Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Antispam proposals advance in the IETF

Once again the battle between SPF and SenderID is working its way through the IETF. Nice overview article at News.com about it. I think SPF will get wide support given how easy it is to set up and run with little to no changes required to a network. SenderID will take a lot more work to get widespread adoption. It has another mark against it being sponsored by Microsoft (which is a shame in many ways) and by them having patent issues with the proposed standard.

I personally think the combination of SPF and DomainKeys will be what most folks go for. DomainKeys is clean, does not have any patent issues that I am aware of and is currently supported by Yahoo! and Google already in addition to making it through the first rounds of the IETF. Either way, I think every Service Provider in the world is going to do both of these for two reasons. First is to reduce the amount of UCE (SPAM) on their networks (cost savings) and second is because it is difficult to run and administer all these solutions as a SMB owner or even the small tech shops that support them. The Service Providers want it to be difficult to run MTA's and DNS on a network, that way you will pay the fees to use their solutions. A win-win as far as they are concerned. Oh, and they can really mess up your day if they refuse to do reverse DNS delegation with you and you are running an MTA. So much for the openness of the Internet!

Bigger enterprise groups will continue to run their own infrastructure since they will have the staff and expertise to support it. Something to think about.
- Ed

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Cisco Networkers 2005

I got to attend three days of Cisco Networkers in Las Vegas. If you do any work with Cisco products and would like to find out what is really going on within Cisco this is the only place to be. Cisco always does a great job with facilities and the presentation sessions were excellent for the most part. It looks like it is going to be in Las Vegas again next year in June. Hope to see you there!
- Ed

Thursday, June 16, 2005

NetApp buys Decru

I found this news interesting. The reason why is that Decru is only one of two crypto on the fly storage protection companies I know of, the other being NeoScale. I don't know if other vendors will still be recommending Decru given the situation but I would not be surprised to see a bidding war for NeoScale now from other storage vendors. Something to keep an eye on.
- Ed

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Windows SharePoint

Kern Sutton gave a great overview of the Windows SharePoint product this evening at the SFNTUG meeting. If you want you can install WSS on your Windows 2003 Server and get it up and running very quickly. It is a free download and is available here. If you are looking to build a quick, functional intranet site this is definitely the quickest and cheapest method if you already have Windows 2003 Server or Windows Small Business Server. Overall, Microsoft seems to have a hidden gem in SharePoint that folks are finally catching onto.
- Ed

Monday, June 06, 2005

Apple switching to Intel? Why not AMD?

Well, Apple has moved to Intel's x86 platform. I personally don't get why they didn't jump on with AMD who already has a 64bit mobile processor. Slashdot has all the digs on it so head over there for the thread.
Now Apple is a true software company (technically they were a hardware company before due to all the custom hardware development). They get to go head to head with Microsoft and also now have to buy chips from Intel who sells to folks like Dell, HP, Toshiba, IBM, and others who buy more chips in a month then Apple all year. I don't know if this is brilliant or suicide. Good luck Apple, you have a rocking OS.
- Ed