Networking

Financially struggling Nortel Networks filed for Chapter 11 in US bankruptcy court yesterday.

The federal government’s proposed ‘clean feed’ Internet censorship scheme does not account for trends in social networking communities and will easily be circumvented by savvy Gen-Yers, according to a prominent network engineer.

Networks will be the next frontier in energy efficiency if a program kicked off by router maker Juniper Networks and test-equipment vendor Ixia gains a wider following.

NEC is developing a system that can extend the conventional PCI Express interface found in most PCs and servers over standard Ethernet to distances of 2 kilometers or more.

Researchers at Finnish security firm Outpost 24 claim to have discovered a flaw in the Internet Protocol that can disrupt any computer or server. After keeping the flaw quiet for years, the researchers hope that going public will help accelerate the creation of a solution.

If 10Gigabit Ethernet has a problem, it's multiple personalities. 10G over fibre is well established as a network backbone technology, but in past generations it's been Ethernet over copper - and especially telephone-style twisted pair cabling - that has brought the big upsurge in usage and sales.

While universities don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networking. Here's a roundup, in no particular order, of some of the most amazing and colorful projects in the works.

The Internet will get support for IPv6, a more secure domain name system and international characters, during the next couple of years, according to Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

Amazingmail.com tossed its Cisco routers, switches and firewalls for Juniper gear and wound up saving enough in ongoing support costs that the project will pay for itself in eight months.

A summary of new offerings to be introduced at the big network industry conference.

Analyst firm Ovum has released its quarterly results for global optical equipment networking vendors with the preliminary indication that the global optical networking (ON) market topped $US3 billion for the seventh consecutive quarter.

Storage networking company Brocade Communications Systems has agreed to acquire enterprise LAN vendor Foundry Networks for approximately US$3 billion, the companies announced Monday.

Nortel is pursuing development of communications-enabled applications, which combine IT and communications in newfangled application types, and would like to see standards set to provide consistent behaviors.

e-DMZ's Password Auto Repository (PAR) is delivered as a hardware appliance with all the services necessary for it to act as a privileged account password manager. All privileged account passwords are issued based on administratively designed rules. The passwords may be deemed valid for an indefinite life, for finite periods of time or for single purpose activities such as installations, upgrades or configuration changes.