February, 2009 | IPNET

How to Give a Webinar (and Not Look Like an Idiot)

Webinar

Someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “We scheduled a Webinar to show off the important technology the company has developed. And since you know it better than anyone else, we decided that you are the one who should be in front of the camera.”

Lucky you.

Many people would rather visit the dentist or pay taxes than speak publicly. They might even prefer to pay the dentist’s taxes than stand up in front of a crowd. Perhaps this fear of public embarrassment is why so many business professionals are nervous about hosting a Webinar.

Read the full story on networkworld.com…

Riverbed bundles Microsoft Server in its WAN optimization appliances

Networkworld

Riverbed will sell Microsoft’s Windows Server bundled with its WAN optimization devices as a way to simplify purchasing for its customers.

The server will run on the Riverbed Service Platform (RSP), a partition of Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimization appliances that can support five VMware virtual machines per appliance.This would have been possible without the OEM agreement between Riverbed and Microsoft, but customers would have been required to deal with both vendors.

Read the full article on networkworld.com…

WebEx Added to Smartphones at Mobile World Congress

Cisco WebEx became more useful than ever this week with the news that it was being extended to work with a range of business smartphones.

The announcement, at Mobile World Congress, means users will be able to join Cisco WebEx Meeting Center Web and audio conferences on smartphones including the BlackBerry Bold, Curve 8900 and Storm from RIM, the Nokia Eseries and Nseries phones, and the Samsung Blackjack II.

To use, you just launch Cisco WebEx Meeting Center through your smartphone browser and you get integrated audio and Web conferencing over 3G or a combination of 2G and Wi-Fi. You can join scheduled meetings and view presentations, applications and desktops with live annotations.

There is also a nice function on WebEx whereby a host can send meeting invites via Short Message Service and a recipient can join simply by texting ‘1’ back. Cisco WebEx smartphone support starts in April this year.

Read the full post on blogs.cisco.com…

How to monitor IP SLA with free tools

Lately I saw an increasing interest for IP SLA monitor and analyze of the data output. I believe that you already know that you can do IP SLA monitor with a lot of tools from the most expensive ones which include support and assistance to the free ones like MRTG or RRDTOOL. From the statistics that I have, more than 50% of the network engineers interested in this tools have a problem either with the money (low budget or the on and on “we do not have money this year for that investment” ) or making free tools actually work and report accurate data.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from SolarWinds that announce me about their FREE IP SLA monitor tool. Usually I ignore such e-mails as for most of them there is always a catch, but since it was from a company that made me a very good impression over the year by offering exactly what’s specified in the advertisement, I said that I should give it a try. Before I present this to you, let’s make something clear. This is not a commercial post, e.g. post to be pay or another things like that. I do not have time and I don’t want to do such stuff of my blog, but when some product really worth to be tried I think that the development company deserve to be specified.

Since it’s a free tool don’t expect to have all the features of the one which you are paying for it, but compared to the headache of implementing other free tools (MRTG, RRDTOOL) you’ll find this one to be piece of cake. Everybody who has an idea about networking can use this without any problems. Configuration is as simplest as it can be. You have to choose the destination IP or hostname to monitor then pick the monitor service and polish some parameters to your particular network. That’s it! One particular issue to me is that this tool is working only from Windows.

Please have a look below to see how to configure this:

Cisco makes the case for WiMAX at Mobile World Congress

Cisco WiMAX There is a big buzz at Mobile World Congress this year around Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio area networks. This is a radio access technology which Cisco fully supports and which promises to bring much greater speed and bandwidth to mobile networks.

Hang on, though. This is pretty much what was promised with WiMAX last year. So what has happened to 2008’s great hope for high-speed mobile access?

To help clarify the issue, Brett Galloway, Senior Vice President for the Wireless and Security Technology Group at Cisco sat in on a round table hosted by Intel. And the answer, it would seem, is that both have a bright future—although possibly not at the same time.

According to the panel, LTE is still about five years away from production deployment.

Read the full post on blogs.cisco.com…