Posts by Davros

WTF is... IPv6?

Please - a how-to guide!

Hi mate, VIC20 was also my first computer and I'm also posting AC to protect my geek cred ; )

Can somebody please post a link to a real how-to guide (no videos) that explains how to do common tasks in the ip6 world. Not just how to connect to the internet but also tasks like:

configure and connect to simple office VPN

manage small home or office network, including wired and wireless connections, multiple routers

set up dns (or however its done) to connect to systems that we currently connect to by ip address eg source control, databases, custom hardware

diagnose network problems (must not require wireshark)

configure firewall to replace previous NAT router's protection against non-requested traffic

configure common VOIP configs

connect to IP4 and IP6 web sites

connect to IP4 and IP6 systems that do not play well with DNS or where DNS is not available (eg RDP, legacy software, etc)

supporting old systems eg win2k, old printers, old hardware

basic security config

set up mailservers, including SPF etc for good deliverability

ensure good performance and reliability

I can do all of the above and more with my eyes closed in an IP4 world, but have no idea how to do in IP6. I'm not going to read the RFCs and work it out from scratch and I'm not going to do any of this until I am confident in advance that it won't cause major instabilities, bugs and general time wasting.

The beer is for whoever can find me a useful information resource.

IANA address space running on empty

instructions please

Could somebody with better google-fu than me please post links to instructions on how to set up a typical small business network into ipv6. Every forum discussion has a bunch of posts from people who say its easy, but I've yet to find any actual instructions. Assume typical small business office with 10-100 persons and IT support done by the programmers in their spare (ha!) time.

VPN

cater to windows XP boxes

old printers

remote desktop admin of servers through firewalls and which do not (and IMHO should not) have public DNS records

remote backup services

mid-range NAT router and firewall (no way are any of the office workstations getting internet-facing ips)

email/calendaring solution

etc

Paris, coz even she's thought more about ipv6 transition than IETF

Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'

Expert sex change gradually going away

Expert sex change is slowly getting less dominant in my searches anyway. And they do sometimes have useful info, just click on 'cached' and scroll to the bottom.

US colonel blasts PowerPoint bureaucracy in Afghan HQ

Its actually worse than this

I've been in this sort of headquarters and usually the situation is actually worse:

1. Most of the idiot power-pointers actually can and do make things worse, they regrettably are not PONTI in practice. If they only achieved nothing that would be an improvement.

2. There are important positions in the headquarters and the powerpoint culture makes it very hard to get these jobs done.

3. The sensible people with 'powerpoint' jobs spend all their time mitigating the worst excesses and stupidest decisions by the idiots at the top

Bear in mind that the majority of people in these positions are actually competent and sensible in the right environment. I've worked with amazingly smart and effective people who were completely unable to escape from this culture.

Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave

slow, buggy, unusable - lack of invites saved me embarrassment

The lack of invitations was a big problem early - I had an invite but nobody else I knew. But as wave was slow, buggy and confusing, I decided to wait for a better release.

Several months later I got more invites and tried again - still slow, buggy and hard to use. I lodged bug reports and voted up feature requests.

A month ago wave added to my apps domain so all my colleagues could use it. But it was still slow, buggy and hard to use. Bugs I saw and reported months ago still present.

Fail.

The poor invites process did hurt wave. But its deeper problems are what killed it. In the end the lack of invites mainly saved me embarrassment by limiting the number of people who's time I wasted.

Google versus Facebook: stop your photocopiers

desktop = commodity so where is the big money next?

I think the point here is that the desktop is fast becoming a commodity. For many years Microsoft and Apple had sufficient market power in their respective segments that they could make huge margins on their operating system and desktop productivity software. As alternatives become more viable (linux, the cloud, consoles for gaming, etc) these high margins are being challenged. They haven't gone away yet, but I think the leading companies see that this will happen.

Apple's response is the itunes ecosystem - a very successful play so far but will it be too closed to dominate in the long term?

Google's response is to push this trend and undercut their competitors' revenue while growing their core search/advertising business. Facebook is a direct threat to their goal of web ubiquity.

Microsoft's response is to cash in on their existing market position on the desktop - this will last a lot longer than most people thing despite their poor performance and contradictory tactics in many areas.

Facebook's strategy is to dominate online communication including as a competitor to email. Their inroads on email to date though are undermined by their 'open' approach to privacy. Google wave had looked promising in this area but has not delivered.

Mozilla teases surfers with near-final version of Firefox 3.6

Chrome

right click and select inspect element in Chrome - got everything firebug delivers in a nicer looking interface.

Back on topic, I'd use Firefox over chrome if the address bar worked properly, thats all I want!

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

unbelievable

I found several other reputable sites carrying this quote or I wouldn't have believed it. How can someone running such a successful company say something so stupid?

Counterexample # 55: my search history may reveal my health concerns - if my medical situation isn't private, what is? But nothing criminal.

Virtualisation in the smaller business

what advantages?

Server consolidation is just not relevant. In my small business if I had dozens of under-utilised servers I wouldn't be interested in virtualisation I would be broke. All the reasons that enterprises end up with large numbers of servers each running one application are stupid reasons. Small business doesn't have the luxury to make such stupid decisions in the first place.

We also don't have huge wads of cash to buy enormously expensive storage solutions that virtualisation seems to require. We look at our needs carefully and in most cases we find that we can store all the data we need and get the performance we need with pretty simple direct storage. SSDs add an option for very high performance on key (relatively small) data sets.

What about high availability, disaster recovery, etc? Here virtualisation still disappoints - sure I can dynamically failover a running system from one box to another, but actually this is only slightly better than the wide choice of old-fashioned ways of failing over an application. And at least in the medium term, moving to a virtualisation based approach will actually be less reliable because we'll make mistakes using a system with which we are not familiar.

I'm open to virtualisation, and perhaps it will eventually find its way into my business and businesses like mine, but so far the case is weak to say the least.