IT Manager's Journal

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

American Fiber Systems (AFS), with headquarters in Rochester, NY, provides fiber optic network services directly to enterprises and to carrier resellers. Bill Ciminelli, vice president of network development and services for AFS, noticed that internal communications were becoming increasingly difficult because the number of mobile company workers like field technicians and salespeople was growing so fast. With an old-fashioned voice messaging system separate from email and other collaboration tools, AFS workers had to manage communications from cell phones, laptops, office workstations, and company phones. Ciminelli began looking for a solution that would move AFS into the 21st century. To his surprise, he found it in Asterisk, an open source product.

Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the application often credited with the introduction of cryptography to the masses, recently announced his intent to provide PGP-like software to ensure the privacy of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. VoIP, or Internet telephony, enables the routing of voice conversations over IP networks (e.g. the Internet) and is currently offered for use through newer companies, such as Vonage and Lingo (and some not-so-new companies, like Verizon and Comcast). You'd be well within your rights to ask, "If VoIP isn't currently secure, how can it be offered to companies and individuals as a legitimate service? And if it is secure, why all the fuss?"

Broadband over power lines has been in the news again recently. At one time BPL was seen as the best way to bring affordable Internet access to poor and rural America: an answer to the technology gap between the haves and the have-nots. Now, thanks primarily to boosters like Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, Powell's successor at the FCC, it's back for another go at the broadband access market. But BPL remains a flawed and controversial technology. Proponents in Texas are pushing a pro-BPL bill past confused legislators in Austin at the same time their counterparts in Washington, D.C., are considering a measure to rescind "BPL-friendly" rule changes made at the FCC last fall.

Mark Taylor believes that OpenLDAP is the catalyst that will finally make open source fully enterprise-ready. And he's willing to stake his business on it.

Taylor is founder and CEO of Sirius IT. Based in the United Kingdom but focusing on all of Europe, Sirius provides training, deployment and support for open source technology in the enterprise. Its clients include government entities and large corporations such as Pepsi, Pentax, Toyota, and the Make A Wish Foundation.

Wouldn't it be nice, at your next presentation, to let audience members download your "customized for this event" sales brochure, contact information, and product spec sheets directly into their wireless-enabled laptops? By using Linux software on your presentation machine and a wireless access point you can build a powerful new way to serve your audience, regardless of whether their client machines run Windows, Linux, or Mac OS.

Aether Systems

Maryland-based Aether Systems delivers wireless and mobile data solutions built on Aether Fusion, the company's standards-based platform that allows for secure, reliable extension of critical information to virtually any wireless or mobile environment.

LAS VEGAS -- Now that we take such futuristic things as high-definition video, broadband Internet, streaming audio, wireless networking, and dozens of other IT victories for granted in today's connected world, the next step is how companies are now using combinations of these in new products. This year's International Consumer Electronics Show, which first showed the VCR in 1970, the CD player in 1981, and the DVD in 1996, is all about how current technologies are teaming up to create new items. And we found some good examples of how these are going to play out in the next few years.

At first glance, the news item earlier this week didn't look that significant: NTT DoCoMo, the huge Japanese telecom, announced it will urge its handset suppliers to build Linux-based phones. So? Lots of companies urge other companies to do things every day. Big deal.