Stories about: Juniper

The Cisco hacking scene has been pretty quiet for the past three years, but at this week's Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, there's going to be a little noise.

Nearly a month after a critical flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System was first reported, vendors of some of the most widely used firewall software are scrambling to fix a problem that can essentially undo part of the patches that address this bug.

Once upon a time, using open-source servers and applications for business was frowned upon in many circles. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find any sizeable infrastructure that doesn't leverage open-source code in some form or another, be it a few MySQL databases, Apache on the Web servers, or a pile of Perl, PHP, Ruby, or Python applications holding things together.

A networking industry exec has challenged Juniper to post its operating system source code on the Internet, and stop hiding behind legalese and paperwork.

Juniper Networks has announced a Partner Solution Development Platform (PSDP) allowing customers and partners to develop specialized applications on its JUNOS operating system.

A top Microsoft executive promoted the company's licensing of network security protocols at the Interop trade show on Wednesday, but not before taking time out during a keynote address to defend the company's patent licensing program for open-source software.

Late at night, a system administrator performed a routine check of a crashed server, one of 48 systems comprising a major online infrastructure that generated about US$4 million per month in revenue. He was a bit surprised that the system had gone down, as it had been humming for months without any indication of being prone to crashing. The check uncovered three encrypted files. The administrator called on MANDIANT to analyse them.

Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? We went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found.

Cisco says it is not releasing its NAC client software code to the open source community, nor does the company have plans to exit the endpoint security client business, despite a Cisco executive telling the contrary to the media earlier this month.

3Com this week plans to make a fresh run at Cisco and Juniper with an enterprise network strategy focused on embedding security, management and VOIP services from itself and others into its routers and switches.

Open source router company Vyatta debuted earlier this year with a Red Hat-style alternative to Cisco and Juniper offerings: the Open Flexible Router, an open source-based WAN router and firewall stack, freely downloadable, with service and support offerings available for purchase. Since then the company has generated buzz in the network industry, while releasing products such as a pre-installed appliance-like version on Dell servers. Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell and chief strategy officer Dave Roberts recently told Phil Hochmuth what Vyatta is, and is not, and what it hopes to become. (The following is an edited transcript.)