Hands On

VIDEO: How to deal with Conficker

Greg Meckbach — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:03:21 GMT

Conficker, which has infected more than 10 million PCs so far, is easy to repel with common security practices, according to Info-Tech Research Group.

See our video interview with James Quin of Info-Tech Research Group to find out who you can protect your network and figure out whether your infrastructure is vulnerable to attack.

VIDEO: Network World Canada at Interop New York, part 5 of 5

Jennifer Kavur — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:10:46 GMT

Multicasting will be the next major trend

Manfred Arndt, distinguished technologist and convergence solutions architect for HP ProCurve, sat down with Network World Canada at the Interop business technology event in New York City to share his 20-year insight on SMB and enterprise networking.

“Multicasting is really more like a television broadcast and what is the same signal or the same packet…goes to everybody,” said Arndt. “This allows you to have very scalable solution. If you tried to send the same video session to 1000 employees, you’d have to replicate that 1000 times, which would overload the networks, which would also overload the servers.”

“In the next five years, multicasting will grow dramatically, on the Internet especially. Some people predict 50 per cent of traffic will be video-type content and much of that will be multicasting-driven. In the enterprises, it may be a little bit slower to adopt, but that clearly is one of the trends that you’re going to see.”

The challenge, according to Arndt, is unfamiliarity with the technology. “There are a lot of network administrators who might be very network savvy, but they really don’t know that much about multicasting. It’s really one of the newer areas in the field and is intimidating to a lot of them.”

“A much heavier emphasis on multicasting-type of applications will also bring a lot of big challenges on how to troubleshoot the network, because it’s a one-way communication without an acknowledgment. When things go wrong, it can be a little more tricky to diagnose. That’s why we have some of these technologies embedded in our switches, like S-flow,” he said.

In part four of our five-part video series, Arndt explains how S-flow sampling technology works with references to election polling.

VIDEO: Network World Canada at Interop New York, part 4 of 5

Jennifer Kavur — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:10:16 GMT

When redundancy becomes important

A 24/7 network infrastructure will become increasingly expected, said Arndt. “If the device fails, how does the network automatically route around it? You can do that through a number of different ways. One is through additional paths through the networks…as you grow, you might want to have switches with redundant management cards in there.”

“An example is video security. If you’re going to put video security on your network, how good is the video security if it only runs eight hours a day? The hours that it’s not running, there is no security. The rule has been if it’s not captured on video, it did not happen.”

In part four of our five-part video series, Arndt highlights the importance of video security in Las Vegas casinos.

Upcoming videos…

Part 5: Multicasting is the next major trend

VIDEO: Network World Canada at Interop New York, part 3 of 5

Jennifer Kavur — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:09:33 GMT

The benefits of video

According to Arndt, video is following the footsteps of IP from a network standpoint. The key applications for business include security, conference calling and distance learning.

For security purposes, video is good for liability protection and theft deterrence, said Arndt. “When people see a video camera, usually their behavior dramatically changes. When things come to trial, they rarely ever go to court. They get settled out of court because it’s usually undisputable what happened...SMBs are exposed to huge liabilities and often large companies or unscrupulous people prey on these and use lawsuits as a way to put them out of business.”

Bandwidth is one challenge for video conference calls, he said. “Video conferencing is like IP telephony, but just higher bandwidth, so you just need to make sure your network has the right bandwidth capabilities to handle the video resolution you are looking to deploy.”

“Virtually all the new cameras today are powered over the Ethernet, so that’s something you want to look for. Do you have 802.3af power for your ports? You want to know that you have both MAC authentication, web authentication and RADIUS authentication so you can authenticate your video cameras. You want to make sure that somebody doesn’t come in, unplug the video camera and plug in some other device into the network. You want to know that your IP phones and your PCs are authenticated appropriately.”

But the key issue in video, said Arndt, is consistent end-to-end policies. “When VoIP first came out eight to ten years ago, people were a little bit suspicious and deployed them in separate networks and it took them a long time to get confidence. The adoption curve with video is a lot quicker, because people are seeing that it’s been proven. The QS concerns aren’t really there anymore. The key issue really is not the actual configuration, just consistent end-to-end policies and how to get the configuration consistently deployed.”

In part three of our five-part video series, Arndt points to GPS screens in New York City cabs as an example of video capability.

Upcoming videos…

Part 4: When redundancy becomes important

Part 5: Multicasting is the next major trend

VIDEO: Network World Canada at Interop New York, part 2 of 5

Jennifer Kavur — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:09:08 GMT

Why IP telephony is better than a legacy system

“Some of these legacy telephony systems don’t give you a lot of flexibility and don’t give you very good growth opportunities,” said Arndt. “Many SMBs are very cost-constrained, so for them, cost and ease-of-use are primary drivers.”

In part two of our five-part video series, Arndt discusses the benefits of IP telephony in a small business environment with examples from his personal experience at a start-up company.

Upcoming videos…

Part 3: Benefits of video

Part 4: When redundancy becomes important

Part 5: Multicasting is the next major trend

VIDEO: Network World Canada at Interop New York, part 1 of 5

Jennifer Kavur — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:09:59 GMT

Convergence and unified communications

According to Arndt, convergence is an area that’s really starting to see a lot of attraction. “Unified communications hold a lot of promise because it is going to seamlessly blend a lot of these tools that users are already experiencing themselves on their cell phones,” he said.

“The difference in a work environment is you don’t have a device made by a single vendor…you have many different types of devices, both mobile and fixed, you have desktop phones, you have email systems…it’s a lot more challenging because it’s a lot of applications from different vendors that need to be integrated together.”

In part one of our five-part video series, Arndt elaborates with an example on improving telephone customer service.

Upcoming videos will post next week…

Part 2: Why IP telephony is better than a legacy system

Part 3: Benefits of video

Part 4: When redundancy becomes important

Part 5: Multicasting is the next major trend

Video: Up close with the BlackBerry Bold

Jennifer Kavur — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:09:39 GMT

Research in Motion released the BlackBerry Bold in Canada on August 21. The fastest BlackBerry on the market, the Bold launched on the Roger’s network. Watch video coverage from the media preview at the Velma Rogers Graham Theatre in Toronto...

Video: Xen Desktop virtualization as shown by Citrix

Shane Schick — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:08:43 GMT

Last week Briony Smith had a Q&A with a local Citrix exec, David Wright, about its desktop virtualization strategy. See below for a clip on the product in action.

The Timing is Virtually Everything

Scott Elliott — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:08:43 GMT

Operating systems in general keep time by counting the “ticks” from the processor (I’m sure that is a vast oversimplification of process). Virtual machines unfortunately don’t have unfettered and unlimited access to the processor and as a result, their “tick count” and internal clock quickly becomes skewed. If a virtual machine needs to interact with other systems – like Active Directory – a wildly incorrect time stamp can cause unwanted results. In the Active Directory example, logging onto a virtual machine that is a member of the domain becomes impossible if the time skew is too much.

Fortunately with VMware ESX servers, there is a mechanism to fix the time skew issue, and it is broken into two parts. The first part requires installing VMware tools on the virtual machines and synching the virtual clock with the ESX host (which over-rides the “tick” count process). The second part is to configure NTP on the ESX service console. This is slightly more complicated, but can be accomplished without too much difficulty.

On the ESX server, there is a service console that looks and acts suspiciously like a Linux OS (well, not on the ESXi platform -- but that is a whole different ballgame). And part of that service console is just itching to activate NTP. Unfortunately, you can’t just say “NTP powers, activate,” but rather have to go through a few simple steps:

Configuring NTP
1. Edit the /etc/ntp.conf file
Personally, I just rename the file to ntp.old, and create a new blank ntp.conf file. In the configuration file, I basically tell it that a) only accept commands from itself, b) give the time to people that ask, but not much else, and c) lists the IP addresses of the NTP clocks to synchronize with.

For example:
restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict default kod nomodify notrap
server tick.company.com
server tock.company.com
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

2. Edit the /etc/ntp/step-tickers file and type the names of the NTP devices (one server per line)
tick.company.com
tock.company.com

3. Allow NTP packets through the service console firewall
esxcfg-firewall --enableService ntpClient

4. Configure ntpd to start on boot
chkconfig --level 345 ntpd on

5. Start the ntp service
service ntpd start

6. Finally, you should synchronize the hardware clock with NTP
hwclock –systohc

For fun, you can watch the how well your ESX server is keeping time by typing:
watch "ntpq -p"

I don’t pretend to be an expert on NTP, all I know is that the above configuration settings have worked well for me. If you want to learn more about the secrets of NTP, http://support.ntp.org is a good place to start.

I’m assuming that you have a few functioning NTP services on your network (Linux boxes and various network routers are often configured to run NTP), or that your servers can access the public NTP clocks scattered across the net. One word of caution: don’t point the NTP service at a Windows 2003 server since Windows uses SNTP (and SNTP is just different enough to mess up the synchronization process).

Yes, you can ... making a VPN gateway support the iPhone

Dave Webb — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:05:53 GMT

Everybody wants an iPhone ... but what about the security issues? Jamey Heary, a security consulting engineer at Cisco, gets into the geeky details of how to Cisco's IOS and ASA lines play well with Apple's smart phone on the Cisco Subnet.

Got some hands-on advice for the community? E-mail us with the link on this page and share your knowledge.

Building a VPN with Cisco ASA gear

Dave Webb — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:05:30 GMT

Sometimes, the licences can be just as important as the technical issues. Ron Nutter tells us here how to settle the issues and connect routers in a VPN here.

Got a tip or trick to pass on to the comunity? Use the e-mail link and share your knowledge through our Hands On blog.

Two buildings, one broadband service

Dave Webb — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:05:05 GMT

Get the skinny on connecting two offices to a single broadband connection from Ron Nutter. There maybe both wired and wireless options.

Got some hands-on advice to share with the community? E-mail us at the link on this page.