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Wednesday, May 16, 2012
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Error 404--Not Found

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

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Wireless and mobility

Location-based security systems for wireless LANs, mobile middleware, WLAN management and monitoring tools

By Christine Burns and Keith Shaw, Network World, 02/28/05

Best of the tests
Testing outside the box
Really cool tools
Open source, tried and true
Category breaker
Fave raves

Winner: Aligo's Omni Mobile Platform 2nd Edition

WLANs are at a crossroads, as many companies have made their infrastructure decisions and now desperately need tools and services to help manage, control or secure these new networks. To that end, we focused the bulk of our testing on a variety of new WLAN management and monitoring tools aiming to do just that.

While a number of strong contenders populated that wireless arena, we give our Best of the Tests Award in this category to Aligo's Omni Mobile platform. This mobile middleware helps you take applications and make them ready for mobile devices (any device, on any network).

The nod goes to Aligo because of its outstanding performance in our testing and its overall push to move mobile networking to a higher level. After all, having a new WLAN in place and a bunch of new devices in your users' hands doesn't help move the company's bottom line if you can't access your business applications with those new devices or across these new networks.


Lab Alliance member Barry Nance found that Aligo's Omni Mobile Platform had the best environment for building, deploying and managing mobile applications. The system supports virtually every type of wireless handheld device, running - by virtue of its Java application server architecture - on many platforms.

Update

THE PRODUCT: Aligo has not released any new product updates or enhancements since we tested the Omni Mobile Platform early last year.

THE COMPANY: Aligo last month announced the completion of its acquisition of H2 Technologies, a developer of service management, dispatching and mobile field service software. With the acquisition, Aligo grew its customer base to more than 1,200 and improved channel relationships, the company says. John McCarthy, former H2 CEO, becomes vice president of sales for Aligo. Also in January, the company named Emerick Woods, most recently a venture capitalist, as its new CEO. Woods replaces Robert Smith, who left the company.

It has a visual design environment that made building and reviewing the design of mobile applications a breeze. Imagine an IBM WebSphere or BEA Systems WebLogic environment especially geared to wireless handheld clients, add a visual design development tool and voilà! You have Omni Mobile Platform.


Finalists

AirMagnet continues to amaze and surprise us with its products, and AirMagnet Distributed 4.0 version of its WLAN management suite was no different. AirMagnet uses a combination of proprietary access points and notebook-based sensors to help assess an 802.11a, b or g area. The product has an outstanding GUI and covers several 802.11-specific problem areas, such as detecting rogue access points, interference issues, conversion errors (an 802.11g access point not transitioning to 802.11b), and finding access points that have gone offline and need to be rebooted, for maintaining a dispersed WLAN.

Extended Systems' OneBridge Mobile Solutions Platform, another mobile middleware entrant, won plaudits in our testing for having excellent device support and a scalable, server-neutral platform. We also liked the product's facilitated discovery process, which helps companies that are just beginning to mobilize their applications. The product makes sure you thoroughly contemplate the effect on each individual application data item as it transitions between connected and disconnected states.

Newbury Networks' Watchdog could fit well into the security category, as the main purpose of the system is to help prevent unauthorized WLAN users from using your network. The system uses Newbury's outstanding location-based technology to pinpoint where WLAN requests are coming from, and then can 'block off' areas where only authorized users can connect. This is like building an invisible fence for your WLAN, and only those users who are inside the 'fence' can work. Neat stuff .


Looking ahead

The funny thing about WLAN infrastructures is that all the innovations are first handled by the home and small office/home office markets (pre-802.11n, a/b/g infrastructures). Still, we plan to get back to testing infrastructure in the wireless space in 2005, tackling the new wireless mesh technologies or even some WiMAX systems, and more wireless performance testing. WLAN monitoring, security and management are also high on our list of test subjects.