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02/18/2004: "my friend Phil"

music: Dope on Plastic v4/Indian Summer/Danny Saber

My friend Phil made Glenn's blog .

Belanger is among a set of early (but not founding) Vivato employees that joined the company during the ascent to the top of its ride who have now left the firm. Most of the founders had already left or reportedly been forced out.

Phil resigned (as I did), and while two of the four founders are still at Vivato, the company has cancer in its management, and surgery would kill the patient. I've known Phil since he was at Aironet and I was at Wayport. Phil is the man who convinced me to go with the as-yet-nonstandard 802.11b in early 1998. He was right, and the result is that Wayport managed to survive.

I was recently back in Austin for 30 hours, and had time to pour margarita's down the gullet of a few friends still at Wayport. What I heard amazed me. 10,000 plus connections per day, nearly all of these Windows notebooks, and all of them, essentially *inside* the network (e.g. behind the captive portal, and gifted with an IP address from the same big pool). Plus the added fun of daily subpoenas from FBI on DCMA and kiddie p0rn complaints. Absolute carnage without the essential hardness of linux at the control point(s).

Other providers, such as STSN, CAIS (now out of business, but not before they sold what was left of their software group to CIsco, where it became a product known as Broadband Service Manager (BBSM)) and everyone who ran Cisco's BBSM, run their networks (including the captive portal) on Windows NT, or 2000.

Imagine the scene when one or more of the early big Windows-specific viri hit. Your captive portal runs on top of IIS, and the machines hitting it can't be stopped without taking down the ability to bill for your 'service". Soon you have 100s, or maybe 1000s of remote Windows boxes all down. Each requires the purchase of a plane ticket to bring it back to life.

And the hits just keep on coming.

The guys left at Wayport couldn't imagine trying to run things without linux. Funny thing is, back in 1998, we were all prohibited by the VPs of Marketing and Sales, as well as the CEO (all of whom loudly proclaimed their loyalty to linux) from saying the "L word" to any current or potential customer. Linux was a dark secret at the time, because the fools who ran the hole-tels couldn't grok a computer that didn't run Windows.