Category Archives: Networking

Issues and news relating to networking.

Disable NetBIOS in W2K/XP/2003

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NetBIOS is an ancient session-level interface and transport protocol developed by IBM to network together PCs. It is a broadcast-based, non-routable and insecure protocol, and it scales poorly mostly because it was designed with a flat namespace. Since the late 1980s Microsoft has adopted NetBIOS for their LAN Manager product, and from there it found its way into early versions of Windows and all the way into Windows NT.

via Disable NetBIOS in W2K/XP/2003.

Works with Windows 7 and got rid of all NBNS traffic for me on a per interface basis.  I have netbios disabled on the wireless interface  because wireless should be considered insecure and this NetBios traffic likes to broadcast to everyone your position which IMHO is not good.  Run silent, run deep.

Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol

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The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD) is a method used by clients to locate a URL of a configuration file using DHCP and/or DNS discovery methods. Once detection and download of the configuration file is complete it can be executed to determine the proxy for a specified URL. The WPAD protocol only outlines the mechanism for discovering the location of this file, but the most commonly deployed configuration file format is the Proxy auto-config format originally designed by Netscape in 1996 for Netscape Navigator 2.0.[1] The WPAD protocol was drafted by a consortium of companies including Inktomi Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, RealNetworks, Inc., and Sun Microsystems, Inc.. WPAD is documented in an INTERNET-DRAFT which expired in December 1999.[2] However WPAD is still supported by all major browsers.[3][4] WPAD was first included with Internet Explorer 5.0.

via Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Tellabs Finds New PON Frontier

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The manufacturer claims to be the first company to convert its GPON platform into an enterprise switch, back in 2009, to enable enterprises to take advantage of the bandwidth capacity and lower costs of passive optics, and considers itself a global leader in optical LANs. Tellabs is getting competition in the field from Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) and newer fiber-to-the-desktop players such as Zhone Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: ZHNE) are also exploring how to use their PON expertise in what is expected to be a growing market. (See Moto Expands PON Family.)

Other companies capitalizing on this market are fiber management firms, such as 3M Co. (NYSE: MMM) and TE Connectivity (NYSE: TEL).

via Light Reading – Mobile Backhaul – Tellabs Finds New PON Frontier: The Desktop – Telecom News Analysis.

Tellabs has had success selling its optical LAN technology into enterprises through Value Added Resellers, and into federal government agencies. One of its new pushes is to encourage telecom service providers, especially those in rural areas, to look to optical LAN technology as something they can sell to their business customers, as part of a hosted or managed service they deliver, says Van Horne.

Open Networking Foundation

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The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the transformation of networking through the development and standardization of a unique architecture called Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which brings direct software programmability to networks worldwide. The mission of the Foundation is to commercialize and promote SDN and the underlying technologies as a disruptive approach to networking that will change how virtually every company with a network operates.

via Open Networking Foundation

Connect Two Wireless Router Wirelessly

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You can setup a wireless connection between two routers only so that it will link a wireless network to a wired network allowing you to bridge two networks with different infrastructure. You can find wireless access points products that offer either a “bridge” mode or a “repeater” mode. In this post I’m going to explain three popular open source choices that can be used for setting up a wireless bridge.

via HowTo: Connect Two Wireless Router Wirelessly ( Bridge ).

Avoiding Egypt: Where Cables Fear to Dredge

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New cables are finding other ways to connect Europe and the Middle East. The Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG), a terrestrial cable that routes from Frankfurt to Oman via Ukraine and Iran, is built “away from the known trouble areas,” says Gavin Tait, director of Asia network planning for Cable & Wireless Worldwide plc (London: CW), now part of the Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD). “Obviously it doesn’t go anywhere near the Red Sea,” he adds. (See Euronews: Vodafone Gets the Nod on C&WW, Vodafone Appoints C&WW Execs and ancotel Provides EPEG Connection Point.)

via Light Reading Asia – Optical Networking – Avoiding Egypt: Where Cables Fear to Dredge – Telecom News Analysis.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s popularity as a network destination is making it hard to land cables there, says Genaro Sanchez, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) vice-president of network planning and engineering. “The corridor in Singapore is narrow, it’s getting crowded, [and] it’s getting more difficult to work with cables.”

GoDaddy is Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility

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Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site’s DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It’s currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve.

via GoDaddy is Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility.

Pingdom flagged this site as being down for 55 minutes starting at around 5:15AM.

Market Leaders Drive Investment in Switching

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Terabit switch chips and switch chipsets that scale up to 400 Tbit/s are making merchant switch chips very attractive for high-performance network systems against in-house ASIC and FPGA-based designs. The latest switch devices not only deliver on performance, but integrate additional system functions such as Ethernet MACs and programmable classification engines to support software-defined networking (SDN).

via Light Reading – Market Leaders Drive Investment in Switching – Telecom.

High-performance switch devices have become both more complicated and simpler. The devices integrate additional functionality with significant on-chip memory and packet processing functions. On the other hand, the interfaces for most protocols are moving to 10 Gbit/s for the current generation and 25 Gbit/s for the next generation.

Scientists Establish First Working Quantum Network

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The team has managed to rig up a laser to fire and hit the first networked atom in a way that the atom preserves its quantum state, but also produces a photon with that information plastered onto it. The photon then shoots off down the fiber optic cable delivering it to the second atom. Network achieved. On top of that, the researchers managed to get the two networked atoms to entangle, which means the network should be completely scalable to something along the lines of an Internet.

via Scientists Establish First Working Quantum Network | Geekosystem.

NOVA series on quantum mechanics.

And another link from Cornell: Does quantum entanglement imply faster than light communication?

Say you agree to send out two beams of light to your two friends who live on opposite sides of the galaxy (you live in the middle). Ahead of time you tell them that if one of the beams of light is red the other will be blue. So you send the blue beam to your friend on one side and immediately she knows that your other friend is recieving a red beam at the same time. Aha! You say, my friends have now communicated at a speed faster than the speed of light and violated relativity, but no real information has been passed between them. You have told both of them at a normal sub-luminal speed about what you just did and that’s all. (A way of proving there’s no faster than light communication is that you could lie and send them both the same coloured beam of light and they would never know!).

Watching quantum mechanics in action: Researchers create world record laser pulse

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UCF Professor Zenghu Chang from the Department of Physics and the College of Optics and Photonics, led the effort that generated a 67-attosecond pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. The results of his research are published online under Early Posting in the journal Optics Letters.

via Watching quantum mechanics in action: Researchers create world record laser pulse.