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Can't download a Nortel Contivity Linux client? Did you "google" it at all? It took me all of about 10 seconds to find this web page: http://www130.nortelnetworks.com/cgi-bin/eserv/cs/ main.jsp?cscat=software&tranProduct=10621

Here are a couple of links from their site.
Wireless Mesh Networks
Taipei Mesh

Here are a couple of links from their site.
Wireless Mesh Networks
Taipei Mesh

Nortel's Passport 8600 384 ports per chassis, true wire-speed, redundant everything, layer 2-7 switching. Also, if you need more ports simply add another 8600 and use Multi-link-trunking (MLT) between the switches. Wash Rinse Repeat. Networks that use these are smokin!

Of course, if you are looking for the typical Ask Slashdot for free solutions answer you can forget it. These puppies cost a bundle.

While you do have the basic idea down, your suggestion of a clustering FS isn't the best for your application. You are describing "vertical scaling", which GFS and clusters will be very good for. Web serving is not a good place for a cluster--"horizontal scaling" is how you scale most web sites and web applications. Typically, for web serving, you will have a block of content that can fit on the hard disk of the average web server.

The best way to deliver this to the user (in this case, the slashdotter) would be to replicate this content onto a group of web servers using rsync(1). Each machine serves the content off of its local drive and can use its memory to cache/buffer the disk reads. In front of the web servers, you would put a wire-speed load balancer, such as an Nortel Alteon content switch or a Foundry Networks ServerIron switch. The load balancer, when configured properly will take care of monitoring your web servers. It would take me too long to explain it here, but these switches are sophisticated enough that they can take failed webservers out of the load-balancing group for everything from a ping failure to a content failure.

The key to designing web architectures is simplicity. Web serving does not need fancy clustering software or distributed filesystems. Very few web sites will not fit on the hard disk of your average 1U server. Keep it simple and put the intelligence up front in the switch.

What is GFS good for? Many things! It would be great for a large computational cluster that had a very large (multi-terabyte) dataset and high disk I/O requirements. Anything that has a requirement to provide one or more very large files to a number of cluster nodes would be perfect for GFS.

Chris

Nortel doesn't make routers? Try again. Around four years ago, when Nortel acquired Bay Networks, it gained a substantial switch and router product line.

What would Canada really be losing if it couldn't buy Cisco technology? Canadians can just as easily buy a switch or router from Juniper, Nortel, or D-Link (instead of Linksys, which Cisco bought). Do you forget (or neglect, or not know) that Nortel is a *Canadian* company and a leader in optical, wireless, and VoIP technology? And Wi-LAN was a leader in OFDM networking long before wireless LANs became so popular.

To avoid running cable at all between all your access points, you might want to take a look at AP mesh technologies from FireTide, Strix, Tropos or Nortel.

This looks suprisingly like a technology developed at Nortel back in the mid-1990s called SoundBeam. Even more interesting: it would seem that the MIT Media Lab picked up the Nortel technology and continued to use it in their own prototypes through the late 1990s.

Nortel's brief description of the technology (available for licensing!) is here.

The description of the MIT Media Lab device as an evolution of the Nortel design is here. The full site about the Media Lab device that used Nortel technology is here.

Lots of people can "discover" the same physical effect. I'm just curious whether the MIT Audio Spotlight is another name for Nortel's SoundBeam or something different that they developed separately. If the MIT guys/gals developed their own, it's natural to wonder what its relationship to SoundBeam is, considering it seems to have been invented around the same time the Media Lab was making prototypes with the Nortel technology. Perhaps Nortel's pre-existing patent moots the "race to millions" that the Technology Review story implies. Regardless, the story is obviously a little more complicated than the Technology Review article.

Yeah, they work for Corel, Alias, Hummingbird, MKS, Cognos, Zero Knowledge, Blackberry, Nothern Telecom ...

Did you look at Nortel? These guys have been in the phone business for over 100 years and they know how to do it right. They don't offer "low cost" solutions and definitely don't offer free solutions but, you can't go wrong with their products.

One of the products that might fit your needs very well is their Business Communications Manager. It is an all in one box for small businesses and branch offices. The Business Communications Manager(BCM) provides PBX funtionality for IP phones as well as standard analog and digital sets. It offers Interactive Voice Response(IVR), Call Center, Unified Messaging(voice mail, fax email), call routing and much more. Indeed, it offers just about all of the services of a full scale PBX, not a key system, a PBX. On top of all the voice stuff, the BCM also offers WAN routing and internet access features such as firewall, proxy and VPN services. Management is performed via a browser based GUI that is really excellent.

I have used this system on several occassions for international branch offices where, interoffice long distance calls and transfers were done over the internet with good results. Not always perfect results as the internet offers no QoS but good results for the most part. The businesses that use this setup feel that the long distance cost savings have more than made up for the occassional degradation in call quality. By the way, when the internet connection quality degrades to unaccepable levels the system automatically switches to POTS connections for new call setup (not IP calls already in progress). How much does it cost you to route your calls from Canada, South America or Europe to your HQ in the US? For these guys it only costs them the price of the BCM and an internet connection.

Did you look at Nortel? These guys have been in the phone business for over 100 years and they know how to do it right. They don't offer "low cost" solutions and definitely don't offer free solutions but, you can't go wrong with their products.

One of the products that might fit your needs very well is their Business Communications Manager. It is an all in one box for small businesses and branch offices. The Business Communications Manager(BCM) provides PBX funtionality for IP phones as well as standard analog and digital sets. It offers Interactive Voice Response(IVR), Call Center, Unified Messaging(voice mail, fax email), call routing and much more. Indeed, it offers just about all of the services of a full scale PBX, not a key system, a PBX. On top of all the voice stuff, the BCM also offers WAN routing and internet access features such as firewall, proxy and VPN services. Management is performed via a browser based GUI that is really excellent.

I have used this system on several occassions for international branch offices where, interoffice long distance calls and transfers were done over the internet with good results. Not always perfect results as the internet offers no QoS but good results for the most part. The businesses that use this setup feel that the long distance cost savings have more than made up for the occassional degradation in call quality. By the way, when the internet connection quality degrades to unaccepable levels the system automatically switches to POTS connections for new call setup (not IP calls already in progress). How much does it cost you to route your calls from Canada, South America or Europe to your HQ in the US? For these guys it only costs them the price of the BCM and an internet connection.

No, the distance limit cited is 100 meters. This is not 10G to your house from the CO over copper. It's 10G from your L2 switch in the closet to your other switch in the office. "Over copper" does not mean "last mile access".

current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber

Well, no. Here's a typical commercial 800 Gbps-per-fiber long-haul DWDM product (80 wavelengths x 10 Gbps/wavelength):

This one supports 120 10Gbps channels, designed for 160 at 50 GHz spacing.

OC-768 (40 Gbps) chipsets are all the rage, for 40 Gbps per individual wavelength, but a fiber carries more than one wavelength.

That sounds very reminiscent of the update procedure for my Baystack 350 switch which used bootp IIRC.

I don't guess you've ever admin'd a major mail machine, well that little computation on every piece of inbound mail would add quite a bit to the system load.

It only takes a little bit extra added here or there to make a system inefficient, this little extra calculation would add quite a bit with thousands of pieces of mail per minute passing through a mail machine, now add an extra bit of work for the MTA, now follow the ruleset for mail that doesn't match the key, now run that through the existing spam filters. It would make hardware vendors happy, likely not sys-admins just trying to keep old hardware running with all the belt tightening that has happened since the bust.

Then again you'd be a fool to run anything Microsoft without something like an Alteon in front of them.

You are a complete fucktard.

• Telecom giants join Linux effort
• Carrier Grade Linux
• Nortel Succession Communication Server 2000
• Cisco SIP Proxy
• Mitel 3050ICP
• Morotola Carrier Grade Chassis
• Motorola HA Linux
• Motorola VoIP
• Zultys Phones
• Zultys PBX
• SNOM Phones
• SNOM Media Server
• Asterisk
• Vovida

The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?

We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya systems, 3 Aspect systems, 3 Periphonics IVR's, a Concerto Unison and Concerto Contact Pro product. Reliability and redudancy are huge for us, a big piece of our business is a 24x7 call center that handles 3 million inbound calls plus another million or two outbound calls a month.

Unix systems were a must!!! They simply don't have problems. They are the most reliable systems I have ever seen. Period.

However, this may be overkill for you. If you understand what you are looking for and do your homework you will be ok.

BTW -- Telecom is one of the easiest ways to cut costs and impress your boss.

Nortel has some really good product: here, their VOIP handsets/desktop phones and software-based-voip-phones are *very* cool... coupled with a 802.11x AP, it is VERY COOL. Ipaq + 802.11x CF Nic + Nortel Software == wirless phone in your office.

Nortel has some really good product: here, their VOIP handsets/desktop phones and software-based-voip-phones are *very* cool... coupled with a 802.11x AP, it is VERY COOL. Ipaq + 802.11x CF Nic + Nortel Software == wirless phone in your office.

Nortel has some really good product: here, their VOIP handsets/desktop phones and software-based-voip-phones are *very* cool... coupled with a 802.11x AP, it is VERY COOL. Ipaq + 802.11x CF Nic + Nortel Software == wirless phone in your office.

As someone who has, on regular occasion, the responsibility of supporting Wireless access technologies for Companies, I can state categorically that the current standards are NOT up to scratch as yet.

What do I mean? Well, for a start I have lost track of the number of times individual machines on Wireless simply 'drop out' of communication, leading to perception on the part of our customers that this isn't a reliable , responsible technology.

We have seen, in implementing Wireless, a whole host of different issues - in ideal circumstances Wireless access works well, is fast enough to be used for most internal office purposes and so on.

The problem with Wireless in any form is that it is not as tollerant of non-ideal conditions. Adverse weather conditions (especially during the summer, when static build up knocks out entire Wireless networks on a regular basis), passing vehicles, other communication devices (especially mobile phones, which regardless of advancements in tech will continue to operate alongside any upgraded solution for some considerable time) and simple things like the type of clothing work by the person using the computer, have been known to knock a machine out of a WAN.

Solutions of phone technology over existing Cat5e UTP cable networking, such as that provided by Nortel Networks work well, with integration into existing office apps, but Wireless for Data is still, in the field, an unreliable technology. Wireless for VoIP still runs the issue of packet lossage (which on any Wireless solution i have ever seen runs at upwards of 25%), which is far more serious than equivalent signal loss for conventional mobile telecom solutions.

See Nortel UEMG9000 for info.
I used to work on this, and can say that its quite a robust system. Runs about 8000 POTS lines or 2000 xDSL, and also supports DS1 and TDM lines. Backbone is OC3 ATM with other options available. VOIP should be done now/soon but I don't believe Sprint went that route. The system has Echo Cancellation and all the other required perks to ensure good quality.
Used to.. Anyone need an embedded driver dev in RTP?

See UEMG9000
Networked over an OC3 ATM fiber link, with other options. 7900 POTS lines max, and can take DS1, xDSL, TDM, etc. VOIP is still in development afaik, but should be done soon.
I used to work on it, and its a pretty robust system. Anyone need an ex-Nortel embedded driver dev in RTP?

True story:

I had an Aironet 340 access point that was missing its antennae and required a damn serial cable and terminal to be configured by command line. I got sick of it, and decided to sell it on eBay. It went for $200 with multiple bids.

After that, I went and bought a D-Link 714P+ router, which had a built in switch, built in print server (works with Linux, although not supported), SPI, higher encryption (256 bit WEP), twice the speed if you use their hardware, anteannae, and Web Based administration (no shitty serial cable for me) for $170.

I actually made money by switching to a better product!

I can't imagine why anyone would buy Cisco equipment on the low end or the high end anymore, except for consistency among equipment maybe.

Additionally, it is very possible to accelerate SSL in hardware. In fact, the Sun project page [sun.com] itself talks about integrating ECC and SSL support into a hardware accellerator.

And there are lots of companies that sell stand-alone SSL accellerators.

Wow! someone wants to do something that doesn't require new technology to do! I'm truly amazed!

Considering this is the kind of thing certain companys have been trying to sell your ILECs for years, I have to wonder if it's actually a viable way to produce revenue, but I would love to see someone try it!

Here in the good old land of OZ, Nortel has been providing free one day sessions to their channel partners, resellers and major customers on what they call 'Security Solutions'. It was definately an eye opener to see one of their engineers show how easy it was to hack and DoS some of the machines setup in their lab. They spent the first part of the day doing some basic hacking and explaining some major vulnerabilities in systems and architectures. Not only at the network level but even in different OS's, and by the end of the day they've shown us (using their equipment of course) how to build a secure architecture. I'll give them one plug and say their Switched Firewall system is very cool. I've used Checkpoint before but I've never seen a Ckeckpoint firewall do 3.2Gb/s.

Here in the good old land of OZ, Nortel has been providing free one day sessions to their channel partners, resellers and major customers on what they call 'Security Solutions'. It was definately an eye opener to see one of their engineers show how easy it was to hack and DoS some of the machines setup in their lab. They spent the first part of the day doing some basic hacking and explaining some major vulnerabilities in systems and architectures. Not only at the network level but even in different OS's, and by the end of the day they've shown us (using their equipment of course) how to build a secure architecture. I'll give them one plug and say their Switched Firewall system is very cool. I've used Checkpoint before but I've never seen a Ckeckpoint firewall do 3.2Gb/s.

I addressed an earlier question about load balancing that is very pertinent to your question.

Put simply there is no better solution than a hardware one, for this situation. This Nortel solution does it all in one box. However, if your traffic load is great enough you might want to look at splitting out the functions across multiple boxes like these Nortel/Alteoon 180 Series switches. There is also a separate SSL concentrator/accelerator.

I addressed an earlier question about load balancing that is very pertinent to your question.

Put simply there is no better solution than a hardware one, for this situation. This Nortel solution does it all in one box. However, if your traffic load is great enough you might want to look at splitting out the functions across multiple boxes like these Nortel/Alteoon 180 Series switches. There is also a separate SSL concentrator/accelerator.

You better check again. There is a wonderful world of switches out there now. Every kind of switch from layer 2 through layer 7. There are many other manufacturers offering similar products too.

The difference between these "switches" and the layer 3 routers that you are use to is the hardware architecture. While older routers consisted of routing code on a CPU passing packets through the CPU and out the appropriate interface, these layer 3-7 switches use ASICs(Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to process the packets rather than the CPU. This translates into a MUCH higher throughput than the CPU based router could ever handle.

If you get in medium to large networks you will see these switches everywhere. Switches with 128 or more gigabit ethernet ports all switching at line speed. Your Alcatel DSL router or Cisco 2600 doesn't even know what line speed is.

Indeed, there are layer 7 switches. Some of the Nortel/Alteon switches can even switch based on URLs. Makes for a much faster hosting site.

Nortel Network's Succession products do have SIP as well as H.323 compatability, and they are designed for building large VoIP networks. Also see SIPCenter for other venders. Hopefully we will see services built with this stuff soon, and then SIP phones, and SIP software for your PC will be more useful.

Similar stuff has already been deployed and is in use today. Here are two examples. The first is a MCI Worldcom deployment from 2001. Your voice calls and data are already flowing around the world on these pipes. The second is, perhaps surprisingly, a Chinese deployment. I'm sure that there are others too but, frankly I can't be bothered to look them up. I know, from personal involvement that there are several other high-speed installations around but, these do not span such great distances. Rather the are 30 and 70 mile rings around metropolitan areas but, they are just as fast and in one case even faster.

Similar stuff has already been deployed and is in use today. Here are two examples. The first is a MCI Worldcom deployment from 2001. Your voice calls and data are already flowing around the world on these pipes. The second is, perhaps surprisingly, a Chinese deployment. I'm sure that there are others too but, frankly I can't be bothered to look them up. I know, from personal involvement that there are several other high-speed installations around but, these do not span such great distances. Rather the are 30 and 70 mile rings around metropolitan areas but, they are just as fast and in one case even faster.

More info:

Nortel's Contivity product supports this. The normal idea is that you use it across the internet, but you can use it on a totally insecure wireless like ieee802.11b.

See Contivity

Yet again Cisco's marketing machine is taking credit, where none is due. The Cisco version of these products might be new, as of summer 2001. But, the technology and the market are several years old.

Numerous companies have been shipping this technology for years. It is used in many hotels to provide high-speed internet access.

One of the first, and probably the best of them all is Elastic Networks, a spin-off of Nortel Networks. See also, Tut Systems and there are more.

Nothing new here, just the same old Cisco BS.

That one fluorescent light bulb in the chamber sounded like a swarm of bees.

and silence truly is golden

I am sitting not more than 3 feet from a Nortel internet phone. It works just like a regular phone as far as I'm concerned, except it shares my lan with my PC through a 3 port 10/100 switch. here's the product page.

From the article: "We risk losing our leadership role."

We can't loose something we don't have, Finland had the first commercial mobile networks, the first digital GSM networks and soon will be amongst the first UMTS networks, a few months after the same can be said for the rest of Europe.

Let's not kid ourselves, they were ahead to start with and continue to be, American is great for many things but our mobile networks have always sucked. I'm not sure if it's even a matter of leapfrogging, the Europeans were installing digital GSM networks in the late 80's and early 90's whilst at the same time we were still deploying analog technology, of varying standards.

This mess needs to be sorted out, this is a critical infrastructure like the highways (or slashdot), when you have former Eastern Block countries with better cellular services than NY it's a disgrace. I'm a libertarian, but the free market has really failed us here.

I'm sincerely disappointed with the state of things, and it only gets worse, the providers are too busy cramming yet more subscribers onto the overburdened networks instead of solving the core problems with the infrastructure. And the market isn't solving a thing, because the competition is doing exactly the same thing.

Probably has more to do with the fact they figured out that they can make a LOT more money with PPPOE than any other access method...

Don't expect to see your setup times go down, either, cause that DSL system is still running through and ATM network :)

Check it! Money Making Hardware for SBC

Actually, Sprint switched to CDMA from PCS 1920, which was a GSM based system. They originally deployed in the Washington DC area, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, and a few other cities using a GSM based system called PCS 1920. After they deployed these systems they decided to switch to CDMA. At that point, they did a buildout of CDMA systems but maintained the PCS 1920 system for a while and eventually phased it out.

This system was definitely GSM based, though. My company was intimately involved in the original buildout. We designed it. I and others, wrote the software that the engineers used to design the system. Now, if Sprint is still using the term PCS or someone else is using it, for some other type of system, that's fine. The originaly PCS system from Sprint, was a GSM based system at 1920 mHz.

Now, I can't prove everything above, but here's a GSM PCS 1920 phone by Nortel but maybe there was never a PCS 1920 GSM based network for this phone. Maybe it was just something they made as a joke. You be the judge.

I was going to send off for one of those mousepads from Museum of e-failure but I realized I could just use of my old ones from Nortel Networks and achieve the same effect.

Systems were made to be circumvented.

When I worked for [large un-named Candian Telecom giant], our management was convinced that unix workstations automatically shared their processor loads. So each manager had a nice workstation running nothing but a screen saver.

Can't they place the DSL termination (DSLAM) in the curb box ? Well, the answer is flatly no.

Really? You might want to check with Alcatel or Lucent or AFC or NEC or Nortel about that.

(Maybe they don't go into curb boxes, but they do go into the neighborhood DLC remote terminal....)

Trial participants received a Palm* handheld computer equipped with a Rand McNally global positioning satellite transceiver. Participants are able to quickly access services based on location via the Palm.Net* service from Palm*, Inc.

Current services are things like "where's an ATM", "Get me a cab to where I am", etc.

BEGIN OPINIONS

When talking about reliability of this information, there are two big chunks:

• how reliable with a cooperative user?
• how reliable with a deceptive user?

I think a cooperative, security aware user could make a case for using this technology to prove their location to a civil court standard; getting a criminal court standard beyond a reasonable doubt requires the second.

And that's hard! You can't trust devices in the hands of deceptive users; any private/public key in the device can be cloned.

Possibly you could build protocols that relied on continuous availablity - but then how do you deal with, say, airplane travel? I'm thinking of things like negotiation every time you cross a cell boundary to establish that the unit with identity A exiting cell site Q is the same one that entered. It'd probably have heaps of false negatives - wireless just isn't that reliable.

Henry Troup Nortel Networks eXtremeVoice

My personal position or opinion should not be confused with the position or opinion of Nortel Networks.

Don't forget that QNX will release RTP on Monday, and Sun has released Solaris on both Sparc & Intel platforms (and source too).
Additionally Nortel has released FIPA-OS for agent based transactions.
Add these to Linux (don't forget HURD), BSD, Inferno, Plan 9, the traditional UNIXs, and of course the Windows family there are almost too many choices.
All we need now is for Palm & Microsoft to joint the open source crowd.
Any chance of Compaq releasing VMS? How about IBM releasing VM & MVS?

I work at Nortel Networks. There are very many females in my work area. In my group of twelve people, there are 5 women. That's a pretty good figure, if you think about it. All of them know high-level programming languages, the most relevant to our work being PERL. The age range is also ver large, from 1st year university co-ops to my group manager, who has obviously gotten further than many men.

TransportNode X/40 SDH Radio

at 310Mbps that's not bad... Although i'm not quite sure the distance of these things neither how far the island is, but this is just cool *G*

M'eh, i'm just trying to get PIPE for my server out here in the Rookies... (DualPiii@750, 382MB ECC, Two 9.1Ultra160 LVD SCSI HD, G400 32MB Dual-head)

--
Jesse Tie Ten Quee - tie@linux.ca - highos@highos.com
http://highos.dhs.org

Is nothing sacred? :-)

AFNI

Nortel Networks has already been pushing this envelope with their 1 meg modem. Nice to see the rest of the market frantically trying to play catchup before Nortel finally blows them all away with fibre to your door. They're already the leading supplier of optical gigabit networks, and the ONLY company selling terabit networks. These modems are pretty piddly.