A fine line between blogging and advertising.
As I was making my final read through bloglines before calling it a night, I noticed a new post on StillSecureAfterAllTheseYears.com. The post is, surprise!, yet another on NAC... but that's cool everyone seems to be talking about it these days... It's on a new feature in Extreme XOS. The "new" feature isn't that new... Cisco users may recognize it as DHCP Snooping with IP Source Guard or even NetReg wth a few custom scripts to query DHCP leases and enable/disable switch ports (which would be entirely free btw). So Alan's post is describing how if you don't want to the infrastructure change to support 802.1x and are stuck with DHCP NAC then Extreme offers this amazing new feature.
The problem is that none of this is new... While I was still working at the college we were discussing implementing NetReg with some custom scripts.. I even had a test implementation up and running... and Cisco's DHCP Snooping with IP Source Guard has been around for a little bit now... So where does that leave us... From a pure technology standpoint we have nothing that would be considered "new technology"... From a product standpoint we have a product that has finally implemented features that the competition has.
One thing I've done lately is attack people for their bias... Agnitum, WebRoot and now Alan Shimel... At least Alan can come out and say that he's biased... which makes this read even more like a press release or advertising than a blog post that's informing readers. This "new" feature has only one target audience to whom it's an advantage.... existing Extreme customers because they previously lacked this feature... and at least it is somewhat presented that way..."Here's a new "nice to have", should you already have the equipment"...
I'd previously heard good things about Extreme... some friends had tested and deployed the software and had spoken highly of it... especially of the NAC features... Having never used it personally, I can only reiterate the description I was given... the description of a device that allowed all the benefits of 802.1x without requiring an OS that supported 802.1x because it relied on a webpage for authentication, making it function seemlessly cross-platform.
I also enjoyed reading StillSecureAfterAllTheseYears... It's a regular on my daily list of blogs to read and generally one of the first ones I'll read if I see it updated in bloglines. But I go to blogs for information and entertainment... not to read ads.
Perhaps a better way to approach this would have been to do what most vendors do... involve a third party... There are plenty of sites that provide reviews of hardware and software that has been provided to them... Hell.. Extreme can send me a switch and not only will I review Trusted DHCP Server but I'll review all the features of XOS... I'd be more than happy too... but I'm not associated with it... so I can provide an unbiased opinion...
HT
So yes I am biased on Extreme because of our partnership with them. In terms of is this new or not, I will defer to what I have been told by the Extreme folks. They claim this is new and not something Cisco or others can do. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the feature to say for sure. I will forward the comments to the Extreme folks though and see what they say.
With all of the BS that flew around about DHCP NAC being avoided, if Cisco could have locked this down, I think they would have said so. I am glad and flattered you read my blog, will try to keep the PR down
I am going to invite an Extreme technical rep on the podcast to discuss this, perhaps you would like to join us and discuss this further?
alan
Obviously, haven’t not played with the Extreme gear I cant say for sure that it’s the exact same as DHCP Snooping with IP Source Guard but it sure sounds like it. (Information on DHCP Snooping and IP Source Guard are available in the 6500 series configuration guide.
I’ll be interested to see what the Extreme folks have to say about this versus their Trusted DHCP Server… and depending on the time and length of the dicussion, I may very well be interested in joining in. Fire me off an email with more details.
Unfortunately it is very common for companies to do this. Probably the main reason is that the press releases are done by the not-so-technical people. You can find two other examples of this over at my blog: http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2007/01/dont-claim-that-you-have-revolutionary.html
Cd-MaN, not only is it common, there’s actually a company with the business model of making it easy to hire bloggers as shills en mass, sick yet devious ain’t it?:
http://payperpost.com/
And Episteme … plugging your book in a repost-as-comment on an article on posts-as-ads: snide, man, snide.
*blink* misread that. But yah, c’mon, it’s TECHNOLOGY everything is a REVOLUTION! Not even just shiny-brochure marketing either. Who cares about xmlhttprequest, it’s AJAX! What do you mean you used PHP in 1999, you weren’t a LAMP developer, couldn’t have been, they hadn’t invented the word yet.