Practical Technology

for practical people.

June 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Netflix goes to the edge of the Internet

Netflix eats bandwidth the way a pack of hungry fifteen years old eats pizza. Indeed, Netflix’s streaming-video entertainment is so popular it now takes up almost a third of peak downstream traffic in North America. So, how do they keep delivering the TV and movie goodies to customers without breaking the bandwidth bank? They’ve decided to do it by starting their own Content Delivery Network (CDN) and their own co-located video data servers at ISPs.

Netflix’s CDN caught the financial markets by surprise. The other big CDNs, like Akamai, Limelight Networks, and Level 3 Communications, were all hammered in the markets. That was rather silly because, as important as video is to us at home wanting to see an old episode of Dr. Who,  it was already old news in the CDN world. Besides, as analysts Craig Labovitz and Dan Rayburn have both separately pointed out, mass video content is not a money maker for CDNs any more.

Netflix goes to the edge of the Internet. More >

June 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds on Windows 8, UEFI, and Fedora

All Windows 8 licensed hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default in their replacement for the BIOS, Unfied Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). So far, so good, who doesn’t want more security? The fly in the soup is that by default only Windows 8 will run on these systems, so no Linux, no BSD, heck, no Windows XP for that matter. Fedora Linux, Red Hat’s community distribution, has found a way: sign up with Microsoft, via Verisign to make their own Windows 8 system compatible UEFI secure boot key. A lot of Linux people hate this compromise. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has another take: “I’m certainly not a huge UEFI fan, but at the same time I see why you might want to have signed bootup etc. And if it’s only $99 to get a key for Fedora, I don’t see what the huge deal is.”

Linus Torvalds on Windows 8, UEFI, and Fedora. More >

June 7, 2012
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu, CentOS, & SUSE Linux comes to Windows Azure

Linux and Windows are popularly thought of to get along like a bad tempered Pekingese dog and an ill-mannered Siamese cat. Things have changed though since Bill Gates said that “The GPL (General Public License, Linux’s license] … makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work.” Things have changed. Now, Microsoft has announced that its Azure cloud will support persistent VMs which will enable users to run Linux distributions. These distros are: openSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2.

This development isn’t as surprising as it may sound. As ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley reported earlier this year, “Running Linux on Azure has been a surprisingly big business-customer request.” A quick look at the Cloud Market analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on June 7th found that there over 18-thousand Ubuntu Linux instances currently running and about 10-thousand otherwise unidentified Linux instances. In contrast, there were only 33-hundred Windows instances. It’s as plain as the nose on your face: businesses want Linux servers on the cloud.

In addition, Microsoft has been working with Novell, SUSE’s predecessor company, on Windows and Linux network and virtualization integration since 2006. More recently, SUSE and Microsoft have been working on Linux and Hyper-V integration. Making it possible to run openSUSE, SUSE’s community distribution, and SLES on Azure was the natural next move.

Ubuntu, CentOS, & SUSE Linux comes to Windows Azure. More >

June 6, 2012
by sjvn01
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IPv6: When do you really need to switch?

World IPv6 Day is here, and with it many ISPs, websites and manufacturers are now supporting IPv6, the next generation network protocol of the internet.

For many users, though, the questions of what, when and why still await answers.

Everyone in networking knows that they should be switching to IPv6. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realized that in 1994, when it predicted that IPv4’s 4.3 billion addresses wouldn’t be enough. Its answer was IPv6. With its 128-bit address space it can have up to 2^128 addresses — that’s 40,282,366,920 billion billion billion usable addresses. Even an interstellar internet won’t run out of numbers any time soon.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the regional internet registries (RIRs) in charge of parceling out IP addresses are down to their last old-style IPv4 addresses. Indeed, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) ran out of IPv4 addresses in April 2011. RIPE NCC, Europe’s RIR, will be the next to run out sometime in August. In North America, the last IPv4 address will be assigned in June 2013.

That will be the end of the road for new IPv4 addresses. Technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) and Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) that let us run multiple devices behind a single IP address have won us some time, but while neither NAT nor CIDR will be going away soon, they can’t delay the IPv4 famine any longer.

IPv6: When do you really need to switch? More >

June 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Old-School Linux Software Updating Techniques

When I patch one of my Linux systems or add new software, 99 times out of 100 I use a modern program like the Ubuntu’s Software Center or Linux Mint’s Software Manager. But there are times, especially when I’m working with a system that needs automated updates using cron or with a remote system via ssh or telnet, that I need to use a good, old-fashioned command line tool—and you will too. So, for times like those, it helps to keep the shell commands in mind.

Most Linux distributions have similar tools… but there are key differences.

Old-School Linux Software Updating Techniques. More >

June 5, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a “total user experience design failure”

When Fedora 17 released GNOME 3.4, I found I could deal with it. I still didn’t like it much, and I prefer both Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity and Linux Mint 13’s Cinnamon interfaces, but if I had to, I could live with the GNOME 3.4 desktop.

But for Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, GNOME 3.4 is ”a total UX (user experience design) failure.”

Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a “total user experience design failure” More >