We’re Recruiting

Isode is a medium sized UK software product company based in Hampton, Middlesex that provides standards based messaging, security and directory products to a number of different sectors. Isode’s key vertical markets are ISPs, Aviation, Military, and Government. We are currently recruiting an engineer to work as part of the development testing team. We intend that candidates will be involved in the development of automated test tools and frameworks. Specifically, the successful candidate will work in the existing testing team and liaise closely with product developers to develop tests and extensible test frameworks.

At present we have various test suites and infrastructure developed using Lua, Perl, Java and Tcl and so experience of one or more of these is highly desirable. A demonstrable ability to quickly grasp new languages and concepts is very important as we work across a broad range of development environments and technologies.

Isode delivers software on a range of platforms including Linux, Solaris, Windows and HP/UX and a deep understanding of at least one of these platforms would be very useful.

Experience of the following technical areas would also be advantageous:

  • Network programming.
  • Internet and OSI messaging and directory protocols, e.g. XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, X.400, LDAP and X.500.
  • Security technologies, e.g. X.509, TLS, SASL and SSL.
  • Multi-threaded programming.

The successful candidate will enjoy a competitive salary together with a good benefits package including profit related pay and share options.

CVs should be sent to careers@isode.com.

R16.4 Preview Release

We’re pleased to announce that a preview release, R16.4, is now available.

This preview release will be mostly of interest to military users. It will enable the evaluation of a number of new ACP127 and BRASS capabilities.

The following BRASS features are in R16.4.

  • ACP127 Broadcast. Including operation over serial and non-ARQ COSS, ship and shore sides, and NATO and Italian RECAP messages, automatic retransmission requests/retransmission, and two minute messages.
  • Ship to Shore. Configuration of separate ship to shore circuits is added.
  • Off The Air Monitoring (OTAM). The OTAM process can compare the transmit and receive data streams. If they vary by more than a configurable amount (i.e., corresponding to a bit error rate on the received stream) then the OTAM process will flag this to a management process.
  • Serial Line support. Support for serial hubs such as Digi Portserver TS. The ACP127 data can be sent direct to modem allowing broadcast with or without the use of a 5066 server.
  • Support for Recap messages and retransmission allowing lost messages to be sent successfully.

The new ACP127 management features are:

  • Mconsole has a new Circuit Monitoring View, that enables useful monitoring of ACP127 traffic. This also provides the ability to take over the stream manually.
  • Mconsole has a new ACP127 Message Transfer View allowing the operator to view ACP127 messages currently queued for transfer out
  • Mconsole has a new OTAM monitoring GUI.

Support for the following ACP127 Variants has been added.

  • ACP128 support.
  • ACP126 support.
  • DOI-103 support.
  • DOI-103s support.
  • ACP 126 support.
  • Janap 128 support.
  • BSG support.

R16.4 is currently available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (64 bit) including CentOS equivalents, Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit), Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. Debian Linux 8 64-bit will be added in a subsequent update to R16.4.

R16.4 will be supported until the release of our next major release (R17.0) and is for test and demonstration systems only, we will not support running R16.4 in a production environment.

If you wish to obtain a copy of the R16.4 preview release contact us at customer-service@isode.com.

Adding a Security Policy to M-Link

We have two small changes to our evaluation guide series to announce (with many more coming soon).

Our core XMPP Messaging Evaluation Guide, using our M-Link XMPP server and M-Vault LDAP directory, now includes a section on adding a Security Policy to your XMPP service. In this new section we show you how to add a the policy to your service and clearances to your users. You can additionally apply label based controls to multi-user chat, domains and peer services (all of which and more is covered in the M-Link Admin Guide).

The Security Policy we use in the evaluation guide is one of the demonstration policies we ship with M-Link but, if you want to create your own, contact us about evaluating our SPIF Editor. SPIF (Security Policy Information File) is a file representation of a Security Policy, in other words the definition of which labels are valid and how to check them against clearances.

Draft & Release for Military Messaging: An Open, Online Approach

In military communications, messages are frequently sent to organizations (e.g., a Command) rather than to an individual or to a role.

The receiving organization will process the message using a Profiler, which looks at meta-information (such as a Subject Indicator Code “SIC”) in the message in order to dispatch it to the appropriate recipient. This process of examination and dispatch is known as draft and release and is, today, mostly done using a mix of paper and online systems. A number of deployments have sought to introduce entirely online systems for draft and release but the approaches used in those deployments all have weaknesses.

In a new whitepaper on the Isode website, “Open Online Draft & Release“, Isode proposes a new open standards based approach to online draft and release, combining the best practices of existing systems with capabilities for message review which can be used independent of draft and release.

ACID Multi-Master Replication in M-Vault

In our latest release, R16.3, we added a multi-master replication capability to our M-Vault directory server, to complement the single master approach of previous releases.

A new whitepaper looks at the approach we took to support multi-master and how that approach addresses the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) database transaction reliability requirements.

The whitepaper then sets the approach in the context of other techniques used in distributed directories. For more information, follow the link to “ACID Multi-Master Replication in M-Vault Directory“.

Are you ready for the Leap Second?

Leap seconds are a periodic one-second adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time(UTC) in order to keep a system’s time of day close to the mean solar time, the next leap second insertion is scheduled for June 30th, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.

The last time a leap second was added was 2012, which resulted in some issues for some Linux users (described in this article on The Register), in particular for users running an out of date version. To ensure you do not encounter problems with Isode products it is important your operating system and Isode products are up to date.

We encourage Isode customers and evaluators to read the published advice for their operating system. Both Redhat and Windows have issued information on how to handle the leap second being added.

Happy Birthday M-Switch

Today we’ve been reminded, by LinkedIn, that one of our core products turns 23 this week. Happy Birthday M-Switch!

The first deployment of M-Switch, then simply called the Message Transfer Agent, was to British Telecom. Since then it has evolved into a range of Isode products, including:

  • M-Switch SMTP; a SMTP Message Switch.
  • M-Switch X.400; a X.400 Message Transfer Agent (MTA)
  • M-Switch MIXER; a message switch, providing conversion between X.400 and Internet email according to the MIXER specifications.
  • M-Switch ACP127 gateway provides mapping between STANAG 4406 and text messaging protocols such as ACP127.
  • M-Switch ACP145 gateway, provides STANAG 4406 message signing and verification.

As well as these core server products we also now offer add-ons to extend M-Switch, such as M-Switch Encryption to add message encryption and decryption capabilities (using S/MIME for SMTP messages and STANAG 4406 Encryption for X.400 messages) as well as an add-on to enable security label mapping & conversion.

Although it has been joined by many other core server products since 1992, products based on M-Switch, under the direction of the messaging team headed by Ian Reissmann, remain a vital part of our business, accounting for over 50% of our new product sales over the last 3 years.

Our commitment to the continued development of the M-Switch family means that it’ll be celebrating many more birthdays in the future.

New Whitepaper: Isode’s Solution for BRASS

HF Radio is an important naval communication channel for ‘beyond line of sight’ (BLOS) communication, BRASS (Broadcast and Ship to Shore) is an approach used by Navies, particularly those of NATO countries, to communicate between ships and shore using HF.

In a new whitepaper (Isode’s Solution for BRASS) we give an overview of BRASS and describe our strategy and solution for this area. The whitepaper looks at how our products can support the protocols and interoperability for currently deployed BRASS systems and move them forward to state of the art capabilities that can extend the services offered over BRASS.

R16.3: Multi-Master Directory, XMPP Archive/Search & ACP127 support

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Isode’s latest release, R16.3, which can be downloaded now from our website. R16.3 is a major Isode release which adds new capabilities across the entire Isode product range, including:

M-Vault

We’ve introduced a multi-master capability to M-Vault, complementing the single-master approach to replication defined in the X.500 protocols around which M-Vault was developed. M-Vault is the first directory to offer both multi-master and X.500.

M-Link

M-Link gains a new Archive Server for archive of all messages (including 1:1 chat, MUC and PubSub). XMPP clients can access archives using Message Archive Management (MAM) as defined in XEP-0313. M-Link also gains three new web applications:

  1. Message Archive Management, allowing browser-based access to information in the archive.
  2. Statistics, a lightweight monitoring alternative to the M-Link Console GUI.
  3. Forms Discovery and Publishing, for end-user publishing and display of FDP forms.
M-Link Statistics Web App
M-Link Statistics Web App

M-Switch

We’ve added gateway support for text based organisational message protocols, which we’re collectively describing as ACP127. The first release of this capability supports ACP127 and DOI 103S, a popular US variant, and enables conversion with STANAG 4406 (compliant to STANAG 4406 Annex D) and SMTP (following the MMHS over SMTP extensions).

In addition we’ve made extensive improvements to MConsole and M-Link Console to support the new M-Switch and M-Link family capabilities. For a full run-down of new capabilities in R16.3, please see the Product Release page. We’ll be publishing further blog posts over the coming weeks focusing on some of the new R16.3 capabilities.

Another Successful Year for Isode’s AMHS Products

One of the foundations of Isode’s continuing success and growth has been the aviation messaging business. We estimate that over 75% of all of the countries now using AMHS systems are using Isode server products (M-Switch and M-Store) at their core.

These AMHS solutions are built by Isode’s aviation partners, most of whom visit the World ATM Congress every year to meet with customers, prospects and partners. This year the congress took place in Madrid over 10-12 March and Isode also attended to catch up with our aviation partners, thank them for their business and find out what product developments they need from Isode to help them continue to dominate the AMHS market.

World ATM Congress 2015

The outlook for Isode and our partners in this market continues to be positive and with a large number of deployments due to go live this year, it looks like 2015 will be even more successful than 2014.