* Welcome to the afternoon edition of Network World Daily News.
In depth
Free virtual tools
Virtualization freebies are available both from the open source community and from vendors such as Microsoft and VMware. Here’s a sampling.
Permanent network TAPs for complex infrastructure
Network test access ports were developed as portable diagnostic tools to gain temporary, out-of-band, nonintrusive access to traffic between two network devices.
An IT Survival guide
We interview Yau-Man Chan, the director of information systems for the College of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley who also wound up pretty close to winning $1 million on the most recent “Survivor.” He says being an IT director is a lot more challenging than surviving on a tropical island.
Wireless networks: The burning questions
What impact will 802.11n have? Which security threats are scariest? What of wireless VoIP?
Test
Blade servers vs. rack servers
Which server form factor is better for your data center? We help you decide.
From the blogs and forums
Two new bloggers this month: Denise Donohue is focusing on Cisco VoIP and related gear. Tyson Kopczynski is looking at security and information assurance in the Microsoft environment.
Paul McNamara wonders if Google is a privacy pariah or pioneer. John Obeto tells us why Google is a little piggie on the competition front. Brad Reese continues the “Cisco: End of a religion” discussion (even though he doesn’t buy it). Greg Royal is reporting from the Nortel international users conference. James Gaskin posts from the ITEC show. Miles Baska considers how hard it can be to get educators to switch from Windows to Linux. Adam Gaffin discusses the case of a VoIP pioneer who now faces drug charges in Boston.
Users debate passwords and user authentication and ponder Marriott’s convergence plans. Also, they consider the meaning of Avaya’s decision to go private and also discuss its VoIP wares. One user takes us to task for saying IPv6 has “an order of magnitude” more IP numbers than IPv4 (it has several orders of magnitude more). One user wonders how come Windows patches never improve Windows performance. And one user looks at Metro Ethernet and when it becomes more cost effective than ATM.
How to
Ron Nutter helps a user use wireless to connect two buildings. Diana Kelly explains how to start protecting credit-card and other data on your network.
More news
Qwest CEO to retire
Qwest announced today that Chairman and CEO Richard Notebaert plans to retire upon the selection of a successor.
IBM to acquire Telelogic
IBM Monday announced a cash tender offer of about $745 million to acquire all outstanding shares of Swedish application life-cycle management software maker Telelogic.
Citrix buys Caymas NAC assets
Citrix is buying the assets of NAC vendor Caymas Systems, which is out of business and whose products have some overlap with the Citrix’s SSL VPN products.
The Avaya sale: Tech buyouts bear risks for customers, too
The sale of Avaya is just the latest in an increasing number of private-equity buyouts of technology companies that might not be good things for customers.
10 free virtualization tools worth noting
More and more IT shops are validating the benefits of desktop and server virtualization, from energy efficiency to better resource utilization. But if you’re still leery of forking over big dollars for the technology, there are some low-cost and no-cost ways to give virtualization a try.
