In the previous post we looked at the fundamental building blocks of physical and virtual networks. Now let us look at two key concepts in physical and virtual networks. They are Ports and VLAN.

In order understand Virtual Networking let us start with the simplest network that many of us operate every day – our home network. The picture below captures what a typical home network looks like. I am sure most of us use wireless rather than wired networks at home but the underlying concepts are very much alike.

Upcoming technologies like OpenFlow and SDN are altering the networking landscape very quickly. The underlying drivers are Cloud Computing and Virtualization. Servers, Storage and Networking make up the trinity for effective Cloud computing strategy. Servers and Storage Virtualization has helped drive the adoption of flexible cloud services already. Now it is time for Network Virtualization.

At the beginning of the year, Scott Lowe, a specialist in virtualization, networking and storage, posted his project list for 2012. He had set a few goals for his learning and development. Last week [Scott posted an honest assessment][1] of how he has been performing on his own goals.

Why would anyone share their personal goals on the Internet? Because once you share your goals, visitors of your blog and people who know you would like to know how you are progressing. This curiosity will result in a sense of accountability and push you to ensure systematic progress on those goals. Another benefit is that you will plan your goals and the deliverables better.

If you write networking or IO oriented programs using Java, there will be several situations where the code on the server will catch multiple exceptions. Most of the times the exceptions are logged, sometimes they are logged and re-thrown.

Companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo generate a large chunk of their revenue from online marketing and advertisement. The revenue from this activity runs into billions of dollars. With large amounts of money involved it is imperative that we are able to track the effectiveness of online marketing and advertising campaigns.

This review is for the three chapters related to Java from the book “Cracking the C, C++ and Java Interview” by S G Ganesh. Buy from Flipkart.com or Amazon.com

Hiring is one of the most important activity for any manager. And the first task in the hiring process, is to write a job description. A “Job Description” is a narrative that describes the different aspects of the job such as responsibility, functions, skills etc. But in practice a typical Job Description (or JD) contains disproportionately more text on the skills required rather than the nature of work itself. A well written Job Description will give potential candidates a very good idea of what they can expect in the new opprtunity.