Boise State ditches Cisco DNS

Boise State University, the largest university in Idaho, has replaced its aging Cisco Network Registrar software with appliances from BlueCat Networks that it says are easier to manage and less expensive to operate for Domain Name System  and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol services. The fiber-optic backbone network is being upgraded to 10G Ethernet in December, with 100Mbps bandwidth to the desktop. Boise State's network links more than 170 buildings spread across its 175-acre campus in downtown Boise. The network carries data and voice traffic, and it supports 2,300 IP-based phones.

But when it comes to core network infrastructure services such as DNS and DHCP, the university decided Cisco's Network Registrar was too expensive to operate. Boise State is a Cisco shop; the university uses all Cisco switches, routers, IP phones, wireless access points and wireless controllers on its network, which supports 21,000 students, faculty and staff. Case study: The Google-ization of Bechtel   Boise State isn't the only organization to discover that it could save money by switching from DNS software to DNS appliances. Boise State had the same problem. The Nevada Department of Corrections recently bought DNS appliances from BlueCat rival Infoblox to replace DNS software from Novell that was requiring too much time from network administrators. Until this summer, the university was running an old edition of Cisco Network Registrar - Version 5.5, which was at the end of its life - on a Windows server for its DNS and DHCP services. "It was very limited as far as what was actually in the database for DNS and DHCP, and what you could see through the [graphical user interface]," says Diane Dragone, network engineer at Boise State. "There was no easy way to see what was really in the database except through command line tools." In addition, Boise State had to do custom coding in order to make this older version of Cisco Network Registrar work with all the vendor tags needed for DHCP. Boise State needed to upgrade the Cisco Network Registrar software, but that option was too expensive, Dragone says.

Dragone explored several alternatives, including DNS software from Novell, Microsoft and Men & Mice. Cisco ended support for Cisco Network Registrar Version 5.5 in May 2006, and it is now selling Version 7.0 of the software. "We didn't want to pay the price for upgrading the software; it became extremely expensive," Dragone says. But eventually she zeroed in on appliances, and ended up testing devices from BlueCat and Infoblox. The retail cost of the two appliances was $26,000. "It came down to cost," Dragone says. "Plus, there were a couple things in the [interface] of the management system that I liked better, but they were very small." Dragone said installation of the Adonis 1000s was easy. "I spent a few weeks on my own learning the interfaces on the Adonis system, the GUI interface and the command-line interface, until I had a good comfort level. Boise State bought two BlueCat Adonis 1000 appliances, which are set up to be redundant to each other. Then I did a testbed of two small buildings…to roll them onto the system for DNS and DHCP so we could test our Active Directory integration and our VoIP to make sure we had no issues," she explains.

She says she can patch the appliances in the middle of the work day, rather than scheduling off-hours maintenance. Dragone said it took three weeks to migrate the entire campus network to the DNS and DHCP services from the BlueCat appliances. "We had no helpdesk calls as a result of the conversion," she says. "People didn't really know it happened." Dragone's favorite features of the Adonis system are the search capabilities and the instantaneous replication between the master and slave systems. Boise State hasn't experienced any outages or other significant problems with the BlueCat appliances. "I have no complaints whatsoever," Dragone says. "I like all the reports that you can look at. That has really come in handy." Operating modern appliances is a lot easier than keeping aging software running, Dragone says. "There are savings headache wise," Dragone says. "I spent an entire week in December trying to figure something out that never got resolved. The other thing I really like is the tool for checking your DNS database before you deploy your configuration. There were a lot of band-aid fixes on the old system to the point where we were shuffling around where the DHCP was coming from." Cisco declined to comment for this article.

Among BlueCat's higher ed customers are UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Michigan and the University of Calgary. Branko Miskov, director of product management at BlueCat Networks, says more universities like Boise State are migrating to appliances for DNS and DHCP services. This segment now represents more than 10% of BlueCat's sales. "We've actually had some pretty significant traction in the higher ed market…in the last 18 months," Miskov says. "They're a little more diverse in terms of the feature sets they use, whereas a lot of enterprises are pretty much uniform. The dorms have different requirements than the university buildings, so they really use the full extent of our gear." Miskov says universities are upgrading their core network services in response to the explosion of IP devices in dorm rooms, such as computers, PDAs and gaming consoles. "Each dorm room might require three or four IP addresses, and that's not even thinking about the faculty requirements," Miskov says. "For those that are rolling out VoIP, that introduces a whole slew of new IP addresses into the mix and makes it harder to manage."

Gonzalez pleads guilty to TJX, other data heists

The man described by federal authorities as the mastermind of the massive data thefts at TJX Companies Inc., Heartland Payment Systems and other retailers today pleaded guilty to charges in a 19-count indictment that include conspiracy, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. That case was being prosecuted separately in New York but was merged with the case in Boston under a plea agreement negotiated with prosecutors a few days ago. Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud related to a data theft at Dave & Buster's restaurant chain.

Gonzalez is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 8 by U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris in Boston. Under the plea agreement, Gonzalez will serve between 15 and 25 years for both cases and will be fined as much as $250,000 for each of the charges. He faces a maximum of 25 years in prison for the charges in Boston and 20 years for the case in New York. Gonzalez will also forfeit more than $2.7 million in cash as well as multiple pieces of real estate and personal property, including a condominium in Miami, a BMW and several Rolex watches that he is alleged to have acquired through his ill-gotten gains. Gonzalez was arrested in Miami in 2008 along with 10 other individuals on charges relating to the thefts at TJX, Dave & Busters, BJ's Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, Forever 21 and DSW. In August, federal authorities in New Jersey indicted Gonzalez on charges involving breaches at Heartland Payment Systems, Hannaford, 7-Eleven Inc. and two other unnamed retailers. About $1 million of the money being forfeited was recovered from a container buried in Gonzalez' back yard, according to a statement released today by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Prosecutors alleged that Gonzalez, along with two unnamed Russian conspirators, stole more than 130 million credit and debit cards from the five retailers. It is not clear if Gonzalez was the leader of a worldwide criminal gang or merely acting at the behest of powerful crime gangs based in Russia and East Europe. Today's plea brings to an end, for the moment, to the career of a hacker who federal authorities say has been the mastermind of the biggest data thefts in U.S. history. But his actions, which his lawyer has claimed stemmed from a computer addiction , have caused millions of dollars in losses to his victims. In addition, some of the companies that were Gonzalez's victims have had to pay fines to Visa and the other card brands for being noncompliant with the credit card industry's Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and to spend more money to revamp their security controls. TJX has publicly estimated that costs to the company from the data breach will touch $200 million . Heartland has already spent or set aside more than $12 million and is facing numerous lawsuits from affected institutions.

No 'confirming or denying' by Verizon, but Motorola's Tao Android phone spotted at CTIA

SAN DIEGO - Verizon Wireless and Google Inc. this week announced Android phones , but an earlier report that Motorola's new Tao Android smartphone (photo, below) might be announced by Verizon on Oct. 6 has not come true. At Motorola's booth at CTIA, a Motorola worker smiled Wednesday when asked about Tao, but then said, "We're not confirming anything about that, only that there will be more Android phones" in addition to the recently announced Cliq . The Cliq was on display for the first time, drawing excited attention from visitors, and will be sold by T-Mobile USA for $200. Pre-orders of the Cliq for existing T-Mobile customers begin Oct. 19, and store sales will begin nationwide on Nov 2. The Tao has excited mobile enthusiasts because it is reportedly the thinnest slider QWERTY-keyboard smartphone, measuring 13.7 mm thick (about half an inch) and sporting a 3.7-inch touchscreen display, and 16 GB of internal storage. A Verizon spokesman said Wednesday, "We are not confirming or denying" a report carried recently by MobileCrunch that predicted Verizon would likely announce the Tao on Oct. 6 , and would ship the device on Dec. 1. However, Verizon is apparently at work with Motorola on the Tao (also dubbed Sholes or Droid), based on comments from several analysts and other observers at the wireless trade show International CTIA, who confirmed they had seen the device. MobileCrunch said it is supposed to run the next generation of Android 2.0, code-named Eclair, but that release is not going to be available until the second quarter of 2010, said Gartner Inc. analyst Ken Dulaney, meaning it would be too late for the Tao if released Dec. 1.

Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation leader soaks in stinging critique

After a stinging critique from a noted expert in establishing consortia, the leader of Microsoft's new CodePlex Foundation says such frank evaluation is welcome because the open source group's structure is a work in progress. The CodePlex Foundation's aim is to get open source and proprietary software companies working together. Sam Ramji, who is interim president of the CodePlex Foundation, was responding to last week's blog by Andy Updegrove, who said the group has a poorly crafted governance structure and looks like a sort of "alternative universe" of open source development. Updegrove, a lawyer, noted expert on standards, and founder of ConsortiumInfo.org, laid out in a blog post five things Microsoft must change if it wants CodePlex to succeed: create a board with no fewer than 11 members; allow companies to have no more than one representative on the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors; organize board seats by category; establish membership classes with rights to nominate and elect directors; and commit to an open membership policy.

He added, however, "There are some best practices [for running the boards of non-profits] that we are not as familiar with as we would want to be." Slideshow: Top 10 open source apps for Windows  Stephanie Davies Boesch, the foundation's secretary and treasurer, is the only board member with experience sitting on a non-profit's board. Despite the stinging tone in Updegrove's assessment, Ramji says he is thankful for the feedback. "Andy's been incredibly generous with his expertise and recommendations," Ramji says. "It is the kind of input and participation we were hoping to get by doing what is probably non-traditional for Microsoft but not necessarily non-traditional for non-profit foundations, which is to basically launch as a beta." For instance, Ramji says that the decision to go with only five people on the board came from Microsoft's experience that larger groups often have difficulty with decision making. Ramji says Updegrove's suggestion to have academic representation on the board was "outstanding. And basically it is re-writable. We did not think of that." And to Updegrove's point on becoming an open membership organization, Ramji says, "our goal is to become a membership organization and Andy has some excellent recommendations for that."He says the fact that Updegrove took the time to respond "in the format that he did is more proof that there is something worth doing here." Ramji, compares the Foundation's formation to the early days of a software development project. "We have said in these first 100 days we are looking at everything as a beta.

Obviously, there are some areas like contributions and licensing agreements we put a lot of time into but even those can be modified." Microsoft announced the foundation Sept. 10 with a stated goal "to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities." The company seeded the group with $1 million and Microsoft employees dominated the interim board of directors and board of advisors. One is a call for a broad independent organization that can bridge cultural and licensing gaps in order to help commercial developers participate in open source. Ramji says the foundation has spent the past couple of weeks listening to feedback in "Twitter messages, email, and phone calls in order to understand what people hope this can be." Within that feedback two patterns have emerged, Ramji says. The other focuses on creating a place where open source .Net developers can gain strong backing. "Look at projects related to Mono, you also can look at NUnit, NHibernate, we really feel optimistic that the Foundation could help them gain a higher level of credibility in the open source community. Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project and the creator of the Gnome desktop, is a member of the Foundation's interim board of directors. They feel they have been lacking that strong moral support," Ramji says.

From a high level, Ramji says the Foundation stands as a sort of enabler that helps independent developers, companies and developers working for those companies navigate the nuances and practices of open source development so they can either contribute source code to projects or open source their own technologies. "One suggestion has been that the Foundation should house all the best practices we have seen software companies and open source communities use," said Ramji. "We want to have a place where everyone interested in how to participate can come and read and if they choose they can use our license agreements or can use the legal structure of the Foundation to grant patent licenses and copyrights for developers and derivative works." Those licensing agreements have a distinct focus, Ramji said, on the rights that are related to code that is being contributed and on how to contribute the patent rights on that code. Ramji says the goal is to service multiple projects, multiple technologies and multiple platforms rather than having one specific technology base, which is how most current open source foundations are structured. "It's early days and we have received a lot of good ideas from experts in a variety of fields from law to code to policy that is what we had hoped for," says Ramji. "Someone wrote it is nice to see Microsoft engaging early on without all the answers and to have the community solve what they would like to see. Once those issues are settled, code would be submitted using existing open source licenses. That is satisfying for me and refreshing to others. This is the right way to proceed." Follow John on Twitter

Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation leader soaks in stinging critique

After a stinging critique from a noted expert in establishing consortia, the leader of Microsoft's new CodePlex Foundation says such frank evaluation is welcome because the open source group's structure is a work in progress. The CodePlex Foundation's aim is to get open source and proprietary software companies working together. Sam Ramji, who is interim president of the CodePlex Foundation, was responding to last week's blog by Andy Updegrove, who said the group has a poorly crafted governance structure and looks like a sort of "alternative universe" of open source development. Updegrove, a lawyer, noted expert on standards, and founder of ConsortiumInfo.org, laid out in a blog post five things Microsoft must change if it wants CodePlex to succeed: create a board with no fewer than 11 members; allow companies to have no more than one representative on the Board of Directors or Board of Advisors; organize board seats by category; establish membership classes with rights to nominate and elect directors; and commit to an open membership policy.

He added, however, "There are some best practices [for running the boards of non-profits] that we are not as familiar with as we would want to be." Slideshow: Top 10 open source apps for Windows  Stephanie Davies Boesch, the foundation's secretary and treasurer, is the only board member with experience sitting on a non-profit's board. Despite the stinging tone in Updegrove's assessment, Ramji says he is thankful for the feedback. "Andy's been incredibly generous with his expertise and recommendations," Ramji says. "It is the kind of input and participation we were hoping to get by doing what is probably non-traditional for Microsoft but not necessarily non-traditional for non-profit foundations, which is to basically launch as a beta." For instance, Ramji says that the decision to go with only five people on the board came from Microsoft's experience that larger groups often have difficulty with decision making. Ramji says Updegrove's suggestion to have academic representation on the board was "outstanding. And basically it is re-writable. We did not think of that." And to Updegrove's point on becoming an open membership organization, Ramji says, "our goal is to become a membership organization and Andy has some excellent recommendations for that."He says the fact that Updegrove took the time to respond "in the format that he did is more proof that there is something worth doing here." Ramji, compares the Foundation's formation to the early days of a software development project. "We have said in these first 100 days we are looking at everything as a beta. Obviously, there are some areas like contributions and licensing agreements we put a lot of time into but even those can be modified." Microsoft announced the foundation Sept. 10 with a stated goal "to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities." The company seeded the group with $1 million and Microsoft employees dominated the interim board of directors and board of advisors.

One is a call for a broad independent organization that can bridge cultural and licensing gaps in order to help commercial developers participate in open source. Ramji says the foundation has spent the past couple of weeks listening to feedback in "Twitter messages, email, and phone calls in order to understand what people hope this can be." Within that feedback two patterns have emerged, Ramji says. The other focuses on creating a place where open source .Net developers can gain strong backing. "Look at projects related to Mono, you also can look at NUnit, NHibernate, we really feel optimistic that the Foundation could help them gain a higher level of credibility in the open source community. Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project and the creator of the Gnome desktop, is a member of the Foundation's interim board of directors. They feel they have been lacking that strong moral support," Ramji says. From a high level, Ramji says the Foundation stands as a sort of enabler that helps independent developers, companies and developers working for those companies navigate the nuances and practices of open source development so they can either contribute source code to projects or open source their own technologies. "One suggestion has been that the Foundation should house all the best practices we have seen software companies and open source communities use," said Ramji. "We want to have a place where everyone interested in how to participate can come and read and if they choose they can use our license agreements or can use the legal structure of the Foundation to grant patent licenses and copyrights for developers and derivative works." Those licensing agreements have a distinct focus, Ramji said, on the rights that are related to code that is being contributed and on how to contribute the patent rights on that code.

Ramji says the goal is to service multiple projects, multiple technologies and multiple platforms rather than having one specific technology base, which is how most current open source foundations are structured. "It's early days and we have received a lot of good ideas from experts in a variety of fields from law to code to policy that is what we had hoped for," says Ramji. "Someone wrote it is nice to see Microsoft engaging early on without all the answers and to have the community solve what they would like to see. Once those issues are settled, code would be submitted using existing open source licenses. That is satisfying for me and refreshing to others. This is the right way to proceed." Follow John on Twitter