Author: Vivek Rajagopalan

Mark Spencer recounted the history of Digium / Asterisk at a linux users group meeting recently.

Check it out http://socializedsoftware.com/2008/03/16/digium-founder-mark-spencer-recounts-the-history-of-open-source-asterisk-pbx/

Money was tight at Digium until one day a salesman from DeltaCom (a southeastern competitive local exchange carrier) walked in to sell Mark and Jim a T1. After understanding what Mark and Jim had built the salesman offered to help them out gratis. From that point on they started seeing a steady increase in sales, and ended the year with a profit. After living on a meager income for so long Mark was able to grow the business without dipping too deep into the profits. 

I am a big fan of Asterisk, especially the much underappreciated IAX2 protocol. Mark’s journey has some lessons for Indian grassroots entrepreneurs such as myself.

• Make code. Didnt Mao say something like “First, build a strong base” ?
• Entrepreneurship is a journey. Not only should you be able to ride out periods of heavy work and low revenue, but also be able to enjoy it. If you grin and bear it, your heart is not in it. 
• Do not look at VC funding as a way to get into “salaried mode”. It rarely works that way.
• There is room to innovate in the linux / embedded / server / 64-bit / multicore and networking areas. It is intriguing to see so many ads from startups advertising for “challenging” PHP/Joomla/Google SEM jobs in the fledgeling social networking industry.

 

 

Microsoft, today made a huge announcement. They have opened the specifications to most of  their core protocols. For guys like us in the protocol and network analysis community, this is huge, *really* huge.

Announcement from Bob Muglia (Senior VP, Servers and Tools at Microsoft)

When sourcing technology solutions, interoperability is among the most critical issues for IT decision makers and developers. At Microsoft, we strive to create software and solutions that follow a principle of ‘interoperability by design.’ As the leading platform developer, it is essential that we participate in stimulating the design and development of new applications with interoperability in mind. Microsoft Protocol Programs are a great example of this principle in action.

 

There seem to be some protocols for which there might be patent issues. I am currently reading the legal page for more. They have “promised” not to pursue their patent claims against open source tools. Wait, this promise seems to be void if the distributor derives revenues in connection with the distribution. Anyway, I sent an email to infodoc@ for clarification.

Unsniff supports the SMB protocol, we would like to align it with the offical spec – since our implementation relies largely on Samba. In addition, we are going to support analyzing the RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). RDP has been notoriously hard to reverse.

I am looking forward to this exercise because

• A great opportunity to improve the documentation of our API.
• We plan to publish the source and involve the community as we proceed.
• It only takes an XML file to describe even the most complex protocols in Unsniff (look at the SMB.xml or worse at the horrendous H.225/H.245 XML files in your Program Files folder after you install Unsniff). There is no C code to be written.
• We can develop cool applications on top of the analysis layer using our C++ API
• We can generate most sample traffic ourselves instead of relying on customer feedback and fuzzing.

The starting point is this page :

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx

So, CIFS and RDP – here we come.

Do you teach computer networks ? Are you a student who wants to learn about networks, protocols, and security ? You might be interested in this screencast.

Screencast Details

Teaching computer networking does not have to involve getting your students to look at hex dumps or protocol trees. Highly intuitive graphics and built in help can make it painless to communicate advanced concepts to your class.

For a limited period we are allowing an extended trial period to select universities.

Click on the picture to view the video (will open in new window)

 

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