Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 31, 2010
by sjvn01
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The Case for IPv6 in an IPv4 World: The Manager’s View

The Internet is running out of network addresses, which will force the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. But IPv6 has other advantages as well, such as improving network performance and making network administrators more productive (and cheerful).

It isn’t a pretty thought to consider migrating an enterprise to a new Internet addressing scheme. Any change to the network can be time consuming and expensive to deploy. But in addition to the technical forces making the move a necessity there are good technical reasons for making the switch.

What are the differences between IPv6 and IPv4? Well, for starters, there’s a gigantic difference between the 4.3 billion unique addresses you get with IPv4’s 32-bit addressing, and IPv6’s 128 bits worth of address: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. That’s 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 addresses are composed of eight groups of four hexadecimal numbers. So, for example, 2010:0625:0000:0000:0000:0000:0433:56cf would be a legal, albeit eye-watering address.

With that many addresses, we won’t need to worry about running out of network addresses unless we give cats and dogs Internet-enabled devices.

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August 30, 2010
by sjvn01
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IPv6 and IPv4 Co-existence

t would have been so easy if the early Internet and TCP/IP network designers had made IPv6 backward compatible with IPv4. They didn’t. And, while Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, admitted at a June 2009 meeting that IPv6’s “lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was [its] single critical failure,” crying over spilt standards isn’t going to help us now. No, instead we have to make the best of using IPv6 in an IPv4 world.

How? It depends on what your network and operating system vendors offer. You may not know it, but almost all vendors already have a variety of solutions in place. You must — I can’t emphasis this enough — must test IPv6-to-IPv4 component interoperability before deploying them. Let’s take a look at the options.

IPv4/IPv6 approaches usually take one of two forms. One is dual stack, where your network hardware ends up running IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. The other is to “tunnel” one protocol within another. Usually, this means taking IPv6 packets and encapsulating them in IPv4 packets. Their technical basics are outlined in the RFC 4213 Basic Transition Mechanisms for IPv6 Hosts and Routers.

There are other methods as well. For example, there’s Network Address Translation – Protocol Translation (NAT-PT). Like the name says, in this method an additional device translates IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets.

Dual-stacking and tunneling are going to be your main choices. Both come with advantages and disadvantages.

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August 30, 2010
by sjvn01
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Windows and Linux: Peaceful Co-Existence With Microsoft and Novell

Novell and Microsoft are more than happy to help you bridge the gap between Linux and Windows.

Once upon a time, bridging the gap between Windows and Linux in the server room or the office was… difficult. Today, while no one’s going to call it easy, Novell and Microsoft have worked hard on ensuring interoperability doesn’t require either a Linux wizard or a Windows expert.

The two technology giants have been at this since they formed their unlikely partnership in November, 2006. Almost five years later, besides the business benefits the two companies have found in working together, Novell and Microsoft have made considerable progress in getting Linux and Windows to get along both on the server and the desktop level.

At OSCON in Portland, OR, Fabio Da Cunha, Microsoft’s senior manager with Microsoft’s Interoperability Alliances team and Frank Rego, the senior product manager in Novell’s Open Platform Solution division explained where the two companies are today with their technology partnerships.

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August 30, 2010
by sjvn01
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Getting the Most from Your 802.11n Investment

Sure, the IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, with its up to 300Mbps (Megabits per second) burst speeds, is fast enough for all but the most demanding office network jobs. And, now that the 802.11n protocol was finally been standardized late last year, you no longer need to worry about access points (AP) from one vendor failing to work with laptops containing 802.11n chipsets from other vendors. Still, as Jobs found out, all that technology can still fail when you need it the most.

More commonly, you may find that while 802.11n in theory can out-pace the 100Mbps Fast Ethernet you probably have around the office, the facts may be quite different. Unless you’ve got your network technicians to set up 802.11n correctly, you may discover that you’re not getting close to the speeds you expected.

Before I jump into what your technical staff needs to know, let me bring you up to speed a little bit about how 802.11n works.

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August 30, 2010
by sjvn01
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What does Paul Allen think he’s doing!?

For years, decades, the big companies didn’t tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don’t tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of millions per year in legal costs just to conduct a business fight. Well that was the case until Oracle went after Google and now Allen is suing the world.

OK, well maybe not the world, but his company, Interval Licensing, is suing AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube for violating one or more of four patents. These patents are Patent No. 6,263,507, for “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented ;” Patent No. 6,034,652, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device;” Patent No. 6,788,314, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device;” and Patent No. 6,757,682, for “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

David Postman, a spokesman for Allen, said that Interval Research was a “groundbreaking contributor” to the development of the commercial Internet and that the patents are fundamental to the ways leading e-commerce and search companies continue to operate.” I say this is nonsense.

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August 30, 2010
by sjvn01
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VMware should buy Novell

Novell’s history has been full of ups and downs. Once, with NetWare, it was the networking operating system powerhouse. Then they tried to be a consulting company. More recently, Novell has been both a Linux company and a friend to Microsoft.

VMware has long been the go-to business virtualization company. But now everyone is in the virtualization business. I think VMware should look into providing more of a complete software stack by buying its new best buddy, Novell.

Novell has certainly been looking for a buyer. While the company still has almost a billion in the bank, it’s not been doing that well in the market. Red Hat, not Novell, is still the big-time business Linux company. Novell is important — the company is especially strong in IBM’s mainframe Linux space. But as the last Novell earnings report showed, it’s still not doing as well as its shareholders would like.

On the other hand, VMware has been doing quite well. But I continue to wonder just how long VMware can withstand the pressure from so many competitors. There’s Microsoft with Hyper-V, Red Hat with KVM, Citrix with Xen, and Oracle with VirtualBox and Oracle VM. Even if VMware’s software is worlds better than the competition — and I don’t think it is — everyone else is offering virtualization for free or as part of a bundle.

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