It was in Data Communications magazine ;-) The switch maker is Berkeley Systems. They licensed NT source and stripped it down (I think the IP stack is one of the things they whacked ;-) to run the switch. With the obvious exception of M$ RRAS, this is AFAIK is the only vendor using NT as a switch or router OS. David Newman Data Communications magazine ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: Wired Q: Embedded NT Author: "Lehrer Neil" <nlehrer@usia.gov> at dcm_smtp Date: 5/14/98 11:04 AM i saw something about a switch maker embedding nt. about layer 4 switches understanding application level info. it was recent, maybe network world, but i can't be sure. ``````` To: nanog@merit.edu From: James Glave <> Hi all, James Glave at Wired News again. This time around I am seeking opinions on behalf of a friend up at Wired (the print magazine) -- concerning embedded NT. I couldn't find any discussion in the nanog archive, so I'm wondering if anoyne here has any experience with, or knowledge of, embedding NT in networking hardware - if that even makes any sense....?
From: Jesse Freund <freund@wired.com> i'm working on a piece about nt-embedded and i have a couple of questions. i'm hoping you might be able to hook me up with a smart network operator or someone else in the know or perhaps you know. basically, i'm curious why the hell someone would want a version of nt embedded in a switch or router? and who provides the custom solutions nt-embedded is meant to replace?
Thanks, all! jtg James Glave, Senior Technology Writer Wired News http://www.wired.com (415) 276-8430 Unstoppable Force of the Week: "Gettin' jiggy wit' it!" Regards +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Neil Lehrer + U.S. Information Agency + Networks and Systems Support Division + + voice 202 619-0903 + fax 202 619-3883 + internet nlehrer@usia.gov + + "oh what a tangled net we weave + when we seek to retrieve." + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
dnewman@data.com wrote:
It was in Data Communications magazine ;-)
The switch maker is Berkeley Systems. They licensed NT source and stripped it down (I think the IP stack is one of the things they whacked ;-) to run the switch. With the obvious exception of M$ RRAS, this is AFAIK is the only vendor using NT as a switch or router OS.
I have to ask WHY!? Surly it would be far nicer to download the Linux source from somewhere since it already has pretty decent networking code and use that? What is the point of putting NT on anything but, well, but somebody's workstation or a server at a push? We already have tons of memory in our routers without having to add any more ;-) -- Leigh Porter
Leigh Porter wrote:
I have to ask WHY!? Surly it would be far nicer to download the Linux source from somewhere since it already has pretty decent networking code and use that?
What is the point of putting NT on anything but, well, but somebody's workstation or a server at a push? We already have tons of memory in our routers without having to add any more ;-)
The reason is simple. While we sit here bitching about this "minor" issue and that "minor" issue, like the state of the net, the S&M (Sales and Marketing, but sometimes I wonder) people are out there from Mickeysoft promoting the "No one ever got fired for buying M$" message. NT is a >corporate< product. This, in my view, means that you don't care if it works as long as you can hire someone else to fix it and your budget is maintained. Hell, if we started using "free" products, we wouldn't have license fees to pay and my budget to run a 100 node NT network would disappear. Budgets = Power in that sad world. A new vendor on the market will us "Our product runs embedded NT." as a plus in a sales pitch. Note the full stop. Their target audience believe them. A different vendor says "Our product runs on xBSD/Linux ..." and then has to spend the next hour justifying why theis selection is a valid one. Oh, yeah. I intend to do something about it. In my own little way. After all, someone has to combat M$ thinking they can buy the ISP marketplace. Regards, -- Peter Galbavy @ Home in Wonderland http://www.wonderland.org/ http://www.whirl-y-gig.org.uk/ http://www.demon.net Be remembered not for your final destination, but for your journey.
You are wrong a little. The difference is: - if you use MS and it don't work, your boss blame to BILL GATES. - if you use FreeBSD (or Linux, through FreeBSD is better for the networking) and it don't work, your boss blame _guess, who? - YOU_ . That's a matter.
The reason is simple. While we sit here bitching about this "minor" issue and that "minor" issue, like the state of the net, the S&M (Sales and Marketing, but sometimes I wonder) people are out there from Mickeysoft promoting the "No one ever got fired for buying M$" message. NT is a >corporate< product. This, in my view, means that you don't care if it works as long as you can hire someone else to fix it and your budget is maintained. Hell, if we started using "free" products, we wouldn't have license fees to pay and my budget to run a 100 node NT network would disappear. Budgets = Power in that sad world.
...
On Mon, 25 May 1998, Alex P. Rudnev wrote:
You are wrong a little. The difference is:
- if you use MS and it don't work, your boss blame to BILL GATES.
- if you use FreeBSD (or Linux, through FreeBSD is better for the networking) and it don't work, your boss blame _guess, who? - YOU_ .
No, your boss will blame you in -both- cases, because you chose the final problem solution. It doesn't matter if the core cause was faulty software, poor installation, or a compatibility issue: in any case, it was -your- responsibility to be aware of the problems before putting a live system in place. You, however, can either: a) blame Bill Gates/Linus Torvalds/Theo De Raadt/etc., in which case you probably won't have a job for long, since passing the buck doesn't keep you employed very long. b) fix the problem, either by adding/upgrading software (the only real NT way), or by tracking down the source of the problem and fixing it yourself. The "your boss will be mad if something goes wrong" argument is FUD, frankly. If a solution you put together goes bad, it won't matter what you built it on...it's still -your- solution. And what does any of this have to do with NANOG anyway? -- -------------------. emarshal at logic.net .--------------------------------- Edward S. Marshall `-----------------------' http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/ Linux labyrinth 2.1.101 #2 SMP Sun May 10 22:34:20 GMT 1998 i586 unknown 10:35am up 4 days, 11:40, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.24, 0.22
Edward S. Marshall wrote:
On Mon, 25 May 1998, Alex P. Rudnev wrote:
You are wrong a little. The difference is:
- if you use MS and it don't work, your boss blame to BILL GATES.
- if you use FreeBSD (or Linux, through FreeBSD is better for the networking) and it don't work, your boss blame _guess, who? - YOU_ .
No, your boss will blame you in -both- cases, because you chose the final problem solution. It doesn't matter if the core cause was faulty software, poor installation, or a compatibility issue: in any case, it was -your- responsibility to be aware of the problems before putting a live system in place.
If _YOUR_ project is a total failure, sure, _YOU_ get blamed and _YOU_ get fired. Even if you used a MS OS, it doesn't matter because there are so many other things that use some MS OS and they "work" (this is what your boss "knows"). Same thing applied a couple decades ago with mainframes and IBM (been there, done that). But I think the point applies to the marginal cases. If there are just a few little glitches, such as the machine(s) crash a little too often, or some incompatibility exists with some other system or application, then in those cases I believe management will be more willing to shift the blame from _YOU_ to the vendor. Or more accurately, they will be more open minded to your argument about who to blame, since the issue isn't a total project failure. But it will be proportional to their viewpoint of how the systems work. To many managers, these non-vendor systems are just "playthings" that are "incomplete" and "unsupported". I've actually gotten a response from one manager, when I told him I run Linux at home, that he once used CP/M. If your project uses a vendor supported OS, management's frequent view is that if the problem can in fact be pinpointed to the OS, then all they need to do is just get the vendor on the phone, and voila, fixed! Of course life isn't always like that. The more technically inclined a person is, the less likely they are going to get working solutions from the vendor tech support, principly because they will be able to solve more truly solvable cases on their own. The person who is nearly always able to get a quick solution from a vendor probably isn't doing as well as they should. But managers generally don't see this. And even if you can absolutely prove that a project failed due to the choice of OS that the manager made, you will still be fired. He needs someone to blame so he doesn't get fired by his boss. Office politics! -- Phil Howard | stop4ads@anyplace.net eat9this@dumb7ads.net stop7ads@spam4mer.net phil | eat78me0@nowhere3.org no0spam2@lame1ads.com die5spam@spam2mer.com at | eat45me8@no9where.org end3it81@spam2mer.org end2ads0@noplace7.edu ipal | stop2334@dumbads3.net stop7123@no0place.com ads5suck@anywhere.edu dot | no41ads2@s9p3a9m8.edu stop3it4@spammer6.edu blow5me4@spammer4.com net | no7spam5@spam8mer.edu crash312@spammer8.org no9way71@spammer5.org
On 25-May-98 Alex P. Rudnev wrote:
You are wrong a little. The difference is:
- if you use MS and it don't work, your boss blame to BILL GATES.
- if you use FreeBSD (or Linux, through FreeBSD is better for the networking) and it don't work, your boss blame _guess, who? - YOU_ .
That's a matter.
No, its not a matter. Either : 1- Educate your boss. 2- Set things up such that the "other-ware" or "free-ware" _will_ work. Our boss has us jumping into NT, and still blames _us_ when it goes t$#s up. I dont even give him a chance with the unix boxes anymore. Morgan ----------------------------------------- Morgan Sarges Voice Phone: 605-338-8334 blip@morgan.iw.net Fax: 605-335-3942 System Administrator Dakota Telecommunications Group Network Operations Center Philadelphia is not dull -- it just seems so because it is next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. PGP Public Key block available upon request. ------------------------------------------
At 4:47 AM -0400 5/25/98, Peter Galbavy wrote:
from Mickeysoft promoting the "No one ever got fired for buying M$" message. NT is a >corporate< product. This, in my view, means that
This strategy worked fairly well for IBM selling mainframes. Its the way to sell to morons. They aren't going to understand the technology well enough to make an informed, intelligent choice, so you convince them they will be "safe" buying your product. Of course, IBM was selling to business managers who didn't know anything about computers. Does Microsoft think they will be selling this kind of networking gear to people who don't know anything about networks? (They've made such mistakes before. MS Bob comes to mind, here) Somehow, I think networking is and will remain hard enough that there won't be very many such idiots in the networking marketplace. I concede that this might be an unreasonable expectation however. --Dean ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP/DCE http://www.av8.com We Make IT Fly! (617)242-3091 x246 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
At 09:59 PM 5/25/98 -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
Somehow, I think networking is and will remain hard enough that there won't be very many such idiots in the networking marketplace. I concede that this might be an unreasonable expectation however.
This is already demostrobly wrong. Look at the Fortune 500 - or any group of "large corporations" - and see who makes these type of decitions. I wouldn't hesitate to give you 10 to 1 odds that well over half of these individuals couldn't tell ethernet from token ring. Now, the good ones have "smart" people helping them, making recomendations or some such, but they still make the final decision. And a lot of times the marketing/sales guy can get in and make their mind up for them before a recomendation is made. Or the sales guy plays golf with the president or something and does the deal that way - with absolutely zero technical input. Marketing is designed to let the clueless user think he knows what he's talking about, that he's covered all the bases, and that he understands the technology. All while touting the particular product's strengths and completely ignoring its weaknesses. This makes it hard for a technical person to explain why the manager is making a bad decision - he thinks he knows enough to make it himself 'cause the sales guy told him all he needs to know. Too many times have I tried to explain why something was bad to someone in "authority", only to have them pick the product against which I was recommending because they were a bigger company or had more history or some other factor which has nothing to do with technical competence. Oh, and price comes to mind too. ;) BTW, this does not mean there are not any good managers out there. Just that there are more than enough bad ones to make a company very successful off their incompetence.
--Dean
TTFN, patrick ************************************************************** Patrick W. Gilmore voice: +1-650-482-2840 Director of Operations, CCIE #2983 fax: +1-650-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net "Tomorrow's Performance.... Today" **************************************************************
A unnamed company runs a ccMail infrastructure with ~3,000 mail accounts and at least ~2,000 of those on a Novell 4.11 machine on a Pentium 166. That box can handle ~1,700 concurrent users with no problem. You can figure the cost, we could put that together with spare parts nearly! It WILL be replaced with MS Exchange. Cost to create the same infrastructure? About 1.2million and ~8 boxes including a DEC Alpha ~300-500mhz. A Linux/FreeBSD with IMAP,SMTP,LDAP etc. or even Netscape solution would be much cheaper too ;-) Its not even a question. Its been a corporate directive. Go figure. I gave up on common sense in corporate America a long time ago! On Mon, May 25, 1998 at 08:03:28PM -0700, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
At 09:59 PM 5/25/98 -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
Somehow, I think networking is and will remain hard enough that there won't be very many such idiots in the networking marketplace. I concede that this might be an unreasonable expectation however.
This is already demostrobly wrong. Look at the Fortune 500 - or any group of "large corporations" - and see who makes these type of decitions. I wouldn't hesitate to give you 10 to 1 odds that well over half of these individuals couldn't tell ethernet from token ring.
Now, the good ones have "smart" people helping them, making recomendations or some such, but they still make the final decision. And a lot of times the marketing/sales guy can get in and make their mind up for them before a recomendation is made. Or the sales guy plays golf with the president or something and does the deal that way - with absolutely zero technical input.
participants (10)
-
Alex P. Rudnev -
Dean Anderson -
dnewman＠data.com -
Edward S. Marshall -
Jonathan Bradshaw -
Leigh Porter -
Morgan Sarges -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Peter Galbavy -
Phil Howard