Buzz roundtable: VPNs, 09/27/99

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.

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.

VPNs

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

How about VPNs, which we're defining as a secure path carved through an otherwise public network. What's your take on where VPNs stand today and where they're headed?

Bradner: VPNs for the most part, certainly big corporate VPNs, are a feel-good for the corporate IT manager who doesn't really want to use the Internet but is told they have to use the Internet somehow.

Kobielus: VPNs are very much an enabler for extranets, an extranet meaning a closed network environment for a specific group of trading partners to exchange information securely with each other. When you get into the e-commerce world, these closed environments are starting to break up. In the Internet e-commerce environment you want to have secure communications between yourself and any number of other partners that you can't foresee, due to the freewheeling nature of commerce. So the concept of VPNs, being closed commerce communities, just seems a little bit creaky, a little bit antiquated. You really want secure communications in a very public forum, without the need for a dedicated VPN, leased line kind of environment.

Bradner: You don't want to have to pre-guess who you want to talk to.

Nolle: VPNs make sense if you call a VPN something consistent, but it's clear that the customer, the service provider, the equipment vendor, the media and the analyst community have not converged on a single strategy. And as long as that's the case, as long as we can't even get the nomenclature right – and I think Scott you wrote a column about this at one point in time – then pretty obviously this concept isn't going to go anywhere.

Bradner: I did get a response back from that column, which was "How do spell VPN?" A dozen different ways. I got a response back saying, "He is absolutely wrong. We know exactly what a VPN is. It's what our product does." (See the column).

More of the roundtable