With the release of PAN-OS 6.0 and the PA-7050, Palo Alto Networks continues to bring new, innovative products and platforms to the security market that enable enterprises, governments and service providers to combat the most advanced and evasive cyber attacks.  In addition to the PA-7050 chassis and new cyber attack protection functionality, this release brings more than 60 additional new features that will allow you to accelerate virtualization and software defined network projects, and embrace mobile computing.

We're all hearing a lot about SDN, but usually it's discussed in the future tense!  Customers and vendors are promising major management and virtualization benefits, all of which will eventually be delivered by SDN.  Well, the good news is that SDN is becoming much more real every day!  For example, Juniper has supported programmable network elements (switches and routers) that can communicate with an SDN Controller for over a year.  These have been successfully deployed in several large-scale enterprise and cloud networks.

When it came time to build a new server for our new website, we decided to go with the latest and greatest version of Windows Server 2012 R2.  There wasn't a lot of information posted about whether or not Drupal 7 would work on the new platform from Microsoft, but we decided to press on.  It was a pretty easy install, thanks to the Web Installer in IIS 8.  We used the installer for PHP, but manually installed MySQL and Drupal 7. 

Ever wanted to confirm that a specific AP is properly participating in the air?  Or needed to determine which specific AP your mobile device is connecting to?

There’s the “low tech” method... take the device, touch it to the AP, and if the “signal strength” reaches “Excellent” (or dBm is better than -40), then that’s probably your AP, and it is probably functioning just fine.

But, there’s a better way to verify, by comparing BSSIDs.  With a mobile device and a wifi analyzer app, you can see which BSSIDs are nearby / connected to you, and compare that with the Controller.