Author: techadmin

Features of Fortinet appliances

Besides being interested in more user-friendliness and simplicity, some of the other features that attracted my interest in the Fortinet devices were:

The FortiGate product can do the same things that I was doing already with the PIX 501: firewall, VPN tunnels, and intrusion detection.

The FortiGate devices come with additional features that the PIX 501 does not support: antivirus functionality, RADIUS/LDAP user-based authentication with Web logging (syslog), intrusion prevention, Web content filtering, e-mail filtering (antispam), traffic prioritization within the VPN tunnel, and a fast, Web-based interface.

Fortinet also claims that, because it uses ASICs, the FortiGate firewalls are faster than Cisco PIX firewalls.

The FortiGate 50A costs about $500, the same price as the PIX 501 units I have been buying.

I really liked the idea of getting more for my money, so I agreed to demo the Fortinet devices (they didn’t know that I would eventually write a review).

Aptec gets Cisco business on Track

The TDME business was formed from the acquisition of Tech Data Middle East more than two years ago, and as Ali Baghdadi, President and CEO at Aptec explains, the time has come for the brand to be revamped.

“When we acquired Tech Data we chose a name which would give us the freedom of branding, but at the same time was close to Tech Data, so TDME stood for both TD Middle East and Track Distribution Middle East,” he points out. “Now that Tech Data has gone, people know TDME, so we have just rebranded TDME into Track Distribution. Track is also going to get outside the boundaries of the Middle East, so the change is in preparation for that.”

Baghdadi explains that Track will function as a “Cisco technology-centric” outfit that also provides solutions from complementary vendors such as Linksys, APC and McAfee.

The rebranding is being accompanied by a concerted push into the services market, with Aptec building on the foundations of its independent services business, ATS. “We have created within ATS a Cisco services group offering implementation, network audit services, project management and design to resellers which do not wish to invest in manpower,” explains Baghdadi.

Track has access to a team of more than 30 certified engineers with expertise in Cisco installation and configuration. Resellers will be able to purchase the support and consultancy services from the company, and even market them as their own resources when completing a customer project if they wish.

In addition to the services element, Track is also pioneering an ‘ISV club’, which seeks to facilitate relationships between local and global software developers on behalf of Cisco.

Aptec remains one of the most established technology distributors in the Middle East. The company was officially registered 30 years ago this month and next year it will celebrate an impressive three decades in business.

Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA)

The Enhanced Graphics Adapter was introduced by IBM in 1984 as the primary display for the new PC-AT Intel 286-based computer. EGA increased resolution to 640×350 pixels in 16 colors. The card itself contained 16 KB of ROM to extend the system BIOS to add graphics functions. The card started with 64 KB of video memory but later cards and clone cards came with 256KB of video memory to allow full implementation of all EGA modes which included…

High-resolution mode with 640×350 pixel resolution. On any given screen display a total of 16 colors could be displayed; however, these could be selected from a palette of 64 colors.

CGA mode included full 16-color versions of the CGA 640×200 and 320×200 graphics modes. The original CGA modes were present in the card but EGA is not 100% hardware-compatible with CGA.

MDA could be supported to some degree. By setting switches on the card an MDA monitor could be driven by an EGA card however only the 640×350 display could be supported.

Some EGA clones extended the EGA features to include 640×400, 640×480, and 720×540 along with hardware detection of the attached monitor and a special 400-line interlace mode to use with older CGA monitors. None of these became standard however.

EGA’s life was fairly short as VGA was introduced by IBM in April of 1987 and quickly took over the market. In the meantime, IBM had a brief go with a specialized graphics system called PGC and the 8514 Display Standard…

Hercules Graphics Card

Noting the 720×350 resolution of the MDA display, a company called Hercules Computer Technology (founded by Van Suwannukul), in 1982, developed an MDA-compatible video card that could display MDA text as well as graphics by having routines to individually address each pixel in the display. Because the screen height had to be a multiple of four, the full resolution of the Hercules Graphics Card was 720×348.

The Hercules card addressed two graphic pages, one at B0000h and the other at B8000h. When the second page was disabled there was no conflict with other adapters and the Hercules card could run in a dual-monitor mode with CGA or other graphics cards on the same computer. Hercules even made a CGA-compatible card called the Hercules Color Card and later the Hercules Graphics Card Plus (June 1986) followed by the Hercules InColor Card (April 1987) which had capabilities similar to EGA cards.

The graphics caught on and not only did Hercules cards multiply rapidly but clones of them started to appear; the ultimate homage to success. Most major software included a Hercules driver.

However, despite its attempts to keep up, Hercules started to fail as a company and was acquired by ELSA in August 1998 for $8.5 million. ELSA then declared bankrupcy in 1999 and the Hercules brand was bought by Guillemot Corporation, a French-based company, for $1.5 million. In 2004 Guillemot stopped producing graphic cards but Hercules, the name, lives on in some of their software and other products.

But, color was still the ultimate goal and Hercules was pushed out by other IBM specifications…

Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA)

Introduced in 1981, MDA was a pure text display showing 80 character lines with 25 vertical lines on the screen. Typically, the display was green text on a black background. Individual characters were 9 pixels wide by 14 pixels high (7×11 for the character, the rest for spacing). If you multiply that out you get a resolution of 720×350 but since the individual pixels were not capable of being addressed there were no graphics. Although, some programs managed some interesting bar charts and line art using various ASCII characters; particularly those above 128 used by code page 437.

The IBM MDA card had 4 KB of video memory. Display attributes included: invisible, underline, normal, bright/bold, reverse video, and blinking. Some attributes could be combined. IBM graphic’s card also contained a parallel printer port giving it the full name: Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter.

The monitor’s refresh rate was 50 Hz and users tended to complain about eyestrain after long days in front of the monitor.