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No. Airport is a brand name, just like ZoomAir, WaveLan, AirConnect, or AiroNet. Does that make it clear?

Or are you still confused about the whole Kleenex/Tissue problem?

3Com does something very similar with the 990 family of cards. The engine is called the 3XP which is an ARM 9 RISC processor. All this for only $99 US, this will definately be in my next Linux box.

3Com's Switch in the Wall

It's a pretty neat idea to use a single drop from your wiring closet out to each cubicle. Unfortunately, I would still need about 3 or 4 of these jacks since I had 12 or so servers and workstations all cancer-clustering around me.

Well, i've been working at the ACCRC For over a year and a half now. It's a terrific place. Most of our volunteers come from the homeless shelter next to our building. It's amazing how much people can leanr when they're immersed in technology so completely.

A couple of answers to previously proposed questions. The Athlon 850's and motherboards for them were graciously donated by AMD for use in our cluster. They also gave us a good deal of PC100 dimms to help us expand the cluster. 3Com donated all of our switches and ethernet cards.

Microsoft has never contacted us, nor are they likely to. I find it highly unlikely that they would attempt to shut us down because we distribute Linux. SuSe Gave us 30,000 boxed copies of 7.0 in its various incarnations, and this is the OS we distribute. We'd love to get any other distributions we could, but for now, we will use SuSe because we have a buttload of it.

Now, some related links! Webcams In the Ministry of Truth, AKA the media lab at the ACCRC.

Buy Shit from the ACCRC here. Extremely disorganized, just like the warehouse is.

Anyone in the bay area is invited to come by and check us out. We are open from 10-5 weekdays and 12-5 saturdays. We invite anyone to volunteer, no matter what your skill level is. Also, if you would like to send us your equipment for a donation and a tax write-off, send it to our street address, not our post office box.

Thank you ve5ry much for all your enthusiasm. We need volunteers badly! Volunteers get digging rights!!!!

• my monitor hung up on my wall
• my mouse in my hand
• my keyboard in my lap
• my Internet connection in the kitchen
• my DivX movies on my television
• my MP3 receiver in my entertainment center
• all controlled by my PC in the bedroom

...of course, in a house where we can't even keep the cordless phone on its recharger for more than five minutes and stash the remote control in a new location every day, this will probably be less of a boon than some people think.

More information here .. Netgear and 3COM. PCI Cards are really useful when you don't want to rewire an office to provide someone connectivity at their desktop. Ok. I'm just nitpicking. :)

Optical Safety
Under most normal viewing conditions there is no eye hazard from the Tx LED. It is recommended however, that the LED is not viewed through any magnifying device, whilst powered on.

The 3Com OfficeConnect 56K LAN Modem does everything you want in a single box. I bought one for my parents, who can't see the value in paying for a cable modem and are content with using an analog phone line. It seems to work pretty well and has a browser-based interface for configuring it. (The interface is way ugly, but functional.)

It's only $140 list according to 3com's website It's also a switch not a hub which makes a difference as well. It's not rediculous at all. Suppose you already have a wire going to a desktop and you need another one. It might cost upwards of $1000 to add a second wire if it's in a difficult place to wire. I've been in that position before. I'm not saying I'd build my cable plant with these, but there are situations where they would be helpful.

1. Fluke networks have a tool that is designed to map switched ethernet networks (no WAN). It can be found at their website.
2. The opennms project is considering adding this, there is a discussion list for it on their website that talks about some of the technology involved.
3. 3com network supervisor. This can do some basic mapping of the network, see their webpage.

I don't grok Unix. I wanted something in a box with negligible maintenance, I had no time and I had adequate money. My ISDN LanModem and hub were 3Coms, so I bought their baby firewall; OfficeConnect Internet Firewall 25. You'll need the link - 3Com's site is impossible to navigate.

I liked it. Seemed robust, and dead easy to admin. Setting up logging was a little awkward, as it needs to log to a remote external box.

Blew up inside a year (I think it may have been mains-surge related, and the firewall was one of few things I didn't have off the UPS). No one is interested in warranty claims 8-( Maybe I was unlucky.

I found this firewall eval site helpful.

Maybe one day they might be useful, if they're cheap enough and have some actual use to them, but I don't see why I should spend $500 to connect my toaster to the WWW

Those aren't the kind of Internet Appliances being discussed in this article. The article references Sony's eVilla which is similar to 3COM's Audrey and Netpliance's I-Opener. Most people thought that cheap devices that offered only web browsing would be a hit with consumers who wouldn't then have to buy expensive and powerful machines just to use them as little more than dumb terminals.

Unfortunately these devices were neither cheap enough nor did they offer enough functionality to entice consumers.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

I was on a search to figure out what an Audrey even was and found a discontinued notice on 3Com's site dated March 31. They say they discontinued all of their internet appliance line due to a lack of market.

Here is their End of Life Statement.

Here is their product page

Here is their Q and A page regarding the discontinuation.

After looking at the specs I doubt I would have bought one anyhow.

A search for the audrey on the 3com site reveals that the product has been discontinued, and will no longer be supported see http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/consumer/au drey/finalfaq.pdf so pickem up cheap now well you can

In particular, they claim to get 50 MB/sec transfer rates from their disk array. But, you can see that they also specify just a 10 MB/sec 100BaseTX ethernet; so 80% of that bandwidth is completely wasted.

I was curious what people's solutions to this are. Does one just get multiple 100BaseTX ethernet connections to a switch, or are people going Gigabit ethernet from the fileserver to the switch?

I plan to go the second route. There are many ethernet switches out there with one or two gigabit ports such as this 3COM switch. This should give 100MB/sec to the switch, and then the switch can distribute this bandwidth to all the client machines at 10MB/sec.

At least this is a reasonable stopgap until Gigabit Ethernet is more ubiquitous.

Any comments?

thad

A nice package that I could install... A firewall/802.11b combination. I plug in the cable modem ethernet in one port, and in the other 2 ports, my local protected network, and then a place to put in the 802.11b base device. That way those around me can have internet access through my connection.

Check out the LinkSys BEFW11S4, the D-Link DI-711 or DI-713, or the 3Com 3CRWE50194. They all have the physical specs to do what you're asking. It's just a matter of finding out if their built in firewall abilities are flexible enough for your specific needs.

-Aaron

---

I bet this would run great on the 3com Audrey internet appliance. http://ergo.3com.com/ergo/html/ergo_audrey_product .html?cat=product

I thought the same thing until I saw Audrey the last time I was in Best Buy. Five hundred bucks. I couldn't see myself using one, but at least it's pretty. :-)

Now you TOO can have banner ads streamed to you...even in the bathroom!

--Just Another Pimp A$$ Perl Hacker who turns his computer off every now and again.

Actually, there's one significant difference, and it's heavily in OpenSSH's favor. Unisys has a patent on LZW compression. Patents are legally binding at the discretion of the holder and may be prosecuted at will (or not) until they expire.

Tatu has a trademark on the name SSH. Trademarks only remain valid so long as they are agressively protected. 3Com has a really funny page about this topic. Since Tatu has implicitly allowed numerous outside groups to use the SSH name, he's probably lost his claim to it already.

just use this one instead. besides the fact its better than intels, a linux driver is also available.

1000BASE-T creates a 250 megabit full duplex channel on each of the four pairs of wire in a CAT-5 cable. The nodes on each end of the cable transmit and receive in the same frequency band. They use hybrids and echo cancellation, much like a high-speed modem, to separate the transmitted signal from the received signal. A 3COM paper on the subject is available here.

I remember Magic Cap, although I never got the chance to play with it all that much. The problems facing Magic Cap were similar to those that plagued the Newton, the oft-lauded but ill-fated PDA of those days. The Magic Cap devices were often expensive ($700 and up) and bulky (too large to fit in a shirt pocket, while too small to be a laptop killer).

My favorite aspect of Magic Cap was that there was even an AOL client for it. I'm not sure whether there were other applications for it; they may have chosen to forego third-party software for fear of compromising the "simplicity" of the device. That killed the TI Avigo, the first direct PalmPilot competitor. From the looks of it, the lack of expansion may also hurt the 3com Audrey.

Is avalible here.

This problem has been known for some time, I forget when I first read this paper, but it has been out for over a year. It describes the problem in good enough detail that I downloaded the adobe versions and made a hard copy of them. Its about time that "major" news service noticed.

Here is an interesting story about Microsoft, and it (slightly) involves IPV6.

I went to "Microsoft's Big Day" back in March I believe. This event was (at our town at any rate) just a big propaganda machine for Windows 2000 and Office 2000.

The hotel where it took place was initally crowded with people from the buisnesses from town, but with each intermission (the "seminar" lasted a whole day).

Basically the lectures went over the features of Win2k and why you should buy it for your buisness, same thing for Office. The main presenter (other than the boring laywer who read from the EULA... No, I am not joking)was a woman who seemed quite knowlegeable about NT. She was quite sharp I thought.

I decided to test how sharp.

I walked up to her during an intermission, where people were asking very very basic questions.

My turn came up and I asked:

"When will the Windows 2000 kernel support IPv6?
Currently it only supports IPv4, and thats a serious issue with the looming IP shortage."

Just for a second her eyes went a little wide - the first question all day that she had not been able to answer. She glanced quickly at a person nearby sitting in the front row, then looked back at me and said "I don't know".

This was fine, I did not expect her to be able to answer the question, I wanted to see her true level of knowledge, whether she was plain PR or a techie at heart.

Now what got interesting is that the fellow to my left who was sitting in the front row of the presentation (dressed in "plain" clothes)and had been the man that the presenter had glanced at, got up and began to praise Windows 2000. He mentioned how "No operating system supports IPv6".

I replied, "Funny, Linux and BSD support it." He did not believe me at first, and addressed the *nix idea with a wave of his hand, as if the *nix OSes were naught but a bother. We then argued about IPv6 and it's importance, and how it loads routers etc, etc, etc. But, as we did so I noticed that he was leading me further away from the people asking questions to the presenters (I was winning the argument because I had just read Understanding IP Addressing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know.) I was also declaring things like: "Well, Linux can do that! What do you mean that Windows can't?" Which seemed to irk him.

(Ok, before someone tells me to read the Advocacy-how-to, I was very polite about it, and not derogitory to MS, I was doing it in more of a "Gee, I thought Windows could do that too... You mean it can't?" Besides, YOU try sitting through an 8 hour MS propaganda session and see if you don't snap!:)

We finished arguing, I "won" not that it was really important. I did not really care. Still, what I thought was *really* interesting was that I did not recognize him. I live in a small town, and I know ALL the computer people here. They all know me as the local Linux geek. I never saw this guy before, and he *WAS* knowlegable, he *DID* know what IPv6 was, and was able to discuss it. I would have known if there was a guy like this in town.

I waited until the very end of the seminar, when everyone was leaving. I watched this "plainclothes" guy, (all the MS people had Microsoft shirts on). The "plainclothes" guy left in the same van that the MS people left in. I have not seen him in town since.

Interesting don't you think?

• 3Com makes both hardware and WinModem versions of the PCI USR Sportster.

Alex Bischoff
---

• 3Com makes both hardware and WinModem versions of the PCI USR Sportster.

Alex Bischoff
---

• 3Com makes both hardware and WinModem versions of the PCI USR Sportster.

Alex Bischoff
---

• 3Com makes both hardware and WinModem versions of the PCI USR Sportster.

Alex Bischoff
---

• 3Com makes both hardware and WinModem versions of the PCI USR Sportster.

Alex Bischoff
---

And if they add links to HTML posts, they could potentially screw it up if they don't pay attention - 3Com USR PCI Voice modem link could end up being malformed to 3Com USR PCI Voice modem link.

--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);

And if they add links to HTML posts, they could potentially screw it up if they don't pay attention - 3Com USR PCI Voice modem link could end up being malformed to 3Com USR PCI Voice modem link.

--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);

But to test this theory, I tried connecting to another machine of mine 40 miles across town, running the same modem (at the time, a Zoom 56kFlex) and made it consistantly at 44k.

How did you do this - the modem to modem connect?

56k modem connecting to a 56k modem will only connect at 33.6k *maximum*.

He could've had something like a USR Courier I-modem, which is an ISDN adapter that can act as the "server side" of a V.90 connection, at the remote site. A connection between two ordinary modems certainly wouldn't get anything beyond 33.6 kbps, as you noted.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Being an IBM employee, I feel the need to stand up for the good Mr. Ayd :).

Aww, talk about sour grapes! They've hurt IBM's feelings, because IBM sells really smokin' computers too.

Seriously, I think David misclassified GRAPE 6 quite a bit. I don't think it's quite David's fault, because the article writers don't know the difference between 'supercomputer' and 'attached processor'. ABC News didn't really apply the term 'supercomputer' correctly either.

The term 'supercomputer' is more of a marketing term than anything else. Technical people only use it when they want to describe a general capability. AFAIK there is no concrete definitions of 'supercomputer', and if there were they would likely change daily. GRAPE 6, from the information I can see, is really an attached processor.

Attached processors can be an ARM chip on your network card to a GRAPE 6. Interanally, GRAPE 6 is a full custom, superscalar, massively pipelined, systolic array (say that 5 times fast). That basically means that data comes in one side of the board, and after n clock cycles the answer comes out the other side. There is no code other than a program running on the host computer which generates and consumes data, and every piece of the algorithm is done in hardware.

"What happens when the algorithm changes?" you might ask. Well, then you're screwed. You have to do a whole new board. Many boards use programmable chips as their processing elements, and can reprogram them when bugs or features get added, but these guys appear to be using ASICs. Great for speed, bad for flexibility.

Even though David Ayd was mistaken about the architecture, this idea has been around for quite a while also. The SPLASH 2 project was one of the first successes with this idea. There is also a commercial company selling boards using that idea but with completely up to date components (compared to SPLASH).

Still, in July of 1995, the GRAPE 4 became the world's fastest computer, breaking the 1 teraflop barrier with a peak speed of 1.08 TFLOPS.

Well, we really can't argue with that, can we, Mr. Ayd?

This architecture lends itself to extremely high throughput. It's no surprise that these perform so well. NSA uses architectures just like this to do it's crypto crunching. Brute forcing doesn't look so bad after trying one of these :).

SIP is the IETF standard for signalling of VoIP calls (as well as other multimedia conferences). It is supported in products by 3Com, Nortel, Cisco, ... Very cool.

You can check it out in the kdenonbeta package of KDE 2.0.

I found some spiffy looking wireless lan products for those that don't need the longer distances.

http://www.3com.com/wireless/

slightly offtopic, but still kind of on the mark.

For the /8 /16 /24, its basically a way to denote a group or range of IP address. A /24 would be a range of 256 IP address (or what used to be class C) and /16 would be a group of 256*256 IP address (old class B). For instance, 192.168.1.0/24 would mean the range of 192.168.1.0 through 192.168.1.255.

A good read on IP addressing can be found at 3com , its a bit long but well worth reading.
--

In a business environment, people can live without access to email for 5-10 minutes. But not to their phone system. Any system that bases their Call Manager and H.323 gateway around a NT solution is doomed. Cisco couldn't offer the reliability we were looking for

I don't really know why this IP Phone post is news, we've switched our own PBX to Selsius and then quickly took it out because of the unreliable call manager and the initial Selsius phone models were pretty bad.

We currently use 3Com's NBX100 product. It's worth checking out. It's been working great for us for the past year. Offers Layer2 and 3 telephony (why waste IP space when you're on a LAN).

Its Layer3 telephony has an "IP on the Fly" characteristic that assigns IP addresses on the fly to the phone only when it requires Layer3 addressing. This way, you don't waste an IP per phone, set up a minimal pool of addresses and they get assigned on the fly when required.

The actual "PBX" is a VxWorks powered box running an AMD Elan (x86 with integrated IO). It's got cards for analog lines, T1 lines, H.323 gateway and some more. It's offers CoS, ToS, Vlan tagging and all the things you'd expect from an IP telephony system.

There are also analog adapters, so you can plug any analog phone (we use it with cordless phones) to an end unit, which then let's you use your analog phone as an IP phone.

We've found the solution to be much more reliable than Cisco's, where you need to dedicate yet another NT box for your call manager and where the reliability just isn't there. The functionality of the Call Manager, though better now, has lacked trivial standard telephone options for a long time and just didn't cut it.

Another nicety of the NBX100 is that you can program/configure your phone through the NBX's web interface, check your voicemail through its integrated IMAP server. It's also TAPI compliant, so the Windows users can tie in their address book software with the phone system.

--
Let's not all suck at the same time please

I currently develop a (better) IP phone for 3Com. We also have a several orders of magnitude larger market share with our NBX phones which can also talk IP.

You are correct that latency is important. I wish more people would cite a latency (measured in units of time) when I ask about a DSL/cable-modem speed instead of a throughput (measured in bits per time). With TCP and congested conditions, bandwidth is allocated by latency anyway. Also, for the TCP ramp-up (where most web pages are loaded) latency is a big governor.

In Internet Telephony (not counting that unusable crap over dialup modems) everyone basically uses G711 (PCMU) with 20ms packetization, so the inherent round-trip packetization delay is only 40ms. My typical ping times across the Internet backbone are less than 80ms making a total of 120ms + a little jitter buffer which is as good as a cell phone. For perspective, sound travels about a foot per millisecond anyway.

A big problem is trying to make the phones autonomous. So many people implement a master slave protocol like MGCP/SGCP which allows for dumb phones. Strangely when you use this approach, you usually want the phones totally dumb, and the protocol specialized to the specific plastics, so everyone uses a proprietary one. The phones don't even know what their buttons mean. The have to tell the server. Yuck.

My phone uses SIP an IETF standard. The phones can make direct phone calls without any server assistance. SIP has features for PGP, and the next phones will support strong encryption, like 3DES and blowfish. They currently already use MD5 digest authentication.

Internet telephony will happen. The voice infrastructure grows at 7% per year, but the Internet at 300 to 1000% depending on how you measure it. As bandwidth becomes free (finally a commodity which really is too cheap to meter), people will naturally migrate to Internet telephony for the services.

Now, if only 3Com could build DSL & cable modems fast enough to satisfy demand. :-) -- Rick Dean

I currently develop a (better) IP phone for 3Com. We also have a several orders of magnitude larger market share with our NBX phones which can also talk IP.

You are correct that latency is important. I wish more people would cite a latency (measured in units of time) when I ask about a DSL/cable-modem speed instead of a throughput (measured in bits per time). With TCP and congested conditions, bandwidth is allocated by latency anyway. Also, for the TCP ramp-up (where most web pages are loaded) latency is a big governor.

In Internet Telephony (not counting that unusable crap over dialup modems) everyone basically uses G711 (PCMU) with 20ms packetization, so the inherent round-trip packetization delay is only 40ms. My typical ping times across the Internet backbone are less than 80ms making a total of 120ms + a little jitter buffer which is as good as a cell phone. For perspective, sound travels about a foot per millisecond anyway.

A big problem is trying to make the phones autonomous. So many people implement a master slave protocol like MGCP/SGCP which allows for dumb phones. Strangely when you use this approach, you usually want the phones totally dumb, and the protocol specialized to the specific plastics, so everyone uses a proprietary one. The phones don't even know what their buttons mean. The have to tell the server. Yuck.

My phone uses SIP an IETF standard. The phones can make direct phone calls without any server assistance. SIP has features for PGP, and the next phones will support strong encryption, like 3DES and blowfish. They currently already use MD5 digest authentication.

Internet telephony will happen. The voice infrastructure grows at 7% per year, but the Internet at 300 to 1000% depending on how you measure it. As bandwidth becomes free (finally a commodity which really is too cheap to meter), people will naturally migrate to Internet telephony for the services.

Now, if only 3Com could build DSL & cable modems fast enough to satisfy demand. :-) -- Rick Dean

The 3Com IP phone system has been out for some time.

The following is quoted from this 3Com white paper

For ADSL, the most talked-about xDSL technology, there are two competing modulation schemes: carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation and discrete multitone (DMT) modulation. CAP and DMT use the same fundamental modulation technique--quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)--but differ in the way they apply it.

QAM, a bandwidth conservation process routinely used in modems, enables two digital carrier signals to occupy the same transmission bandwidth. With QAM, two independent message signals are used to modulate two carrier signals that have identical frequencies, but differ in amplitude and phase. QAM receivers are able to discern whether to use lower or higher numbers of amplitude and phase states to overcome noise and interference on the wire pair.

Sounds like a MODEM to me!

*LMFAO* You're thinking of 3M makers of PostIts, Scotch Tape and all kinds of nifty paper products...not 3Com the makers of some of the best NIC cards ever made *LMFAO*

I'm /sure/ that was a joke....it was a joke...right?

Now I really will have to work on a device driver.

Another project going on (for the last time) is Earthkam (on space.com), Digital camera in the shuttle, schools take pictures. Not quite as cool as the radar imagery, but still really cool.

Here is short promo from 3com Space Shuttle Images Of Earth To Reside On 3Com e-Network For Internet Age Education