[rogerbinns]

Time to air some dirty laundry. I worked for one of their competitors - Riverbed was set up after we were successful with the intention of beating us. (They eventually did mainly because we were acquired by a big company who essentially threw away the $300m they spent on us.)

But Riverbed's SMB implementation was done by people who didn't understand it, and who had a dangerous attitude. Essentially a WAN optimizer is looking at commands and responses going by and doing a beneficial man in the middle attack based on that data. One technical issue is to decide how you handle the unknown - eg a client or server speaking a dialect you haven't tested, or a command you haven't seen before/developed support for. Our attitude was always that it invalidated any caches, and worst case would disable acceleration on that connection. Riverbed just let it fly by.

An example of how that breaks things is that there is something similar to an ioctl to set ranges of a file to be zeroed out. Riverbed didn't know about that, and would keep returning the old cached contents. Similarly they didn't know about alternate data streams, and especially how they are named which breaks a naive filename caching implementation. At one point I sat down and came up with 5 separate demonstrations of how Riverbed corrupt data (ie 5 different areas of the protocol they messed up). The first one got published and Riverbed threatened to sue, as there was some Oracle inspired clause in their legal agreements! Our lawyers were chickens and that was the last of it.

My own view is that customer data is sacrosanct and I made sure we always did the right thing. They played fast and loose. However most people would blame Microsoft if there are issues rather than realising it was Riverbed's attitude causing corruption.

Riverbed did many other things right. They didn't get acquired like most in the industry, so they didn't have to deal with being squelched by an acquirer. Their marketing focussed a lot on the low end - when people already have two devices they are likely to buy more of the same (sunk cost fallacy). And they did TCP only (we did IP and TCP). TCP only makes it far easier to configure, load balance and do auto-discovery.

[abcd_f]

> Our lawyers were chickens and that was the last of it.

Should've leaked it. Data corruption is a bitch of a problem for anyone hit by it.

[rogerbinns]

If it was up to me I would have publicised the threat to sue - Riverbed's correct reaction should have been to acknowledge the issue and fix it, although they didn't know I had a whole bunch more lined up and only stopped because I got bored.

[pasbesoin]

Thank you for taking the time to write these comments. I've found them quite informative.