Blog Archive: January 1970
The VPN Convergence
On August 1st, 1997 In Technology
What's a VPN? A Virtual Private Network. A misnomer really,
or more of an anacranism. In the old days if you strung two
T1 lines between two sites you had a Private network, or "PN".
Now days if you run a 'tunnel' or encapsulated link between two
sites it forms a 'virtual' T1 or Virtual Private Network.
Lots of people seem to be convinced
VPN Client tools?
On August 1st, 1997 In Technology
The world needs more VPN client tools. It sounds like Cisco and
Ascend are venturing into this world. No doubt others are too.
I use "PPTP" from Microsoft currently for NT systems and "ssh"
and the commercial "F-Secure" product from DataFellows (www.datafellows.com)
for Unix. I really like ssh. I found PPTP to be ok, but it's rather
complex
What happened to August?
On August 1st, 1997 In Technology
You might notice that a rash of these pages appeared out of the
blue, many after the fact. I can blame that on several things.
First, I'm lazy. Two, I wrote up some of them and forgot to
put them up on the web (see #1). Three, I have disk problems
on my Linux box. Four, people who write paragraphs with
numbered sentences should go back and
SS7 and Windows NT
On August 1st, 1997 In Technology
In something akin the "Bride of Frankenstein" I read about someone
porting SS7 software to Windows NT. SS7 is the protocol which
giant phone switches (like the AT&T 5ESS) use to talk to other
phone switches. So, why would you want to connect your NT server
to a giant phone switch with SS7? You wouldn't. But, you might