Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 1, 2010
by sjvn01
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Nothing new in the new Apple TV

I like owning videos. I like knowing I can watch and compare the classic Maltese Falcon and first version from 1931 whenever I want. Or, on the lighter side, that I can watch Dr. Who episodes from anywhere in time and space at my convenience. That’s why I’m totally unimpressed by the new Apple TV.

I’ve been a fan of the old Apple TV since day one. Unlike a lot of people I never had much trouble with it. The only problem I think it ever had was that Job damned it by calling it a hobby. Without putting Apple’s marketing muscle behind it, the device did indeed stay a hobby and that’s a shame.

I use it to this day to bring movies from my NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives, via iTunes, to my TV over my 802.11n network. Thanks to the Apple TV I have access to my own personal collection of over a terabyte of movies and TV episodes. I’ve been buying some movies from Apple and converting my DVD collection to MP4s with Handbrake for ages now. It’s proven to be a great way to keep a video collection that I could stream anywhere I had an Apple TV without taking up yards of shelf space.

You can still do that with the new Apple TV, but it appears you’ll no longer be able to buy videos directly from Apple. This midget device is all about rentals. Oh, you can also use it to view streaming Netflix movies, but let’s get real. What’s new in the way of TV gear that doesn’t support Netflix these days? Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, Roku, HDTVs, and, in my own case, a Sony networked BDP-N460 Blu-Ray DVD player.

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September 1, 2010
by sjvn01
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VMware doesn’t like Windows

A friend recently asked me if I really wanted VMware, a company with a former Microsoft guy in charge, VMware, to buy Novell? His unspoken message was “Wouldn’t that be horrible for Novell’s Linux?”

Bless his heart, clearly he hasn’t been paying attention to the relationship between VMware and Microsoft. VMware, a semi-independent fiefdom of EMC, has no love for Windows at all.

Two years ago, a VMware executive said that in ten more years, Windows would be history. Okay, you say, that was some guy in charge of Australia and New Zealand. It’s not like he’s even in VMware’s top ten executive list.

True, but according to my friend Paula Rooney, today at VMworld, Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO, virtually proclaimed the death of Windows in his keynote speech. Now, Maritz — he speaks for the company.

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September 1, 2010
by sjvn01
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There will never be enough Wi-Fi bandwidth

And, it’s only going to get worse. Deal with it.

My friends at VMworld, VMware’s annual trade show, tell me that the Wi-Fi sucks dead ducks through rusty tailpipes. I’m not surprised. If Steve Jobs’ Wi-Fi can fail while unveiling the Apple iPhone 4 to over a thousand Apple fans and journalists at the Moscone West conference hall in San Francisco, it can fail for anyone.

Guess what? It’s only going to get worse. Time was that people used Wi-Fi only for e-mail and basic Web surfing. Now, as I sit in a coffee shop in my hometown of Asheville, NC, I see one person with an iPhone 4 looking at YouTube videos and another, with their brand new iPad watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Netflix. That’s a whole lot of bandwidth being used up.

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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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