The annual pilgrimage of computer professionals during the second week of May to Las Vegas for the Networld+Interop Conference and Exhibition successfully brought together people from many industries and countries, all looking for solutions to their networking problems or the next great networking technology. The conference is a merger of two earlier conferences: Networld, focused on Novell's networking and platform issues, and Interop, focused on Internet network technologies. It has become much more and now includes voice over IP, 64-bit operating systems, security software, Internet appliances, routers and switches, and integration software. Among those, I discovered a number of Linux gems.

The conference itself was probably most exciting to Linux users who work specifically on new networking technologies. Most of the talks focused on current and emerging network technologies such as voice over IP, IPv6, IPsec, DSL, multiservice WANs, and such. They were fairly platform independent, which is fine for a networking conference. The real action was taking place on the exhibition floor -- that is, if you could skip past the standard run of conference gimmicks and go straight to those companies touting Linux technology.

Small rack-mountable appliance servers were out in force, giving companies such as Cobalt Networks a bit of future competition. I saw a number of small companies exhibiting their 1U height servers. Network Engines offered their WebEngine line of clusterable 1U height servers, the Celeron-based Roadster LX and the dual Pentium III based Viper LX. The company also had a AdminEngine server for administrating clusters of its WebEngine systems. Unfortunately, AdminEngine runs NT, although it can manage Linux-based WebEngines.

More interestingly, a company called e-Appliance demonstrated its SuperNode/Quad750 1U chassis, which contains four separate computers within its system. It also has an internal Fibre Channel backplane that connects all four computers and runs a customized Linux known as LinuxOnBoard. I have never seen that kind of density in a 1U server. Each computer has its own Pentium III, up to 512 MB of RAM, and a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port. There is a separate central management console port for all four computers as well. E-Appliance also offers external connections of Gigabit Ethernet, T1, T3, and OC-3c. I would have thought such a box would radiate heat like a furnace. Needless to say, the unit is filled with fans on the chassis and on the CPUs. A company engineer assured me that it works well in nonserver room conditions. Such a monster server would save a lot of money for dense server solutions. E-Appliance also makes a smaller SuperNode/150 chassis with a single computer coupled with an eight-port Ethernet switch. Thus, small offices would not have to worry about separate server and networking hardware.

WatchGuard Technologies, the longtime Linux security company, presented its line of firewall and security management products. The big news was on its IPsec capable virtual private networking (VPN) boxes and a custom firechip that contains the company's firewall software for OEM developers that make cable, DSL, or ISDN modems, as well as residential gateway systems. That will allow future consumer Internet appliances to have the same level of firewall security as large companies' networks.

Check Point Technologies, the leader in the firewall market, demonstrated its Check Point 2000 software package that was ported to Linux systems in January. That package combines its award winning Firewall-1 system with its VPN-1 tool.

In a remote corner of the exhibition floor, Tripwire presented its popular namesake product for active intrusion detection. Tripwire 2.2.1 for Linux can be directly downloaded from the company's Website, but the really interesting news is that it's planning to open source its software in the fall.

Chrysalis-ITS, a semiconductor and network processor company, demonstrated its upcoming encryption/decryption accelerator for Web transactions. Its Luna VPN product, which works with Linux, will soon be replaced with a new board that sports its custom network processor, capable of encrypting up to 155 Mbps (OC-3c speeds) of network traffic for a VPN or several hundred SSL transactions per second. The new chip, which is capable of handling Triple DES, Public Key Encryption (RC-4), and even the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms, uses proposals that might become the American encryption standard. The product, which won't be released until the fall, should enhance the processing abilities of Web commerce servers everywhere.

Sendmail.com was on hand, displaying its new Secure Switch and Multi Switch products and promoting its new version of Sendmail for NT. Secure Switch handles secure delivery and encryption of email, using the transport layer security protocol between servers and from servers to clients. The Secure Switch servers can handle return receipts that report when a message was delivered to the end user as well as when it was opened and read. It has a spam-management tool and an API for content management for third-party developers. Multi Switch is a centralized management tool for distributed sendmail servers across your network.

Legato demonstrated its eCluster package for Linux and presented its Networker backup client software. ECluster is an application level clustering package that actively monitors the behavior of server applications on multiple machines and performs tasks such as restarting halted servers, load balancing new traffic, and collecting performance statistics. Legato even offers a Perl module to help developers enhance the cluster tools through scripting. Although Legato does offer a backup client in its Networker product line, a proper backup server for Linux is still not available, and users have to resort to a Unix- or NT-based server.

If you're looking for Keyboard-Video-Mouse (KVM) switches for Linux, the company to go to would be Cybex. Well known for their Commander product that works with PC servers, Cybex's new Autoview and XP4000 series are capable of communicating with racks of PC servers at a time. As with any KVM switch, the switch needs to handle booting up of multiple servers at a time and properly signal the existence of the shared KVM to each of the servers. The low-end Autoview allows two KVM sets to communicate with up to eight servers at a time, while the high-end XP4040 can be matrixed to give up to 128 users access to thousands of servers at a time. The XP4040 can communicate with remote KVM switches over a wide campus, using both standard Category 5 cable Ethernet and KVM line extenders. I definitely look forward to testing out Cybex's products in the future.

Over at the Linux Pavilion, Red Hat, Atipa, and TurboLinux were the major vendors present. TurboLinux promoted its enFuzion product, a distributed computation system that runs on idle desktops in screen saver mode, very much like the grid-computing systems of SETI@Home, Centurion, and others. Atipa demonstrated its clustered server products for high availability and scientific computing.

MaxSpeed and Big Storage were among the smaller vendors in the Pavilion. Big Storage is an integrator of storage systems for Linux platforms. In particular, the company focuses on the high end from hundreds of gigabytes to terabyte-size storage systems. The company recently announced its support for the ReiserFS journaling filesystem, which is being developed by Hans Reiser to supplant the current ext2 filesystem. Sam Bogoch, Big Storage's president and CEO, mentioned a client who was able to rebuild his entire 100 plus GBs of disk space in a few minutes rather than a few hours, using a journaling filesystem. I can't wait for such new filesystems to become the norm.

The Fibre Channel Industry Association Pavilion hosted several vendors who promoted Linux drivers for their host bus adapters (HBAs) or FC controllers. Qlogic, one of the leaders in that area, already has HBAs for Linux and will soon have switches that are guaranteed to work with its adapters, as a result of its recent acquisition of Ancor. VMIC, a small FC vendor, also presented its HBAs running Linux, although Emulex has yet to release drivers for its adapters. FC is what big servers run for storage area networks. As soon as it becomes available for Linux, you may see a new growth of high-end servers running Linux.

Nokia plans to port its wireless access protocol (WAP) server to Linux. WAP is a new system for interfacing the small screens and limited capabilities of mobile devices such as smart cell phones to the Web. Nokia's WAP server, currently in NT form only, allows Nokia cell phone users to download their email, check Websites, and even run applications designed specifically for those units. By porting their WAP Server to Linux, Nokia is opening up the potential of millions of mobile devices accessing networking services through a safe and reliable platform. Nokia hopes to release its product by the end of the year.

All in all, I probably walked 20 miles in my two days at the show, but I came away with the feeling that Linux is starting to make a bigger impact in the decision making process of product development in network technology firms. The show brought promises of important new technology for Linux such as FC, WAP, journaling file systems, and security products -- and the energy is definitely on the rise.