in the Admin Guide).
Six hours later, we completed the actual server upgrade without any major hitches, or so it appeared. Our \\companyweb intranet was operational with a new improved look and feel that we instantly liked. Almost as instantly there were problems. Microsoft, for whatever reason, no longer uses the \\companyweb as the root for the SharePoint system! There is a new root and while our 'companyweb' pages were upgraded and still reachable (at least internally) we now had two web sites! The Admin guide offers little on this which is a total surprise, nor does the Microsoft web. So we thought - fine, we will move the web pages and merge the two sites. We still have been unable to do this. Again - all works, but it is not as pretty as we would like.
The next day we received problem reports that remote access to the SharePoint intranet was inoperable. We found out that it was partly operable and we saw error logs aplenty. Research on the MS web revealed that SQL Server 2005 had to be reconfigured for remote access - this had not been any issue prior to the upgrade. Once that was fixed we seemed back to normal.
With all seemingly settled, it was time to set up the PowerPoint Library. As we explored, it became obvious that SharePoint 2007 has had many new features added which is great news. The library function worked great - at least we thought. Turns out there are little annoying 'gotchas' all around. Here is a list of these bugs:
The good news is as follows:
We continue to explore SharePoint 2007 as this is written, and we will do a follow-up in another blog post.
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