Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 25th May 2012 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Corporate: Brocade Embraces Software-Defined Ne… | Brocade Communities – Brocade outlines their SDN/OpenFlow strategy in this post. I’m not sure I understand it yet and need to spend some more time researching before I’m sure that I have got it right.

So You Want to Participate in the IETF… – Russ White blogs at the Packet Pushers about getting involved with the IETF ….

But how do you actually go about getting involved?
Start by understanding the process the IETF uses to build documents.
Then pick a working group, subscribe to the mailing list, read the documents, and participate.
It really is that simple.

BYOD Policies vs. the Realities of Corporate IT – Network Computing – My latest article at Network Computing :

The tension between consumer usage and corporate purpose is a massive gulf of expectation deficit. Consumer technology such as Apple’s iPhone and Google Android can be truly useful, and a delight to use.

The corporate IT of today is simply not able to deliver the promise already offered by consumer technology. The IT department will hold back productivity and prevent effective use of tools because of good corporate policies–policies that are based on sound, old-fashioned reasons rooted in law and good corporate governance.

And users are going to hate us for it.

Why I Dislike Keynotes | The Networking Nerd – Tom talks about the poor quality of Keynote presentations in recent years

I don’t like keynote addresses.

Nope. None of them. I’m not singling anyone out here. I don’t like the idea of a keynote, period. At most of the conferences and Tech Field Day events that I attend, we have a small mix of people listening to presentations and giving honest and real-time feedback about what they are hearing. It’s not all that dissimilar from an honors class in college. Smaller groups that debate topics and ask deeper, probing questions that might not be as welcome in a larger class.

When at events I don’t bother with keynotes any more either. They are usually lectures by CEOs or CTO that are banging their own agenda which is boring.

The Last of the Dinosaurs? –

VMAX and the like are the ‘Big Iron’ of the storage world; they are the choice of the lazy architect, the infrastructure patterns that they support are incredibly well understood and text-book but do they really support Cloud-like infrastructures going forward?

Storagebod continues to ask good hard questions and come up with good answers. This one considers whether EMC is innovating or “not dying”.

Nmap 6 Release Notes – NMAP 6 – the scanning tool of choice. Now with more features and goodness. As discussed in Packet Pushers Show 96 – Hack the Hackers where we talked with Fyodor who the project lead.

Flash Changed My Life – Storagebod – Storagebod ( aka Martin Glassborow) make a great point about how flash has changed his personal computing experience.

But flash has made a big difference to the way that I use my personal machines and if I was going to deploy flash in a way that would make the largest material difference to my user-base, I would probably put it in their desktops.

Speed results in faster boot times which means turning off a computer more often. Or keeping documents open for weeks at a time (probably Mac OSX feature to automatically reopen documents). Nice reflection on the changes that are happening.

Time To Say Goodbye To Static IPs – Network Computing – Timeless advice that is more relevant now that IPv6 is creeping in.

Frankly, the IP address assigned to a host shouldn’t matter. What’s more important and useful to IT is the host name: You can decouple a name, which is portable, from an IP address, which may not be. You want to connect your application to database.example. com, not 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334.

The days of memorising the IP addresses in your network are over. You can’t memorise a large number of IPv6 addresses. Why would you even want to ?

Who Will Support SMB 3.0, and Which Features Will They Support? – @SFoskett – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat – So Microsoft’s CIFS protocol is simply crud. So bad it’s not funny anymore. The protocol is inefficient, faulty, and slow. So some of the billions of dollors of licensing fees has been spent on a new SMB protocol which Stephen Foskett outlines the case to believe that Microsoft is not a complete bunch of losers

Naysayers may point to previous Microsoft initiatives that failed to gain traction, but I think SMB 3.0 has a lot going for it. Microsoft’s openness with documentation and testing is a positive sign, as are commitments from major vendors like EMC, NetApp, and Samba. Add in the discontent with CIFS and existing work to implement SMB 2.0 and 2.1, and I expect widespread availability of at least some of the features of SMB 3.0 around the same time that Windows Server 2012 is released this summer.