Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 31, 2010
by sjvn01
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IPv6, Google, and Your Business

One reason why IPv6 adoption has been so slow is that everyone is waiting for everyone else to adopt it first. If that’s the reason for your own company’s sluggishness, it’s time to reconsider, because important online partners are already using the network address protocol: Google is leading the way, by offering its services over IPv6.

When you were a kid, all the other kids would head down to the beach, creek, or swimming pool. Even though the purpose was to go swimming, there would be a minute or two before anyone would jump in. Everyone kept waiting for someone else to take that first frigid plunge. It’s the same with businesses getting their feet wet with IPv6. No one wants to be the first to jump in. Well, now you don’t have to, since one of the biggest kids on the block, Google, has already jumped into IPv6.

Google, which saw the need to start moving to IPv6, began its implementation in March 2008. By May of the same year, Google started offering Google Search over IPv6 at http://ipv6.google.com. (Unless you have an IPv6 connection to the Internet this site will not work for you.)

Since then, with Google network engineers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline leading the way, Google has started offering more services over IPv6. It’s not been easy. As Steinar H. Gunderson, a Google open-source and IPv6 developer explained at the Google’s IPv6 Implementers Conference in June 2010, when trying to retro-fit network programs for IPv6 (PDF), your software should “Start listening on IPv6, then send IPv6 data. Watch it crash. Fix, repeat until it looks OK.”

In short, they learned, if you don’t want your company to have real fits come the day that you start implementing IPv6, have your internal programmers start working on in-house software now and start insisting that your ISVs (independent software vendors) deliver IPv6 ready software.

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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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