Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 15, 2010
by sjvn01
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IPv6 basics: Getting started with IPv6

Some people still think they don’t need to worry about the growing shortage of Internet IPv4 addresses and that they need to start thinking about how to migrate to IPv6. Oh boy are they ever wrong.

As I write this in late October 2010, the Internet is officially down to less than 5% of the possible IPv4 addresses. The bad news? It’s actually worse than that, according to the real-time IPv4 Address Report, we’re down to 4%. At this rate, local ISPs and businesses won’t be able to get new IP addresses after January 2012.

That doesn’t mean that Internet addresses won’t be available. They will be. But, as with good domain names, you can expect to start paying a pretty penny for your IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. This won’t matter so long as you or your business doesn’t expand or move, but when you do, as time goes on you can expect to pay progressively more for your new addresses.

When the Internet began, IPv4’s possible 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses looked like more than enough. We didn’t see mobile devices coming or predict that people would start carrying two or three IP devices — smartphone, laptop, tablet, MP3 player, etc. — at once. We could blame Vint Cerf for this vision failure, but it’s too late to play the blame game. It’s time to start working on the problem.

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November 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Fedora, like Ubuntu, to dump X for Wayland

When I first saw that Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, was dumping the X Window System, which is the networking windowing system that’s the foundation of almost all Unix and Linux graphical desktop, for Wayland, an OpenGL-based display management system, I wondered if other Linux distributors would follow. After all, everyone in Linux graphics circles had one or more beefs with X-too complicated, too slow, too filled with archaic junk and so on. On the other hand, everyone in Unix circles had also been using X since the late 80s, long before Linus Torvalds started work on Linux. Could people really give up X that quickly? You betcha! Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.

After the recent Linux Plumbers Conference, a gathering of core Linux developers, Fedora’s “graphics cabal,” Adam Jackson, Kevin Martin, and Dave Airlie decided that while Wayland wasn’t ready yet, with work, Fedora could, and should, use Wayland in place of X for its graphics stack.

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November 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Here comes the 100GigE Internet

This summer, the IEEE ratified IEEE 802.3ba, which sets down the technical guidelines for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100GigE Ethernet. Now, companies and organizations are beginning to deploy these faster than fast optical Internet backbones.

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November 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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We’re a long, long way from securing the Web with SSL/TLS

Firesheep can certainly be mis-used as a hacking tool. It was meant, however, to serve up as a wake-up call to everyone that Web site managers were doing a lousy job of securing their Web sites. How has that worked out? Not well at all as far as I can tell.

I, and lots of other people, have written lots of stories about what you can do to protect yourself from Firesheep; how to keep your Wi-Fi connection safer; and what Web site administrators need to do to secure their sites. So, I’m sure some people at least are trying to practice safe Interneting. But, what about the Web hosting companies and the major Web sites? Eh, not so much.

Over at the official Firesheep Google group, there’s a whole 143 messages, and most of them are technical support style questions. I don’t see a single message about how would someone go about securing their Web server. Mind you, there’s no rocket-science to how to start using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TLS/SSL over HTTP (HTTPS). But, you’d think someone would ask. They haven’t.

Far more telling is AccessNow’s analysis of the top 100 Web sites. According to AccessNow, a group devoted to the belief that the realization of human rights and democracy in the twenty-first century depends on Internet access, only 99 of the 100 most popular Web sites currently use TLS/SSL correctly.

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November 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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RockMelt: A social networking spin on Google Chrome

Would you like to do your Web browsing while keeping a constant eye on what your Facebook friends are doing? If so, then RockMelt is for you.

RockMelt is actually a combined Facebook front end and Web browser. It is built on the foundation of Google’s open-source Chromium Web browser, which is also the basis for Google’s popular and fast Chrome browser.

I tried RockMelt out on a Dell Inspiron 530s PC running Windows XP. RockMelt will also run on Macs, but there is no Linux build available. On my XP system, it ran quite quickly, like Chrome does.

You can’t download RockMelt without logging into Facebook. Once you have the application (which is still invitation-only), you must log into Facebook and give RockMelt permission to show and manipulate Facebook data before you can install it.

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November 10, 2010
by sjvn01
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Red Hat announces Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat announced today, November 10th, that long anticipated release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.

The announcement itself was anti-climatic. Everyone in Linux circles knew that RHEL 6 was coming. What I did find interesting–as customer after customer and partner after partner said how wonderful RHEL was and Red Hat Red Hat EVP Paul Cormier showed how the server operating system market has become a battle between RHEL and Windows-was how utterly mainstream Linux has become.

Solaris is done. The other versions of Unix now live in niches. The other Linux distributions, such as Novell‘s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and feisty newcomers such as Ubuntu are fighting it out for second place.

Linux is no longer a revolution. It is no longer the outsider wanting into the business market. Linux, in particular, RHEL, is at business’ heart. As Cormier said, "It’s no longer about who has the newest kernel, our customers are beyond that."

Exactly. I see Red Hat’s announcement as a graduation ceremony. Yes, the technology is important, but what’s even more important now is Red Hat, the business, Red Hat, the brand.

As for RHEL 6 itself, yes there are many advances. What I see as the big change here is that Red Hat is pushing RHEL not just as the standalone server operating system we’ve known it as for years, but as the business operating system for both virtualization and the cloud.

That’s not to say that Red Hat will be ignoring bare-metal servers. You’ll still be able to run RHEL on everything from re-purposed desktops serving as servers to blade and rack servers with symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) 4-CPU quad-core processors to mainframes. But, if you want to, and Red Hat hopes you will, you’ll use RHEL on virtual systems. During the press conference Red Hat claimed that RHEL virtualized guests can reach 85%-90% of the performance of running on native hardware. To do this, Red Hat uses Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Red Hat also hopes you use RHEL 6 in cloud computing deployments. Whether customers want to use a private cloud inside their data centers or use RHEL on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud.

Another point that Red Hat makes is that RHEL is that they’ve gone to great trouble to make RHEL as power-efficient as possible. RHEL 6, the company claims, will use 40% less electricity. That may not sound that important to you, but, ask your local data center director how he would feel about cutting his electrical bill by 40%. This is a big deal.

Is this exciting news? If you’re a cutting edge technology person, no, it’s not. But, Red Hat, and indeed Linux, is no longer about revolution, it’s about getting more from less with Linux. RHEL has become the establishment. The Linux dream of being taken seriously, of being important, has happened. It may not be as much fun as being on the outside looking in, but it will be more profitable.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.