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By November 1st, 2009, underCisco AP 500 Series Wireless Access Points
By December 28th, 2009, underCisco AP 500 Series Wireless Access Points
The Cisco AP 541N is an 802.11n dual-band clustering access point built for small businesses. The clustering capability makes it easy to set up, configure, and manage a growing wireless network. You can deploy multiple access points and push a single configuration to all the devices within the cluster, managing your wireless network as a single system without worrying about interference between access points, and without having to configure each access point as a separate device.
The Cisco AP 541N is a versatile, high-performance wireless solution that supports virtually any wireless application your business requires, including mobile data, voice over wireless LAN, wireless video monitoring, and highly secure guest access. It can be used as a standalone access point in small wireless environments or deployed as part of a larger data and communications network, such as the Cisco Smart Business Communication System (SBCS).
Designed to integrate with other solutions in the Cisco Small Business Pro Series, it makes even advanced wireless and communications applications easy to install, configure, and support.
Cisco AP 541N Wireless Access Points features:
Connectivity: Now employees can securely access network resources from places that were previously out of range. The reach and signal quality of Cisco Wireless Access Points go beyond that of a standard wireless connection so you can provide stronger connections from further away.
Security: Standards and encryption protocols keep Cisco Wireless Access Points just as secure as a wired network.
Performance: Cisco Small Business Wireless Access Points offer the fastest speeds possible with expanded range and coverage–a transparent extension of your wired network.
Ease-to-Use: Web-based configuration tools make it easy for you to install the access point and set up your network devices. Getting your business online with your new Cisco device isn’t a complex process at all.
Clustering Technology: Simplifies wireless deployments by creating a single point of administration for multiple access points. Clustering technology replicates a configuration, pushes it out to other access points, and continuously manages the frequency channels for each device, reducing network interface.
Superior Performance: Gigabit Ethernet LAN interface for higher throughput. Wireless radio complies with 802.11n wireless technology, using MIMO technology to enhance network coverage, capacity, and throughput for data and multimedia applications, while allowing for backward compatibility with a, b, and g clients.
Robust Security: Supports business-class security encryptions (WPA2, 802.1x supplicant) and authentication for client compatibility, MAC address authentication, client isolation, and rogue access point detection.
Voice Roaming: Allowing for client fast roaming while maintaining good voice quality with 802.11i pre-authenticated standards.
Power Options: Uses both standard AC power and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), simplifying installations in locations such as drop ceilings where power outlets may not be accessible.
Models & Key Features:
Clustering technology for a single point of administration for multiple access points
Gigabit Ethernet LAN interface for higher throughput
802.11n compliance
Dual band user selection for 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz
Supports business-class security encryptions (WPA2, 802.1x supplicant)
Fluke Networks Completes Acquisition of AirMagnet
By November 17th, 2009, underFluke Networks Completes Acquisition of AirMagnet
EVERETT, Wash., August 26, 2009 — Fluke Networks, the leader in network installation, certification, testing, monitoring and analysis, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of AirMagnet, a leader in performance, security and compliance solutions for wireless LANs.
The acquisition of AirMagnet is expected to create a global leader in the fast growing area of Wi-Fi testing and security and should further strengthen Fluke Networks’ worldwide leadership in test and analysis for networks, regardless of media type. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
About AirMagnet Inc.
AirMagnet Inc. is the leader in security, performance and compliance solutions for wireless LANs. The company’s innovative products include AirMagnet Enterprise, the leading 24×7 WLAN security and performance management solution, and AirMagnet WiFi Analyzer — which is known as the “de facto tool for wireless LAN troubleshooting and analysis.” Other products provide WLAN site survey and design, RF interference detection, remote diagnostics, and the world’s first voice over WiFi analysis solution. AirMagnet has more than 8,500 customers worldwide, including 75 of the Fortune 100. The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.AirMagnet.com.
About Fluke Networks
Fluke Networks provides innovative solutions for the installation and certification, testing, monitoring and analysis of copper, fiber and wireless networks used by enterprises and telecommunications carriers. The company’s comprehensive line of Network SuperVision™ Solutions provide network installers, owners, and maintainers with superior vision, combining speed, accuracy and ease of use to optimize network performance. Headquartered in Everett, Washington, the company distributes its products in more than 50 countries. More information can be found by visiting Fluke Networks’ Web site at: www.flukenetworks.com or by calling (800) 283-5853.
Apple’s Snow Leopard: A flurry of changes
By November 1st, 2009, underApple’s Snow Leopard: A flurry of changes
By admin August 19th, 2009
According to rumors, the release of Mac OS X 10.6, Apple’s operating system also known as Snow Leopard, might arrive a bit early. Though Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June that Snow Leopard would hit stores in September, tech blogs became overly excited when it was whispered that it might be ready to debut on or about August 28.
How much does it matter that it could arrive five whole days before September officially begins? It doesn’t. Regardless of when the operating system ships, here’s what to expect from Snow Leopard, and why it might matter to you.
What’s the difference between Snow Leopard and Leopard?
First thing to know: This is not a complete overhaul of Mac OS X. Rather, it’s a series of small to medium-sized improvements, what Apple calls “refinements.” Much of the new shine to OS X 10.6 comes from changes that are under the surface, possibly not obvious to the unobservant. But Apple does say that the improvements make the overall OS much faster, including a 45-percent faster installation than the previous version of the operating system, OS X 10.5, or Leopard. Apple is also promising faster boot times, quicker shut down, a speedier process when joining wireless networks, and faster backups to Time Machine. And it’s not just quicker, Apple says, it’s lighter: Upon install it frees up 6GB of space.
Specific applications have been tinkered with as well, with a lot of attention focused on Quicktime, Expose, and a shiny new Safari 4 browser, which was released in June. For more on that, see here.
Quicktime gets a mysterious new version number, and is now called Quicktime X. It’s a bit slicker, and the new interface appears similar to the iPhone’s media player. The real change is that many features that were previously in the Pro version of Quicktime are now in the free version. You will be able to edit video inside QuickTime using a video timeline ribbon that appears along the bottom of the screen. And there will be fewer steps involved in video uploading. You don’t have to worry about file formats–Quicktime will do any necessary conversion and upload directly to video-hosting sites or MobileMe, Apple’s subscription service that syncs personal files on any of its devices. Apple promises it will take just one click to record audio or video (on a Mac’s built-in mic or camera) with the new Quicktime. It will also support HTTP streaming of a wider variety of file formats (like h.264 and AAC). It’s a feature that many competing media players have long offered, and it automatically adjusts the playback bit rate according to what the connection can handle. It also means you can stream video or audio through more firewalls.
Expose, an operating system UI feature for organizing open application windows, or just the windows from a particular application currently running, gets tweaked a bit too. In Snow Leopard, Expose is integrated with app icons in the dock, which cuts out the need to first switch to the specific application you want before activating Expose to see its open windows. It also means you don’t have to use a keyboard, or use a trackpad gesture to call it up. Clicking and holding an app’s icon will bring all windows open that are associated with that program to the front.
What’s the one killer feature worth upgrading for?
Many people will probably consider support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 the most important new feature of Snow Leopard. Improved Exchange support will be integrated into Mail, iCal, and Address Book in Snow Leopard, which means e-mail, calendar appointments, to-do lists, and contacts from Outlook will be viewable on your personal calendar, mail, and address books. It also allows things like dragging and dropping contacts into iCal to schedule meetings, and your Mac will be able to discover time conflicts between personal and work calendars and change the meeting time and location.
Related: Microsoft is improving its Exchange support for the Mac too. This week Microsoft said that Outlook for Mac will replace Entourage, the current e-mail and calendar program in the Mac Office suite. Although it will still differ from the Windows version of Outlook, it will add support for more Exchange features, such as public folders and rights management features.
How much?
Apple surprised people by putting the price to upgrade to Snow Leopard at a very attractive $29 for a single license, and $49 for a five-user family pack. But there’s a catch: you have to already have Leopard installed to pay those prices. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you’ll have to pay $169, which includes an upgrade to 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). For a 5-user family pack license, it’ll cost $229. And Snow Leopard is only compatible with Macs containing Intel chips. On the OS front, Leopard is the end of the line for PowerPC Mac owners.
Is it worth upgrading right away, or should I wait?
Some people are fans of waiting until the first update, the 0.1 release, which tends to correct any of the immediate issues that inevitably pop up when a new operating system is released to the public. Some who attempted to upgrade to the first version of Leopard ran into trouble after the software was installed, and when they attempted to restart their machines a blue screen would appear instead. But it appeared to hinge on a specific piece of third-party software many had installed that was out of date. The majority had a smooth transition to Leopard.
Overall, we think this will be a worthwhile upgrade if the speed claims turn out to be true. Another way of looking at is that for the price of the Quicktime to Quicktime Pro upgrade, you get most of the Quicktime Pro features plus a newly tweaked core OS. We think it’s a good deal for Apple OS X 10.5 users.
When will it be available?
So far, Apple has said only “September.” Recent rumors have indicated it might be ready earlier than that, but it’s mid-August now, so that’s mostly inconsequential. No matter what, it’s going to be available before Windows 7 is set to roll out on October 22. When it’s available, we’ll be sure to let you know.
Cisco wireless LANs at risk of attack
By November 1st, 2009, underCisco wireless LANs at risk of attack
By admin August 25th, 2009, under Cisco wireless LANs at risk of attack
Cisco Systems wireless local area network equipment used by many corporations around the world is at risk of being used in denial-of-service attacks and data theft, according to a company that offers protection for WLANs.
Researchers at AirMagnet, which makes intrusion-detection systems for WLANs, discovered the vulnerability, which affects all lightweight Cisco wireless access points, as well as the exploit that could be used against networks that have the Over-the-Air-Provisioning (OTAP) feature turned on.
“We found it in our labs,” Wade Williamson, director of product management at AirMagnet, said on Monday. “We don’t know about it being exploited in the wild.”
Basically, the Cisco access points generate an unencrypted multicast data frame that is sent over the air and includes unencrypted data like the MAC address and the IP address of the wireless controller, as well as some configuration options, he said. The controller is used to manage the access points.
With that information, someone listening to the network could easily find the internal addresses of the WLAN controllers in the network and potentially target them with a denial-of-service attack, Williamson said.
“Someone out in the parking lot or a neighbor can look at the packets and see information about the controller on the wired side,” he said. “This is giving anybody that’s listening to the environment some pretty detailed information about the wired network that we want to keep protected.”
If an access point has the OTAP enabled, the wireless LAN is also at risk of a “skyjack” exploit, Williamson said. With the OTAP feature enabled, a newly deployed Cisco access point will listen to the multicast data being broadcast to find the address of its nearest controller.
However, the access point could end up connecting to an outside controller if it hears multicast data from that network instead, and thus it would be under someone else’s control, he said.
Someone could skyjack a corporation’s access point and “use the wireless LAN to create a wired path into your network,” Williamson said.
AirMagnet has informed Cisco about the problems and Cisco is working on a solution, Williamson said.
“As a matter of policy, Cisco takes security vulnerabilities very seriously and we continue to take active measures to safeguard the security and reliability of our equipment,” a Cisco spokesperson said.
“Our standard practice is to issue public Security Advisories or other appropriate communications that include corrective measures so customers can address any issues,” he said. “For that reason we do not provide comment on specific vulnerabilities until they have been publicly reported, consistent with our well-established disclosure process.”
Cisco has 65 percent to 70 percent of the install base for wireless LANs, according to Stan Schatt, security practice director at ABI Research.
“What this really shows is that more and more companies have to have 7/24 monitoring of their LANs,” he said. “They can’t just periodically walk around the facility with a laptop and check to see if there’s a problem.”
An attack on a wireless LAN would be particularly dangerous for hospitals, which are increasingly moving critical apps onto the network for use by doctors and nurses with Wi-Fi-enabled handhelds, Schatt said. “A denial-of-service attack could impact mission critical phone systems,” he said.
To mitigate against any attacks, Cisco customers should disable the OTAP feature and use a separate intrusion detection system that can detect whether someone is snooping on the network, as well as monitor that all access points on a network are authorized, AirMagnet said.
Energy Department eyes superfast Ethernet
By November 1st, 2009, underEnergy Department eyes superfast Ethernet
By admin August 25th, 2009, under Energy Department eyes superfast Ethernet
Scientists will collaborate with as-yet-unnamed hardware and software vendors to develop a prototype 100Gbps Ethernet network, which will be used to connect U.S. Department of Energy supercomputer centers.
The aim is to develop a network capable of handling 1Tb (terabit) per second, according to Michael Strayer, head of the Department of Energy’s office of advanced scientific computing research.
“This network will serve as a pilot for a future network-wide deployment of 100Gbps Ethernet in research and commercial networks, and represents a major step toward the DOE’s vision of a 1Tb–1,000 times faster than 1Gb–network interconnecting DOE Office of Science supercomputer centers,” Strayer was quoted as saying in a statement.
The network will be used by scientists to share data and research in such areas as climate-change modeling, and for collaborative projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. Businesses will benefit as 10Gbps and 1Gbps networks will become more affordable, said the statement.
Ethernet networks normally run at either 100Mbps or 1Gbps, while the standard for the fastest is 40Gbps. Scientists working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will undertake research into the high-speed Ethernet project, which is called the Advanced Networking Initiative.
The U.S. government has pumped millions of dollars into the project. The Energy Department’s ESnet, formally known as the Energy Sciences Network, announced Monday that it had received $62 million in funding.
ESnet, which is run from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will put some of the money into new jobs for network and software engineers at Berkeley Lab. However, the bulk of the cash will be used to buy networking equipment and services from providers adjudged to have the necessary infrastructure to support 100Gbps technology.
The funding was allocated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package enacted by the Obama administration, designed to aid U.S. economic recovery during the global financial downturn.