Networking Most Recent Posts

There's a lot of talk right now in the industry about big data and the business intelligence applications that are being used to wrangle it. However, very few people are talking about the impact that big data can have on the network.

I have been on the road for the past few weeks, last week I was in the Middle East and this week I come to you from Scotland. These places would appear to the outsider as being very different places but not when it comes to IT. One topic that was common throughout most meetings that I attended was on the subject of the insider threat, something getting inside a network and causing a problem.

What stood out to me about The Avengers themselves was how dysfunctional they were as a team early on and how they remedied that quickly enough to save the earth. Here are five key things that we as IT professionals can learn from this team.

Last week I was out in Washington D.C. presenting at Geek Day. It's a trade show and networking event focused on IT professionals (geeks) in both the public and private sectors. As you would imagine, I couldn't resist the opportunity to do some live polling while I had a captive audience.

Capturing packets from computer networks can sometimes sound like an activity reserved for hackers and geeks. Looking at a stream of raw packets is not for the fainthearted, but thankfully there are a number of technologies out there that can make the task easier.

After years of network segregation, the organization where this pilot fish works is finally at a point of consolidation -- but that does mean a few things could be confusing to users.

Over at the Ethergeek blog last week, Josh Stephens had an interesting piece on the challenges of finding experts with data center expertise. Another trend that I see is the centralization of IT staff to main data centers. Gone are the days of having a dedicated IT person at sites which run a number of local services or applications.

This brings its own problems as it can be cost and time prohibitive travelling to these sites to diagnose and fix problems. The good news is that there are a number of technologies out there that can make this task easier.

IT support pilot fish gets a terse message from a network engineer: "Hi, I'm on cap6, unable to 'ping localhost.'" Which, as fish knows, shouldn't be possible.

This pilot fish is working at a level 2 network help desk when a request comes in from a client -- and one of fish's co-workers quickly volunteers to handle it.

In my previous post on the BitTorrent protocol, I took a look at how BitTorrent operates as a very efficient way of downloading and uploading data. For this post I am going to take a look at how you can detect for its presence on a network. There are many reasons why you would want to do this, from investigating DMCA notifications to finding out where all your Internet bandwidth has gone. The three main ways in which I see BitTorrent been used.

Network admin pilot fish at a rapidly growing company gets word that the outfit has outgrown its current facility -- but the new location is going to require some work.

In my previous post on the BitTorrent protocol, I took a look at the main parts of what makes up its infrastructure. For this post I am going to focus on how data is uploaded and downloaded.

The BitTorrent protocol is designed as a very efficient way of sharing data. You start by using your BitTorrent client to prepare the file that you want to share. A number of operations are performed at his point

Working the help desk at a bank, this pilot fish gets a request to set up a PC for the information security officer. Fortunately, there's a spare network jack in the ISO's office. Unfortunately, there's a problem.

I was working behind the scenes at a large tradeshow recently, and I was asked to give a group of executives a tour of the NOC. As I was demonstrating the network management tools, I started getting text messages from the system that we were having wireless issues. Turns out that one of the attendees for the show had a bad Wi-Fi card and everywhere that user roamed it caused the wireless router to spike to 100% CPU and reboot, knocking off all of the other users.

I have been looking for a simple way to see all the devices on a Local Area Network for a long time. Fing, an application for both Android and iOS, seems to be the answer. It's fast, free and extremely useful.