First off, howdy and welcome to the inaugural post of the EtherGeek blog. My name is Josh Stephens and I’m Head Geek and VP of Technology at SolarWinds, an IT management software company in Austin.

According to the OSI Model, the session layer is where connections are established, managed, and torn down. For connection-oriented network protocols, understanding how the session layer works, and ...

Layers 7 through 4 are geared more to the application than the lower layers, which are designed to move packets from one place to another no matter what they contain. This top layer defines the ...

Most IT users will be familiar by now with the idea of `the software-defined something or other’. Indeed, there vendors that already talked about software-defined everything, which really should cover ...