Abandonware

So Windows Xp is end of life on 2014-04-08 (a nice avoidance of April Fools Day). I originally thought that was fair enough, but is is really? To abandon a user base that large is taking a huge risk with the planet's computing infrastructure and it seems rather irresponsible of Microsoft to simply walk away muttering "Windows 8.1" after making enough billions for their founder to seek to address world poverty in his spare time.

Not that Apple is any better. It looks like about half of Apple's hardware has been cut off from support by Apple's abandonment of their 32-bit Intel platform. Ironically those machines have a 32/64-bit CPU and all it would take is a UEFI update to bring those machines back into the fold again.

Linux is an answer to abandoned Windows Xp users. But it's not as simple as it at first appears. For example, if you need an Exchange e-mail client you really need to be using Evolution from GNOME3 (the Evolution Exchange connector with GNOME2 simply has too many bugs which have since been solved). But it's harder to imagine a user interface further removed from Windows Xp than GNOME3. Sure there's shell extensions and tweak tools for the expert, but it's an unreasonable step for people coming from Windows Xp. I'm really hoping Cinnamon is the answer here but I've yet to try it.

Anyway, expect to see abandonware adopted as the latest threat by the secutitatii. Be interesting if they can find a way to make a quid from it, as they usually manage to do. Microsoft isn't holding back from the feeding trough: their online store has Windows 8.1 downloadable for a mere A$399. You'd almost think they'd rather you purchased one of their tablets.

SDN, QoS and SIP

Software defined networks are big in the data centre: there are many startups because that's where the money is. But SDN is also very useful in the wide area.

Take the vexed issue of SIP handsets at customer sites. What we really want to do is admission control of those handsets' traffic into the Voice QoS class. Then hacked softphones can't run a denial of service into the Voice QoS class.

There's a whole IETF architecture to do this: integrated services. But no one uses it. It is complex, support isn't very widespread, and all the difficult questions are pushed to a "bandwidth broker" which requires too much knowledge of the network topology.

SDN gives us another approach. Set up the IETF Differentiated Services in the core. At the edge do admission control into that DiffServ core. But how to do the admission control when there so little support for IntServ?

The obvious thing to do is for the SIP entity which SIP-routes the call to send a note to the OpenFlow controller, which then puts some rules on the edge switch above the customer to admit the flow into the QoS class (at a minimum: for the specified IP address and UDP port, rewrite the DSCP to EF).

Yeah, all of this is an obvious application of SDNs. But in this age of software patents, that's well worth saying.