Networking: Reviews

Have a presentation or a favorite video hiding in your smartphone? One of these five mobile projectors will let you show off.

If your network has between 1,000 and10,000 devices and computers, you have a midsized network. Your servers, connections and other resources suffer the same problems as larger networks, but your budget for keeping the network healthy is less than what large enterprises enjoy.

Connecting remotely to network servers is a fact of life for millions of end users. Whether working from a PC or a mobile device, users rely on secure, reliable remote connections to maintain their productivity.

Most of the products tested (except Windows Server 2012), use Oracle's Java in one form or another, at least for client access and also in some cases within the management interface. With numerous vulnerabilities recently discovered in Java, leading to guidance from Department of Homeland Security and others to disable it entirely, this raised some questions about usability and possibly even security of the devices tested.

After being delayed seven times due to reported problems with the new installer, Fedora 18 has arrived. On the plus side, Fedora 18 delivers new management functionality for IT administrators and offers improved Active Directory support. However, a complicated installation process and some issues with the user interface make it a less attractive option than desktop competitors like Ubuntu and Mint.

Offering Wi-Fi can be a good way to increase return customers and boost revenue in retail stores, hotels, cafes, etc. And it provides convenience for contractors and associates working in corporate offices and conference rooms. Though visitors might have 4G mobile devices or laptops, Wi-Fi can provide a faster, higher quality connection.

Puppet is model-driven, Ruby is procedural, and both are large, messy, open source ecosystems plagued with pitfalls

WordPress may be a popular CMS, but its built-in backup isn't ideal. Here are 10 plugins that can help you keep your entire site safe.

The newest Wi-Fi technology -- 802.11ac -- promises blazing speeds of up to 1.3Gbps, according to claims made by the leading vendors.

During our review of 802.11ac routers, some of the vendors sent along additional products that they thought we might be interested in. Here are short reviews of four WiFi tools that you might find useful in your network.

The Cisco UCS Express family is a new set of blades that add high-performance general-purpose Intel server capabilities to the ISR G2 series of routers.

The Cisco CSR 1000V router is designed for enterprise network managers who want to have a little piece of their Cisco infrastructure in the cloud.

In the early days of Wi-Fi, site surveys were fairly basic and involved running around with a laptop looking at simple signal levels. The next step was mapped-based tools that provided a good visual of Wi-Fi coverage, but still involved carrying a bulky laptop around.

ScienceLogic EM7 brings ultraflexible, ultrascalable, carrier-grade network monitoring to the enterprise

Samba's open source alternative to Microsoft's domain controller is a good start, but not ready for prime time

DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, M0n0wall, PfSense, and Vyatta suit a wide range of devices and networking needs

Deploying the enterprise mode of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA2) with 802.1X authentication provides great Wi-Fi security, but complicates the client configuration and connection process. In bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments, this can cause user frustration and a spike in help desk calls. The solution is to deploy an automated configuration process so users can easily connect their devices without invention from IT staff.

When we tested mobile device management (MDM) last year, the products were largely focused on asset management - provisioning, protecting and containing mobile devices.

Silver Peak VX virtual appliance matches physical WAN appliances in both features and performance

When we did a roundup of Network Attached Storage devices seven years ago, the products boasted an amazing (for the time) 1TB of disk space. This time around, we're testing six units that sport 8TB or larger storage capacities. While the disk space has exploded, the investment remains modest, sometimes at a lower actual dollar figure than the first batch back in 2005.