Features

Review: Perfect Harmony By Satish Laxminarayanan and Dave Molta If your wireless users are singing the slow LAN blues, turn them on to 802.11a access points. Our tests show they have speed to burn. We also determined that Proxim's Harmony hits all the right notes.

Big Fat Bandwidth? By Darrin Woods Before you sign up with a service provider for high-speed building-to-building connections, understand the differences between traditional carriers offering ATM and Sonet, and newer metro-area providers supplying Gigabit Ethernet. We examine the technologies and explore the providers' strengths and weaknesses.

RFI: Metro Ethernet Providers versus Carriers: Genuity Wins the First Round By Darrin Woods In our contest pitting traditional carriers against metro Gigabit Ethernet providers, Genuity's wide footprint and broad range of services -- not to mention its experience -- give it the edge over metro-area upstart Cogent. Online-Only:  Request for Information Responses: Genuity and Cogent

Workshops

Workshop: A Rookie's Guide to Defensive Blocks By Michael J. DeMaria New to firewalls and DMZs? Our primer covers the security basics and explains some advanced moves.

Online Only: Interactive Buyer's Guide: Web Editors Replace your simple text editor with a Web editor that has project management tools plus XML syntax checking, applets support and more. Compare 16 feature points in top products, including Adobe GoLive 6.0 and WebSphere Studio Site Developer.

Sneak Previews

Wash Away Those Web Service Testing Blues with Parasoft's SOAPtest By Lori MacVittie If your Web service client needs tidying, give SOAPtest a spin. What this Java-based testing app lacks in reporting functionality, it makes up for in other capabilities.

Solaris 9 Does It All By Sean Doherty Sun has improved OS performance and resource management while incorporating support for its ONE network and Web services platform.

WhiteHat's Arsenal Tool Set Aims to Knock Off Web Site Black Hats By Michael Ross and Jeffrey H. Rubin WhiteHat's Arsenal, a collection of tools to test for Web application vulnerabilities, is a good fit for experienced programmers and security admins only.

Departments

Quick Takes This issue, we look at these hot products: * IBM WebSphere Everyplace Access 4.1 * Interlink Electronics ePad-ink Electronic Signature Pad * Red Gate Software SQL Compare

Centerfold: AXA Financial Advisers Get Fuller Web Benefits By Kelly Jackson Higgins With its Workstation Transformation Initiative, AXA Financial is expanding its portal sights so its advisers can manage clients online.

Letters "We've received Klez more times than all other worms and viruses combined -- even the big ones like I Love You, Goner, CodeRed and CodeBlue." --Parrish S. Knight, Market*Access International

Columns

Air Time: Whose Problem Is WLAN Interference? By Dave Molta Organizations routinely violate FCC rules by using amplifiers and high-gain antennas. And it's legal for a company to sell a 2.4-GHz cordless phone that renders wireless LANs inoperable. Will a mere Band-Aid stop the kind of bleeding that may be in store for the wireless industry?

The Inside Story: Man Oh Man! By James Hutchinson Which companies are best equipped to provide high-speed MAN (metropolitan area network) access to enterprises? That question takes on greater importance when you see the No. 2 service provider, WorldCom, get shaken to its financial core. No vendor is a sure bet anymore.

Down to Business: Cultural Revolution By Rob Preston Thriving cultures drive revenue and improve productivity, especially among IT-centric companies. And great IT departments value the ability to share expertise, work with others and question conventional wisdom.

Security Watch: Time to Smarten Up About Security By Robert Moskowitz Security is full of traps both big and small. We must demonstrate how protocols cope with unexpected events -- because attackers don't play by the rules.

BuzzCut: A Flawed Random-Number Theory By Sean Doherty The large number of us who use aliases on the Internet to maintain our ...

BuzzCut: Fishing for Better Management By Steven J. Schuchart Jr. The Storage Networking Industry Assoc. plans to have ...

BuzzCut: United Linux at Odds With Open Source? By Lori MacVittie Now that Caldera, Turbolinux, Connectiva and SuSE are creating a single Linux distribution, there's no doubt Linux is on the move. But is it moving in the right direction?

BuzzCut: SQL Snake Is Your Problem By Mike Fratto The SQL Snake worm scans for open Microsoft SQL 7 and 2000 servers, which run on TCP Port 1433 by default. Do yourself a favor -- move your database to a protected network and restrict access to Port 1433 only to servers that need it.