“The annual pilgrimage of computer professionals during the
second week of May to Las Vegas for the Networld+Interop Conference
and Exhibition successfully brought together people from many
industries and countries, all looking for solutions to their
networking problems or the next great networking technology. The
conference is a merger of two earlier conferences: Networld,
focused on Novell’s networking and platform issues, and Interop,
focused on Internet network technologies. It has become much more
and now includes voice over IP, 64-bit operating systems, security
software, Internet appliances, routers and switches, and
integration software. Among those, I discovered a number of Linux
gems.”
“The conference itself was probably most exciting to Linux users
who work specifically on new networking technologies. Most of the
talks focused on current and emerging network technologies such as
voice over IP, IPv6, IPsec, DSL, multiservice WANs, and such. They
were fairly platform independent, which is fine for a networking
conference. The real action was taking place on the exhibition
floor — that is, if you could skip past the standard run of
conference gimmicks and go straight to those companies touting
Linux technology.“
“Small rack-mountable appliance servers were out in force,
giving companies such as Cobalt Networks a bit of future
competition. I saw a number of small companies exhibiting their 1U
height servers. Network Engines offered their WebEngine line of
clusterable 1U height servers, the Celeron-based Roadster LX and
the dual Pentium III based Viper LX. The company also had a
AdminEngine server for administrating clusters of its WebEngine
systems. Unfortunately, AdminEngine runs NT, although it can manage
Linux-based WebEngines.”