With all the hoopla surrounding SDN, in all of it’s forms, I thought it would be interesting to look at a possible predecesor to OpenFlow, at least in spirit: The ForCES protocol. From RFC 5810, we have the following description of ForCES: Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) defines an architectural framework and associated protocols to standardize information exchange between the control plane and the forwarding plane in a ForCES Network Element (ForCES NE).

I’ve recently started attending IRC meetings. Since I run a Mac, I had to do some digging to understand the best possible IRC clients out there. Fairly quickly, I discovered LimeChat. It’s a very versatile IRC client, the UI is pretty clean, and it doesn’t appear to suck a ton of resources. Overall, I’m quite happy with it, and would recommend it for anyone looking for a slick IRC client on the Mac.

With all of the talk regarding Software Defined Networks (SDN), it’s easy to get lost trying to understand where the value will be. The general consensus here is that value will be built on top of SDN. SDN is, in essence, a building block. One interesting project providing value by using SDN as a building block is the RouteFlow project. The goal of the project, taken straight form the front page, is:

A recent project had me looking into useable Unit Test Frameworks for the “C” programming language. After doing some initial research, wikipedia ended up showing me a large list of frameworks, of which the majority appear to be dead or not used anymore. After doing some initial scanning, I decided to look into a handful: I initially looked into check. This one is mostly current, still appears to be maintained, and looks like a large list of open source projects use this for their own unit test needs.

This week I am traveling to San Jose for the oVirt Kickoff Workshop. Future posts will likely detail the events of the event, but for this post I wanted to talk about Tech Gear for traveling. I recently upgraded my aging Nokia N900 to a new iPhone 4S . Given the plethora of apps in the app store, I was curious to try and travel with and utilize the iPhone almost exclusively for this trip.

So, you’ve somehow stumbled onto Silicon Loons, and you may be wondering what exactly this place is. Let me summarize it for you by saying we at Silicon Loons hope to share our experiences with virtualization, networking, storage, and telecommuting. We’ve done some fun things over the years, and thought it was time to start sharing with a broader audience. So stay tuned for the fun to follow. Oh, and you may be thinking why the Loons part?