A Series of Tubes
An independent technology podcast…
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A Series of Tubes #55 –- Extending the LAN over the WAN with VPLSJuly 3rd, 2008Our guest this week on A Series of Tubes is Dr James Kershaw, product manager at junior telco Nextgen Networks. Nextgen is marching to a slightly different drum in its enterprise services: while most carriers have focussed on rolling out all-IP national networks, Nextgen has built a national VPLS (Virtual Private Label Switched) network. In this interview, Dr Kershaw talks about the reasons behind Nextgen’s choice of technology, and why the carrier believes a transparent end-to-end Ethernet LAN makes life easier for its customers. Also on the show this week, we’re joined by Neville James, channels and marketing manager at our sponsor, Nortel Australia-New Zealand. He’s talking about Nortel’s green computing initiatives. A Series of Tubes #54 — AARNet’s astronomical bandwidthJune 26th, 2008On this week’s edition of A Series of Tubes AARNet’s Optical Operations division infrastructure specialist Ivan Phillips joins the show to discuss the networking technology in eVLBI (electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometer) telescope experiments. For the uninitiated, AARNet stands for Australia’s Academic and Research Network. In eVLBI, telescopes separated by long distances (in this case, Parkes, Narrabri, Canberra, China and Japan) are linked together to create a telescope with an effective diameter close to that of the Earth. Such projects need big pipes, with each telescope generating more than half a gigabit of traffic per second. The resulting project doesn’t just help the scientific community; it’s also part of getting Australia involved in major international educational and grid computing projects. As you’ll hear, A Series of Tubes has a new host, Richard Chirgwin. He’s got loads of experience as an analyst and a journalist and really knows his tubes! You can contact Richard with story tips and feedback by e-mail: rchirgwin at ozemail dot com dot au. A Series of Tubes #53 — Orcon CTO Thomas Salmen talks SIP cards at the exchangeJune 12th, 2008Our guest on this week’s edition of A Series of Tubes is the CTO of New Zealand-based ISP Orcon. Orcon is the first ISP in the land of the long white cloud to get access to the incumbent telco’s copper. That means they’ve put in their own DSLAMs, and now, SIP cards. Instead of selling VoIP solutions that require the installation of an ethernet ATA at the customer’s home, Orcon can churn them to VoIP with no change required on the customers’ end. Also on this week’s show we’re joined by Fotios Kotsiopoulos from our sponsor HP ProCurve. This week Fotios joins us to update us on the latest with 10G ethernet. A Series of Tubes #52 — Net neutrality: An interview with with Juniper’s chief strategistMay 29th, 2008In this podcast, A Series of Tubes interviews Judy Beningson, the Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Juniper Networks’ Infrastructure Products Group. As more and more content finds its way online, ISPs are wondering how they can tweak their business models to cope with surging bandwidth demand. One way to help ISPs to remain profitable is to end net neutrality as we know it. But that doesn’t necessarily involve throwing YouTube into the great big Internet “bus lane”, it could just mean getting tricky with content delivery. In this podcast you’ll hear interviews with:
A Series of Tubes #51 — How to destroy the InternetMay 22nd, 2008In this interview Risky Business spoke to Arbor Networks’ Chief Research Officer, Danny McPherson. Danny also serves on the MPLScon Advisory Board, the FCC’s Network Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC) and is active in the network and security operations and research communities. He’s a bizarre hybrid — a twisted split between a security guy and a network guy! In February Danny enjoyed a 15 minutes of fame of sorts when he blogged about a snafu at a Pakistani ISP that saw YouTube knocked offline for two hours. Globally. The Pakistani ISP had been asked by the government to block YouTube. An admin decided to blackhole it with a BGP announce. Unfortunately, routers upstream from the pakistani ISP swallowed the BGP announce as well, and the whole thing propagated around the world until YouTube was completely offline. So in this interview I spoke to Danny about the Internet as critical infrastructure — as you’ll hear, he believes the way the internet address space is configured gives the bad guys a little wiggle room when it comes to routing attacks. A Series of Tubes #50 — Is it what you’ve got or how you use it?May 15th, 2008This week’s edition of A Series of Tubes is sponsored by ProCurve, networking by HP. On this week’s show we tackle the infrastructure question — should we invest truckloads of money in our IP infrastructure? Or should we revolutionise the way we write our applications so they’re more efficient? Independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde joins us to discuss. On this week’s show:
A Series of Tubes #49 — Counterfeit Cisco gear a backdoor for spies?May 1st, 2008This week’s episode of A Series of Tubes is brought to you by ProCurve, networking by HP. On this week’s show we’re looking at the shadowy world of counterfeit Cisco equipment. America’s FBI is worried its bottom-line driven procurement processes mean low-cost, counterfeit equipment is winding up in sensitive US Government networks. It gets worse — the FBI is concerned the counterfeit gear is loaded with back-door software or hardware. Agents are concerned foreign spies could be using these back doors to access critical networks. On this week’s show:
A Series of Tubes #48 — Computing’s greatest hits: The MainframeApril 26th, 2008This week’s edition of A Series of Tubes is available for download, thanks to our sponsor HP ProCurve and hosting partner Vigabyte. Everyone loves to declare the death of the mainframe… but according to this week’s guest, Kevin McIsaac, the true picture is less cut and dry. Some organisations are actually deploying new mainframes at the core of their infrastructure. Who’d have thunk it? On this week’s podcast:
A Series of Tubes #47 — 3Com and Huawei deal post mortemApril 17th, 2008Your weekly networking podcast is available for download, thanks to our sponsor HP ProCurve and hosting partner Vigabyte. On this week’s show:
A Series of Tubes #46 — The Ultimate EscapeApril 10th, 2008Hey hey. A Series of Tubes episode 46 is now available for download! Tubes is sponsored by HP ProCurve and hosted by Vigabyte. This week we spoke to (gasp) a non IT professional about mobile broadband. Mobile device manufacturer i-Mate recently sent five professionals to a house in Byron Bay to see if they could do their jobs remotely using Telstra’s NextG network and i-Mate’s new devices. We spoke to Tamara DiMattina — PR consultant from Melbourne who was one of those chosen to stay in the house. She’s not a tech pro, but chatting to an actual IT user about what mobility means to them proved interesting. The interview is a tad slow to start, but stick with it — it’s worth it! On this week’s show:
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