Microsoft will launch Windows 8 in late October. Along with a slew of other features, it will be among the first to support the 802.11w standard to protect Management Frames for client devices on Wi-Fi networks.

Customers running old Cisco unified releases (between 4.2 to 7.2) in local, Flex or mesh mode will run into an interoperability bug (CSCua29504, to be exact) that prevents 802.11w enabled clients from connecting to a Cisco WLAN with Management Frame Protection (MFP) enabled. This bug does not affect customers running autonomous access point deployments or customers running Cisco unified releases older than 4.2.

What are the possible solutions for you?

1. Please upgrade your production environment to one of the following releases, which will interoperate with Windows 8.

• 7.3.101.0
• 7.2.111.3
• 7.0.235.3

2. Roll back to pre-windows 8 drivers as identified in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article.
3. Fall back to TKIP
4. Sign up for a beta release for Cisco’s upcoming feature release 7.4 (beta available now!) that supports the 802.11w feature in local mode.

What is 802.11w ?

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Tags: 7.0, 7.2, 7.3, 802.11w, access point, autonomous access points, beta release, IEEE, interoperability, management, management frame protection, management frames, MFP, network, unified release, WFA, wi-fi, Windows 8, WNBU

Last week at Interop New York, we unveiled theAironet Access Point 2600 and Aironet Access Point 1600. They join the Aironet Access Point 3600 (launched earlier this year) to make up Cisco’s second generation “G2” enterprise class 802.11n Cisco Aironet Access Points, a key component of Cisco’s Unified Access solution: one network.

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Tags: 1600, 2600, 3600, access point, Aironet, network, wireless, wlan

What does the future hold for our cities?

Previous centuries saw industrial infrastructure (such as rail, highways, and telephone lines) paving the way for new cities – and for a host of new connections. Now, change is being driven by a global “network of networks” that is making it possible for everything to become connected to everything else. In 2001, about 300 million devices—computers, cell phones, PDAs—were connected. By 2010, this web of invisible connections had expanded to include everything from cars and lights to buildings and security cameras. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Cities, collaboration, digital city, future, government, IBSG, ICT, infrastructure, internet, meeting of the minds, network, san francisco

The science behind Virtual Machine Monitors, or VMM, aka Hypervisors, was demystified almost half a century ago, in a famous ACM publication, “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures”.

In my life, I had the honor of working on some of the most bleeding edge virtualization technologies of their day.  My first was IBM’s VM, VSAM and a host of other v-words.  My last was at XenSource (now Citrix) and Cisco, on what I still think is the most complete hypervisor of our age, true to its theoretical foundation in the Math paper I just mentioned.

Though Xen is arguably the most widely used hypervisor in the Cloud or sum of all servers in the world today, I actually think its most interesting accomplishment lies in what its founders just announced this week.  Therefore, I want to extend my congratulations to my good friends Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt for the admirable work at Bromium with vSentry.

I think it is remarkable for two reasons.  It addresses the missing part of what hypervisors are useful, which is security; for those of you that actually read Popek & Goldberg’s paper, you would note that VMM’s are very good at intercepting not just privileged but also sensitive instructions, and very few people out there, until now have focused on the latter, the security piece.  But there is one more reason, in fact the key point of this paper, the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to be able to have a VMM or hypervisor, and I am hoping the Xen guys who have done so well articulating that for real (not fictional or hyped) hypervisors, can also help sort our the hype from fiction in what is ambiguously called nowadays a “network hypervisor”.

Could this approach be what is actually missing, to sort out truth from hype in what we call SDN today?  Is this the new age of hypervisors?  Or is this just another useful application of an un-hyped hypervisor?

Tags: Cisco, hypervisor, network, network hypervisor, open source, SDN, security, virtualization, vmm, Xen

By Dan Mathieson, Mayor, City of Stratford

Stratford, Ontario, is a city which has continued to grow and be successful even after multiple changes in industry have occurred.  Although we are a city renowned for our Shakespeare Festival, we are also becoming a leader in digital media and infrastructure, as witnessed by the hosting of Canada 3.0 for the fourth time this year.

Canada 3.0 is an annual event which gathers representatives from private industry, government and academia, as well as startups, to discuss and exchange ideas around digital innovation in Canada, and more specifically, how to elevate Canada’s position in the global digital economy.

We have the ability to host a nationally significant event such as Canada 3.0 as a result of our strategy to invest in digital infrastructure and making it a major priority. Over the past five years, through Rhyzome Networks, a 50 km transmission grid of buried optical fibre has been installed – as well as a city-wide Wi-Fi network – which has made Stratford a leader in digital infrastructure. This has lead to Stratford becoming recognized over the past two years by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities in the world.

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Tags: customer voice, digital media, network, Wi-Fi network