Try to get OSPFv3 working without an IPv4 router-ID
Router IDs, at least in OSPF (all versions) and BGP, are not IPv4 addresses. They are a 32 bit number, that in some implementations are displayed as dotted quad. It is only common practice to make your publicly available router ID to match one of your assigned IPv4 addresses, so that collisions between Router IDs will rarely happen.
I still run across companies that have router IDs of 1, 2, 3 etc. Some router implementations will randomly grab the lowest IP address of all the local interfaces, and use that if an ID isn't explicitly specified. I've seen BGP4 Router IDs of 10.0.0.1, which switch to other random addresses from time to time, creating all kinds of confusion. I guess it all depends on how well you learned your networking, some training companies are worse than others, and many universities don't bother hiring professors with a clue, and for many cisco==networking.
None of the significant US ISPs support native IPv6 transport across an infrastructure without any IPv4 present at this time
This is a straw man argument, close to trolling. Nobody expects an ISP to roll out an all IPv6 network any time soon, but any ISP that expects to continue growing after 2010 will certainly need to dual stack their whole network from end to end.
I have built a proof of concept 100% IPv6 network, the full report on all the things right and wrong with it costs quite a bit of money. But for a/. summary, there is much work to be done on the server end. Apache, IIS, python, ruby, perl, PHP, VoIP, SIP/H.323, firewalls and most other server end technologies have a huge amount of development to do, none of them deal with IPv6 properly at all. On the client side, at least at the consumer level, Vista, Mac OSX, linux, BSD, Solaris and all the other modern OSes are quite well advanced, but applications rarely take advantage of the underlying support.
OpenBSD is the only system I use for IPv6 firewalls. OpenBSD's packet filter is the most advanced IPv6 firewalling implementation out there, and thus it is used to protect all kinds of infrastructure where IPv6 is in production use.
But the machines that OpenBSD+pf are protecting are quite easily compromised, there are so many PHP/MySQL/IIS/etvas exploits out there that give root level access to a machine. I tend a data centre with thousands of poorly administrated machines, several of which get compromised on a daily basis. All the firewalling in the world can't protect a web server whose main function is to serve up pages to the internet at large. Many companies just rent a dedicated machine, or space on a shared machine, and once their website is barely up and running they tend to forget to update or patch the system. So the servers get compromised into botnets, or taken over by children on IRC, or just have a disgruntled ex-admin fucking around. It's a major pain. Even if the server has been configured for IPv4 only (because Apache is broken on v6), a root exploit can still send IPv6 packets out a local interface.
Once there is a compromised machine on the local network, then a script-kiddie tool to compromise an unpatched OpenBSD firewall can be uploaded. A nightmare situation, but kudos to the OpenBSD team for a quick, straightforward response. Time to go pre-order some T-shirts. Since the mailing lists have been quite active as this exploit has been discovered, it has given me time to check all the firewalls I manage for "scrub in" commands. Now I get to go do some kernel patching as well.
These are some of the best tools out there, but none of them really are suited to managing large IP space allocations efficiently, or have the ability to produce clear reports for network managers configuring routers. None of them support IPv6 addresses (the QIP sales weasels kept making hollow promises, but now admit since the lucent/alcatel mutual ass-reaming, that the sun will go nova before it happens).
Northstar works for what it does, but it's abandonware. I guess the author graduated and no longer works for an ISP, but there hasn't been an update since 2003. I've used it on one project, and except for a bit of a learning curve about all the limitations and procedures to get usable information in and out, it worked pretty well. I couldn't see using it to manage a whole/16 of space, though.
IPPlan/IPTrack has a quite active development community, which is reassuring. I tried once to get it working, but just ran into way too many install/config/usability issues. It looks like the developers actually worked on those issues since then, and it may be time to try it again. But it is more oriented towards managing DNS files, rather than helping a network admin to configure routers. The worrying part is the childish attitude of the developers when presented with reasonable requests in the forum, they sound like 4 year olds.
Never heard of PHPip, but it seems oriented towards managing Active Directory and DNS servers, rather than anything useful for planning IP allocations.
I've known admins subjected to the horrors of QIP, I understand there is a program to help them recover but if you ask them about their experiences they just get a thousand yard stare and start quivering uncontrollably. The product started as an overdesigned DNS/DHCP/DynDNS server, which has had functionality cobbled on over time. It supposedly requires at least one full time DB admin and system admin, and was originally targeted at only the largest of ISPs who had millions of customers on dial-up or megacorps with 10s of thousands of machines. With broadband and static addressing, it has pretty much lost its reason for being, as a well designed BIND installation is far easier to manage. The IP allocation tool is the only one I've ever seen that properly deals with the hierarchy of IP addresses, and it integrates with RIRs to pull data from and update the IR DB. But the web based interface of the IP planning/allocation functions looks quite similar to Northstar and IPPlan, so given the choice between 30,000Euros/year licensing costs or one of the free/libre options, this being/. there isn't much to recommend QIP.
Someone with a 7 digit/. ID mentioned Look@Lan, which is also free and no longer actively developed/supported. Its a windows product, that ping sweeps and snmp sweeps the network, and creates lists of what it finds. I've seen a few small customer sites use it, for basic network monitoring its fine, but it is no allocation or planning tool.
There must be at least one other commercial planning/allocation tool out there, because every time the RIPE or ARIN changes the interface or structure of the IRDB, lots of people scream about how all their automated tools broke.
Back to the IPv6 notice above. Last year I had an intern working for me, and for his project I asked him to research wiki or other web based documentation projects that could deal with tables of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. His job was to set up and test wikis to see if they could search on partial or complete IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, and properly format tables 5 or 6 columns wide and maybe hundreds of rows long. In the end, he didn't find a single wiki that could do either of those functions well enough to use without major patching and kludging. If he comes back for another internship next semester, maybe I'll get him to cobble together something that combines the best of Northstar and IPPlan, but deals with IPv6 and hierarchy correctly.
ARIN wouldn't give us an allocation. In their rules...whinge, whinge, whinge
So give me 200 Euros, and I'll get you a/32 allocation, if you can show you are an ISP of any size or have an AS number. As long as you claim you'll be giving out at least 16/48 networks to your customers within the next 2 years, its no problem. If you aren't an ISP, but a company that wants a large enough allocation to route (a/35), I'll rent you space on one of my allocations, for about 100 Euros/year. This is all in the RIPE region, add a little more for ARIN allocations, and allow a few weeks extra, because, as you point out, ARIN is the worst region for getting approvals.
The rules are changing for IPv6 allocations. It doesn't take much justification, and it's pretty much SOP to stretch the truth when asking for a standard initial/32 block. Once you have it, nobody really ever checks if you are using it or just playing around.
IPv4 allocations are handed out for free, but you can't get one unless you're a mega-conglomerate.
That statement has been false since at least 1995. Nobody gets IP addresses for free any more. But the rates are so low that being a Local Internet Registry is rarely a money making activity for an ISP. The charges are just to keep people from grabbing many allocations and sitting on them, hoping that in 2012 they can re-sell them for a profit.
Rates for IPv4 are about the same as IPv6, I'll charge 100Euros for a v4/24 or a v6/48, 200 Euros for anything up to a v4/20 or v6/32, and significantly more money for anything larger because it takes a lot more work on my part.
Anyone who just wants a v4/24 PI block just has to write a check and they get the addresses within a few days. That's the way the internet has worked for at least the last 10 years. Justification is left as a creative exercise for the applicant.
IPv6 adoption won't occur in the US unless ARIN comes up with a better policy.
No argument there, ARIN is seemingly stuck in the stone age compared to all the other RIRs. But there is progress, they now grudgingly admit a need for IPv6 PI space, even if they put a time limit on the allocation.
Current insightful joke making the rounds of technical recruiters and some hiring managers is "How do you make a CCIE leave your front door?" "Pay for your pizza".
Certs are there for getting your foot in the door when you don't have any other relevant skills. They show an employer you've got just enough basic knowledge you wont break his network, but not much more.
If you have any chance of getting into Uni, and you really want to work in the Engineering side of networking, go for a real engineering degree. If all you want to do is be on the Operations side, surviving from one pay stub to the next as a hell desk support drone, or maybe a NOC monkey, then take the easy road and grab a few certs.
The Network Engineers who actually design and build networks have degrees in Electrical Engineering, or maybe Comp Sci. They have the diverse base of knowledge to understand things like how bit error rates affect retransmissions, and what the speed of light is and why it can't ever be exceeded. When their employer needs someone to build and test a new satellite circuit or a trans-continental fibre ring, the only ones who work on the project have degrees. So even with all your certs, you'll hear their stories over beers, but you'll never move up to those projects without an otherwise worthless scrap of sheepskin in your possession.
this was going to be a longer, more insightful post, but there's a huge pop-up advert covering the whole right side of my browser that wont go away no matter what I do. it appears to be connected to a new slashvertising menu item on the top left. way to go/. business shitheads, next time try a little testing - still there after preview, lets see what happens when I submit to my slashvertising overloards
You are not supposed to count the digits to the right of the decimal point, if you had a degree you would have known that:-)
Joking aside, for those who can no longer get a degree (too old, bad socio-economic situation, whatever), the advice part of your post is spot on. Grab the cert study guides for just their content, i.e. something to structure your studies around, but skip the actual certs. Get lots of used equipment, wire it up into something different every week, learn all the tools to manage it, and keep learning all the networking skills to get a job where you can actually work on production equipment. Get jobs where a company is upgrading from obsolete kit, and make them an offer for the old stuff. When obsolete kit really can't help you any more, eBay it. Make contacts through local networking groups, whore yourself out to experienced networking gurus, and realise you'll never be making the big bucks like them. If you can glean information from a guru, asking questions like "why did you use a/29 there but a/30 over here?" and "why is there 1.2dB/km loss with this fibre and 0.6dB/km loss with this other brand?" will go a long way to filling out knowledge. Cert courses, self study, and the like can only go so far in answering the "Why?" questions, which is not far enough to get a real job.
But if the OP has a chance to get a degree in the field (Network Engineering or Electrical Engineering), get that. Over the lifetime of a career, 40 years or so, certs will leave you behind but solid degrees are useful forever. Professors in Uni, industry apprenticeships, and the combined knowledge of fellow students is the best way to learn the "Why?" answers.
In Europe, especially in cultures where traditionally someone is expected to stay with one employer for most of their lives (Germany and France are the worst), more than a few jobs on a CV can exclude a worker from many jobs. In a few other places where worker protection is now lacking, employers understand that workers may have quite a few entries on their CV (England is almost America at this point). Since/. is mostly American oriented, I would say that a few job hops in a few years is not a big deal, but 4 changes in 16 months would be a red flag for most recruiters, even in the U.S.
For more experienced workers, i.e. those with more than a decade of experience, a few different employers can be a good thing. But for workers just starting out, it is rather imperative to have at least one long stretch of employment, to show that you can keep a job, be a team player, and all the other buzzwords that recruiters tend to bandy around.
Is being branded as a 'hot potato' enough to keep you from switching?
It depends on your job history. I started my career with nearly a decade at one company, and many recruiters have told me that one sign of stability is still more important than all my recent successful projects. I've been contracting most of the last 10 years, and have 20 successful projects listed on my CV for that period. But recruiters look for stability more than skills and experience for 95% of the people they have to hire. Rarely, and I do mean rarely, a recruiter (HR drone or other) has to find someone with a specific skill for a short term contract and then they'll be looking at recent projects only. So now with 30+ years of work experience, I don't worry too much about getting branded 'unreliable', but if I'm talking with a recruiter from France or Germany, I'm always defending my long and varied track record. Most German recruiters will just toss a CV with more than 2 jobs on it, it's a constant battle for hiring managers because they know that their HR people are stuck in the 1800's mentality of hiring practices and good people are always ignored.
If your resume/CV has too many jobs on it at the beginning of your career, with no long successful project to show you are also stable and good enough for employers to keep you for a few years, you will do serious harm to your career later in life. If someday.NET becomes as fashionable as COBOL (very serious possibility in 10 years), you'll need to show something other than 40 jobs in 10 years. Concentrate on getting into a stable long term job soon, it's more than just income, it's an investment in your long term employability.
The article is the usual tabloid trash which confuses the issues and has some strange tie-ins to Chernobyl in the hopes of spreading panic. Exactly what I've come to expect on/.
The story everywhere is that servers are getting more efficient, smaller, and more dense. This means that data centres all over Europe are at their capacity for supplying electricity and cooling, with lots of empty space they can't rent out. Even the newer centres designed a few years ago are having problems. I hear the same thing about centers in the U.S. The electricity companies are struggling to keep up for the data centres not directly on the main distribution grid, requiring the replacement of transformers and transmission lines. The smarter data centres build right next to major sub-stations/switching stations. Google got smart and are building a massive data centre right next to a hydro-electric dam at one of the main crossroads of the western US power grid.
Currently, customers with dense server racks are asking for 2.5KVA per square metre, but there aren't any centres that can supply more than 1.5KVA/m2. There are newer racks coming out that will require 3KVA/m2 or more. With every watt (or BTU if you count that way), there needs to be an equal amount of cooling, which is always slightly less efficient.
Many server farm companies are turning to hiring case modding "tuning" specialists who can build water cooled equipment, and lashing up entire floors full of servers that use more efficient cooling so they can put their cooling energy budget into powering the servers. Interesting to see a whole floor of servers without all the fan noise.
On the other side of the equation, consumers want more and more content. Broadband is taking off (well, except in some places), carrier bandwidth is keeping pace with more capacity at ever lower costs, but the content providers are running into a wall with being able to grow their server farms fast enough. As server capacity grows, the energy costs will grow, but the amount of content served will be significantly higher.
I didn't see you sitting around drinking with us last night, but you sure recounted our main conversation. You missed a few points, though. You may have taken a bathroom break, so all is forgiven.
What will the final name be? Apple may have negotiated with Cisco for temporary use rights, and may yet go with an iPod or ApplePhone style of name. Something like the iPod Communicator, or the ApplePhone Pro, allowing for many future products like the ApplePhone Brique, and the ApplePhone Nano.
When will the next version come out? This is just the next generation iPod, with mobile phone functionality built in. There will be a follow-on unit 9-12 months after this one hits the stores, as Apple has a track record of always replacing old product lines. That would be about the right time to introduce into European and Asian markets. Smaller, bigger, or maybe a scratch-resistant screen.
Will the 802.11n-draft be upgradable to -final when all the committee members get through flinging poo at each other in 2008?
Is the speakerphone sufficiently echo-canceling with the mic and speaker only a centimeter apart? Is there enough DSP processing power to do real echo canceling or will they try and do it in software on the intel processor?
From the ex-Nokia geek came this question: whose GSM VHDL libraries did they use? Did they design and build their own phone chipset, or did they go out of house for it? My suspicion is they had Moto do it.
Will there be a car antenna attachment point so this can be dropped into a hands-free cradle when you get into your car, and get a good signal while traveling?
Can data be routed/NATed between the bluetooth/Wi-Fi/EDGE/USB interfaces in all directions? Can I have my Tom-Tom, which has only bluetooth communications, contact this iPodPhone and get to the internet through the Wi-Fi interface, or through the USB to my MacBook which has a nice solid ethernet connection. Will the user be able to specify the order/preference of this connectivity?
Will this have a terminal+SSH application on it? If so, this will be the on-call tech support gadget for the next few years.
I guarantee anything Steve did was over Wifi.
It looked like he had the demo unit on a docking connector, which raises the hope for full wired internet connectivity when plugged into a computer running iTunes 8.x. Which means they'll break DAAPd again, so it will have to get fixed again.
Did you note the difference in presentation skills between Jobs and the blimp at the head of Cingular? He read from flip cards, didn't connect with the audience at all, and certainly didn't understand any of what he was saying. Oh, you poor 'merkins, tied into that company for the next two years.
Similar state of affairs here in ETSI-land, a 9 month minimum lead time from filing before regulatory approval, with most of the filing becoming public information 3-6 months after the first filing. Plus the fun of dealing with 30+ regulatory regimes, all twisty little passages nearly identical with subtle differences. Any of the companies who perform certification here navigate the process on a daily basis, so it's just a matter of time before Apple gets its CE mark.
GSM carriers in Europe will have from now to the end of 2007 to figure out how to deal with a truly "smart" phone getting on their networks. Working call duration and GPRS/EDGE traffic counters, random access voice messaging, and an OS which will probably allow the user to install all kinds of nifty applications like SIP phones. Include with that the ability to exchange ringtones, photos, and all other info stored on the phone through bluetooth, wifi, or a working USB connector, bypassing the carrier and their outrageous charges altogether, and interesting times are ahead. Perhaps we'll see something like a pre-installed "Orange App bundle" which adds carrier specific functions to applephones when sold through an Orange shop front with an Orange service contract. Suddenly I sense a great need for experienced OS-X programmers, obfuscated email above if you want to throw large quantities of money my way:-)
given how difficult it is to do a cellphone (very - carriers are very picky
If Apple wants to tap the largest GSM mobile market in the world, and they will, they'll be forced to sell these phones without any crippling of features and without any tie-in to carriers. The nice thing about Europe is local consumer protection laws that prohibit tying one product or service to another. So any phone store can buy mobiles from any manufacturer, and sell them without contracts. Any consumer can walk into any carrier storefront and ask for service without ever showing which phone they have (but they still have to provide official government issued photo-ID, there is no such thing as an anonymous phone call any more).
Sure, carriers can resell a phone with a contract for a discount, but consumers can just pay a little extra and walk out the door with one. Should make for a dynamic grey-market in the U.S. while Cingular has their monopoly until the end of 2008. After the end of the 2 year tie-in with Cingular, there may be a free-for-all in the U.S. market, but the complete lack of free market over there may cripple the uptake for a long time.
When this shows up in Europe by the end of the year, there will be even more EU regulations preventing tying a phone to a contract. Any phone offered with a contract or tied to a single provider must also be available unlocked without any service or contract. So you can just pay more for an unlocked phone and put your existing SIM into the phone.
It will be interesting to see how Apple licenses the interfaces to their features (like random access voicemail) to carriers in Europe.
By June we'll know if us Europeans can pop on over to NY and buy one without a service and bring it back unlocked. Certainly by next December unlocked phones will be on the market in Europe.
I rememember trolling by morse code back when slashdot was a ham radio channel.
Youngsters these days. Back then it was called dashdot, it predated even radio, the oldest of us trolled with semaphores. With the introduction of electrickity, the whole telegraph scene took off. Then some guy named Morse forked the project and publicised the code as his own. It's been downhill ever since.
Hitches up his braces, fires some chaw in the spittoon, waits for someone older to out-troll
In a similar vein, when Americans leave the comfort of their super-safe society, many are quite concerned at how dangerous the rest of the world seems.
Tourists often ask why there aren't safety rails everywhere, why there aren't warning signs in English, why everything seems to be more dangerous than normal. It's quite a phenomenon with some of the sensitive ones, not having the false sense of security at every turn.
Yeah, I admitted during the last interview my/. login was Anonymous Coward. Big mistake.
One thing I forgot to post was that we've noticed getting rejected by Google is now a badge of honour. My 5 interviews don't even leave me in the running compared to some who went through 10 or 15 interviews and never hearing anything back, or getting a reject email 6 months after the last interview.
the AC How in the hell did my post get modded up to 4? Flamebait, pure and simple, but I can't mod my own posts
The solution to this is to interview with them, and somehow screw up.
Google has a strange recruitment process, they never ask what you are currently doing or where you live, they just find a few old web pages in their cache and assume they're current. It was on the 5th interview when the Google interviewer suddenly realised I wasn't a programmer, but I knew enough CompSci to have struggled through 4 interviews. They had the idea I was a major F/L OSS programmer based on all my activity in mailing lists, not a guy just helping test one project. They had also found an old Irish mobile phone number that forwards to my current phone, and assumed I lived in Ireland.
After a few mumbled promises to send my current CV to the right group, within hours I received a "No Job For You" form letter and I seem to have been put on a black list internally. The stream of recruitment emails have trickled off to maybe one every two months.
It's funny, because I run into senior Google people at trade events who try to recruit me because they know my reputation. When I tell them I've already been rejected for a junior level programmer position in an HR blunder a couple years ago, you can see their faces fall. They know that once Google rejects someone, there's little chance of getting them in past HR, but some senior guys are working to reform their broken system.
Getting rejected is a great solution if you never want to work there and limit those spammish requests. Since they are offering you a job, tell them you want to be head of HR;-)
What a strange site. Very busy, if your machine is infested with flash, useless otherwise.
After finding a few places on the site which claims the service is free in exchange for personal information, I found an order site that wants a US$5,000 sign up fee, plus US$1,020/year subscription. Just another commercial site that has paid/. to place an advertisement on their front page in the guise of a normal article.
There doesn't seem to be anything there that a person responsible for security couldn't cobble together as a normal part of their job. But they only have to get a few gullible companies to sign up to earn back their hiring a couple of ADD afflicted flash developers.
One of my best clients did that one year, back in 2002 when the Euro was new. He struggled through the year (beginning of the dot bomb cycle), and managed to be the last company in his industry still in business at the end of the year.
He gave every one of us who worked for him during the year an envelope with a single 500 Euro note inside. Quite a nice bonus, at a time when the IT economy was really bad. About 45 people, not a small amount for a small company.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2003 he was audited, and the undeclared cash transaction caused some serious problems. He still gets audited every 6 months, and I think part of the "don't throw me in jail" agreement he has to do that for another few years. Still, he earned some loyalty from a lot of people, and he can hire easier than most because people want to work for a company like his.
Damn, just when I had almost made it through 2006 without adding a new webcomic link to my bookmarks. This afternoon is going to be shot to pieces checking the archives.
the AC
He needs to show the reserved Class E block as such (the whole upper right corner), as well as many other reserved blocks. With corrections/suggestions coming in from/. and other sources, he could have a nice map soon enough. Pretty enough to buy a copy or two
ADSL2+ speeds long ago left 10BaseT speeds behind. Now that ADSL2+ is becoming obsolete, and fiber is going in, expect that 3rd world countries will pick up the kit for cheap. 20Mbps sustained downloads are pretty common in Europe, 8-10Mbps in the UK. I know of many companies that have a single ADSL line for the 20 to 50 PCs in the office, its enough bandwidth for casual internet use.
Of course, if you live in a country with a corrupt administration and a broken telecoms regulator, then you will never know the joy of gigabit speeds or even relatively sluggish 24Mbps.
That would be Pages Jaunes, which is pretty cool for things like finding a restaurant you once ate at, but can only remember what it looked like and approximately what street it was on. Also good for seeing what a place looked like when the pictures were taken (1998 to 1999 era). The site hasn't been much updated, it was a massive effort to take all those photos in the first place. Because French law doesn't allow publishing a photo where an individual can be identified without the persons express written permission, the photo trucks had to take multiple passes, and every photo had to be checked to make sure people couldn't be recognised in each shot.
I've also been working with developpement programmes in Africa for quite a few years now. Mostly francophone sub-saharan regions. I don't know of any area there where US$100 could feed a village for a year.
There is a large "middle class" in Africa. Many people live in adequate homes, they have jobs, they have a reasonable level of education, electricity as reliable as the national network, basic levels of health care. They have money, not huge amounts by western standards, but enough to live well by local standards. Africans love to show off their wealth. After they have their neatly painted house, a car, some nice clothing, they look further down Maslow's hierarchy for where to spend their money. What every one wants are flashy consumer electronics. Most have mobile phones. Many have computers, TVs, VCRs and DVD players, and satellite dishes. What they are all screaming for right now is internet access. Just having access to email from their home is a way of not only showing off wealth, but showing a touch of modernity.
I helped a group set up a wireless network a while back. Every time one of their guys came up to Europe for a meeting or vacation, they'd head back down with two suit cases full of Linksys routers. We had found them a good bulk rate of about 30 euros per box. They had good technicians back in Africa who would reflash with OpenWRT, combined with some home crafted antennas, then they would set up relays across their country, radiating from the capital along major highways out to villages and wealthy sub-divisions. The wealthy would pay to get a flashed linksys box and an outside antenna setup, just to upstage their neighbors. Internet access outside the country would be just a trickle, but P-2-P inside the wireless network ran at reasonably good speeds.
Young people in a poor village in Africa are no different than anywhere else You are right. There are cyber cafés everywhere with a small LAN, and every evening the places are full of kids playing counterstrike;-)
I'm constantly amazed at the perception in Europe and the U.S. that Africa is mostly mud huts. There is wealth there, much of it from petroleum and mining, and as the education level comes up, outsourcing/globalisation is adding to local economies. Yes, there are some extremely poor people in the rural areas, but as long as their farms don't fail they get by well enough with sustenance levels.
I came to this thread hoping to get in a flamingly indignant post about the wrongness of the article, but I'm glad that many other slashdotters have already covered it for me. Kudos.
Depending on how adventurous you feel about getting linux running on strange hardware, you could buy a used cisco or foundry L2/L3 box for cheap. I know there are a lot of linux projects at cisco, there must be something you can google about how they went about compiling for the platform. The CPUs inside will be something non-mainstream, i.e. not a pentium, but chances are there is a linux distro for it. It shouldn't be that hard to find some archived info on how to bootstrap a linux distro onto one of those boxes.
Used cisco 3500s or 2950s with 24 or 48 ports are on the market for a few hundred (dollars or euros) each. Foundry workgroup switches are less than 100 euros right now. Cisco 7200s are just PCs inside, but their PCI buses are a different layout to allow hot swapping. Cisco Pix 515s are just commodity 1U intel pc motherboards, cisco didn't even bother doing a redesign to remove the superfluous connectors.
If you have enough money for a PCI-ish box and many quad ethernet NICs, then you probably could afford a used Juniper M5. It already runs BSD, and pretty much looks like standard PC hardware inside. A used M5 without any interface cards should be had for less than a new PC, its the interface cards that will cost you dearly.
If you follow my advice, then with any luck you will document everything you did along the way, and release a linux distro for some otherwise proprietary hardware. I'd like to see a cisco 2950 turned into a linux box with all kinds of extra linuxey features. What I'd love to see is openBSD's pf on a switch, so I could set per port ACLs and bandwidth shaping.
My internet connection is a fibre from my main router to my house. I convinced a supplier to lease me a section of their inter-city fibre that was lying dark, and I paid a crew to pull a fibre from the local pop to my place. I normally have a cisco 3550 on the end of the fibre, and the data centre end is a router with multiple Gig connections to various parts of the internet. I traded my local town for some right-of-way in exchange for the fibre going past the main municipal buildings, so I became the ISP for their IT guys. It works out for all of us, nobody really pays bills in either direction.
For initial tests of the 10GigE equipment, I put a pair on my fibre to see if their promised wan-phy interfaces actually worked. The layer 1 was acceptable and layer 2 worked barely. But with only 4x 1GigE connections further on, there just wasn't any difference moving from 1GigE to 10GigE for home use except for bragging rights. I have a lot of geek friends always trying to out-gadget each other, but nobody has ever topped me in the bandwidth category.
In GPON, the multiplexing depends on the constructor, but typically it is shared between the 16 customers with an ethernet style of contention. Some bandwidth is kept reserved for all the services, internet access is always lowest priority. A few people running popular web servers from their homes might notice each other at peak times, but a few web servers wouldn't hurt. Gamers love GPON because the interleave is so short they see sub milliSecond pings to nearby game servers.
These are European capitals I was talking about. Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam. I've talked with a company trying to do a rollout in London, but they are running into a bureaucratic nightmare with Ofcom playing obedient lapdog to moneyed interests. I know there are some upgrades going on in Stockholm and Helsinki where much fibre already exists. Other cities have plans, but it all depends on the local telecoms regulator keeping the incumbents from screwing over the free market.
There are supposed to be over 200k GPON lines lit and generating revenue by the end of this year around Europe. I have serious doubts about hitting that target, mostly because the companies will not hire enough experienced engineers and the marketing campaigns suck. There remains a huge investment in developing the features at the headends, such as TV on Demand, and the CPE boxes are still lagging in features. The sweet spot for pricing is supposed to be around 80 euros per month for a quad package, but the first installs are going for 120 euros or more, and uptake is slow.
The biggest problem right now is the cost of the GPON equipment, the makers just can't get the prices down to where they promised they would be.
The prices of 10GigE switches were outrageous just a year ago, but they've fallen quite a bit as cheap chinese and indian switch makers are getting their production lines cranked up.
I'm seeing about 200 euros per port for a 24 port 10GigE switch, much less for a switch with a few 10GigE ports and 24 10/100/1000 ports.
Give it another year for 10GigE. Where the price savings are now starting to happen is with the real, working 1GigE switches with jumbo packet support, flow control, and non-blocking switching fabric. Those just started hitting about 100 euros for an 8 port switch, and they make a nice home switch for power users.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to get OSPFv3 working without an IPv4 router-ID
/. summary, there is much work to be done on the server end. Apache, IIS, python, ruby, perl, PHP, VoIP, SIP/H.323, firewalls and most other server end technologies have a huge amount of development to do, none of them deal with IPv6 properly at all. On the client side, at least at the consumer level, Vista, Mac OSX, linux, BSD, Solaris and all the other modern OSes are quite well advanced, but applications rarely take advantage of the underlying support.
Router IDs, at least in OSPF (all versions) and BGP, are not IPv4 addresses. They are a 32 bit number, that in some implementations are displayed as dotted quad. It is only common practice to make your publicly available router ID to match one of your assigned IPv4 addresses, so that collisions between Router IDs will rarely happen.
I still run across companies that have router IDs of 1, 2, 3 etc. Some router implementations will randomly grab the lowest IP address of all the local interfaces, and use that if an ID isn't explicitly specified. I've seen BGP4 Router IDs of 10.0.0.1, which switch to other random addresses from time to time, creating all kinds of confusion. I guess it all depends on how well you learned your networking, some training companies are worse than others, and many universities don't bother hiring professors with a clue, and for many cisco==networking.
None of the significant US ISPs support native IPv6 transport across an infrastructure without any IPv4 present at this time
This is a straw man argument, close to trolling. Nobody expects an ISP to roll out an all IPv6 network any time soon, but any ISP that expects to continue growing after 2010 will certainly need to dual stack their whole network from end to end.
I have built a proof of concept 100% IPv6 network, the full report on all the things right and wrong with it costs quite a bit of money. But for a
the AC
OpenBSD is the only system I use for IPv6 firewalls. OpenBSD's packet filter is the most advanced IPv6 firewalling implementation out there, and thus it is used to protect all kinds of infrastructure where IPv6 is in production use.
But the machines that OpenBSD+pf are protecting are quite easily compromised, there are so many PHP/MySQL/IIS/etvas exploits out there that give root level access to a machine. I tend a data centre with thousands of poorly administrated machines, several of which get compromised on a daily basis. All the firewalling in the world can't protect a web server whose main function is to serve up pages to the internet at large. Many companies just rent a dedicated machine, or space on a shared machine, and once their website is barely up and running they tend to forget to update or patch the system. So the servers get compromised into botnets, or taken over by children on IRC, or just have a disgruntled ex-admin fucking around. It's a major pain. Even if the server has been configured for IPv4 only (because Apache is broken on v6), a root exploit can still send IPv6 packets out a local interface.
Once there is a compromised machine on the local network, then a script-kiddie tool to compromise an unpatched OpenBSD firewall can be uploaded. A nightmare situation, but kudos to the OpenBSD team for a quick, straightforward response. Time to go pre-order some T-shirts. Since the mailing lists have been quite active as this exploit has been discovered, it has given me time to check all the firewalls I manage for "scrub in" commands. Now I get to go do some kernel patching as well.
the AC
These are some of the best tools out there, but none of them really are suited to managing large IP space allocations efficiently, or have the ability to produce clear reports for network managers configuring routers. None of them support IPv6 addresses (the QIP sales weasels kept making hollow promises, but now admit since the lucent/alcatel mutual ass-reaming, that the sun will go nova before it happens).
/16 of space, though.
/. there isn't much to recommend QIP.
/. ID mentioned Look@Lan, which is also free and no longer actively developed/supported. Its a windows product, that ping sweeps and snmp sweeps the network, and creates lists of what it finds. I've seen a few small customer sites use it, for basic network monitoring its fine, but it is no allocation or planning tool.
Northstar works for what it does, but it's abandonware. I guess the author graduated and no longer works for an ISP, but there hasn't been an update since 2003. I've used it on one project, and except for a bit of a learning curve about all the limitations and procedures to get usable information in and out, it worked pretty well. I couldn't see using it to manage a whole
IPPlan/IPTrack has a quite active development community, which is reassuring. I tried once to get it working, but just ran into way too many install/config/usability issues. It looks like the developers actually worked on those issues since then, and it may be time to try it again. But it is more oriented towards managing DNS files, rather than helping a network admin to configure routers. The worrying part is the childish attitude of the developers when presented with reasonable requests in the forum, they sound like 4 year olds.
Never heard of PHPip, but it seems oriented towards managing Active Directory and DNS servers, rather than anything useful for planning IP allocations.
I've known admins subjected to the horrors of QIP, I understand there is a program to help them recover but if you ask them about their experiences they just get a thousand yard stare and start quivering uncontrollably. The product started as an overdesigned DNS/DHCP/DynDNS server, which has had functionality cobbled on over time. It supposedly requires at least one full time DB admin and system admin, and was originally targeted at only the largest of ISPs who had millions of customers on dial-up or megacorps with 10s of thousands of machines. With broadband and static addressing, it has pretty much lost its reason for being, as a well designed BIND installation is far easier to manage. The IP allocation tool is the only one I've ever seen that properly deals with the hierarchy of IP addresses, and it integrates with RIRs to pull data from and update the IR DB. But the web based interface of the IP planning/allocation functions looks quite similar to Northstar and IPPlan, so given the choice between 30,000Euros/year licensing costs or one of the free/libre options, this being
Someone with a 7 digit
There must be at least one other commercial planning/allocation tool out there, because every time the RIPE or ARIN changes the interface or structure of the IRDB, lots of people scream about how all their automated tools broke.
Back to the IPv6 notice above. Last year I had an intern working for me, and for his project I asked him to research wiki or other web based documentation projects that could deal with tables of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. His job was to set up and test wikis to see if they could search on partial or complete IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, and properly format tables 5 or 6 columns wide and maybe hundreds of rows long. In the end, he didn't find a single wiki that could do either of those functions well enough to use without major patching and kludging. If he comes back for another internship next semester, maybe I'll get him to cobble together something that combines the best of Northstar and IPPlan, but deals with IPv6 and hierarchy correctly.
the AC
ARIN wouldn't give us an allocation. In their rules...whinge, whinge, whinge
/32 allocation, if you can show you are an ISP of any size or have an AS number. As long as you claim you'll be giving out at least 16 /48 networks to your customers within the next 2 years, its no problem. If you aren't an ISP, but a company that wants a large enough allocation to route (a /35), I'll rent you space on one of my allocations, for about 100 Euros/year. This is all in the RIPE region, add a little more for ARIN allocations, and allow a few weeks extra, because, as you point out, ARIN is the worst region for getting approvals.
/32 block. Once you have it, nobody really ever checks if you are using it or just playing around.
/24 or a v6 /48, 200 Euros for anything up to a v4 /20 or v6 /32, and significantly more money for anything larger because it takes a lot more work on my part.
/24 PI block just has to write a check and they get the addresses within a few days. That's the way the internet has worked for at least the last 10 years. Justification is left as a creative exercise for the applicant.
So give me 200 Euros, and I'll get you a
The rules are changing for IPv6 allocations. It doesn't take much justification, and it's pretty much SOP to stretch the truth when asking for a standard initial
IPv4 allocations are handed out for free, but you can't get one unless you're a mega-conglomerate.
That statement has been false since at least 1995. Nobody gets IP addresses for free any more. But the rates are so low that being a Local Internet Registry is rarely a money making activity for an ISP. The charges are just to keep people from grabbing many allocations and sitting on them, hoping that in 2012 they can re-sell them for a profit.
Rates for IPv4 are about the same as IPv6, I'll charge 100Euros for a v4
Anyone who just wants a v4
IPv6 adoption won't occur in the US unless ARIN comes up with a better policy.
No argument there, ARIN is seemingly stuck in the stone age compared to all the other RIRs. But there is progress, they now grudgingly admit a need for IPv6 PI space, even if they put a time limit on the allocation.
the AC
Current insightful joke making the rounds of technical recruiters and some hiring managers is "How do you make a CCIE leave your front door?" "Pay for your pizza".
/. business shitheads, next time try a little testing - still there after preview, lets see what happens when I submit to my slashvertising overloards
Certs are there for getting your foot in the door when you don't have any other relevant skills. They show an employer you've got just enough basic knowledge you wont break his network, but not much more.
If you have any chance of getting into Uni, and you really want to work in the Engineering side of networking, go for a real engineering degree. If all you want to do is be on the Operations side, surviving from one pay stub to the next as a hell desk support drone, or maybe a NOC monkey, then take the easy road and grab a few certs.
The Network Engineers who actually design and build networks have degrees in Electrical Engineering, or maybe Comp Sci. They have the diverse base of knowledge to understand things like how bit error rates affect retransmissions, and what the speed of light is and why it can't ever be exceeded. When their employer needs someone to build and test a new satellite circuit or a trans-continental fibre ring, the only ones who work on the project have degrees. So even with all your certs, you'll hear their stories over beers, but you'll never move up to those projects without an otherwise worthless scrap of sheepskin in your possession.
this was going to be a longer, more insightful post, but there's a huge pop-up advert covering the whole right side of my browser that wont go away no matter what I do. it appears to be connected to a new slashvertising menu item on the top left. way to go
the AC
I don't have a degree yet I make 6 digit income
:-)
/29 there but a /30 over here?" and "why is there 1.2dB/km loss with this fibre and 0.6dB/km loss with this other brand?" will go a long way to filling out knowledge. Cert courses, self study, and the like can only go so far in answering the "Why?" questions, which is not far enough to get a real job.
You are not supposed to count the digits to the right of the decimal point, if you had a degree you would have known that
Joking aside, for those who can no longer get a degree (too old, bad socio-economic situation, whatever), the advice part of your post is spot on. Grab the cert study guides for just their content, i.e. something to structure your studies around, but skip the actual certs. Get lots of used equipment, wire it up into something different every week, learn all the tools to manage it, and keep learning all the networking skills to get a job where you can actually work on production equipment. Get jobs where a company is upgrading from obsolete kit, and make them an offer for the old stuff. When obsolete kit really can't help you any more, eBay it. Make contacts through local networking groups, whore yourself out to experienced networking gurus, and realise you'll never be making the big bucks like them. If you can glean information from a guru, asking questions like "why did you use a
But if the OP has a chance to get a degree in the field (Network Engineering or Electrical Engineering), get that. Over the lifetime of a career, 40 years or so, certs will leave you behind but solid degrees are useful forever. Professors in Uni, industry apprenticeships, and the combined knowledge of fellow students is the best way to learn the "Why?" answers.
the AC
In Europe, especially in cultures where traditionally someone is expected to stay with one employer for most of their lives (Germany and France are the worst), more than a few jobs on a CV can exclude a worker from many jobs. In a few other places where worker protection is now lacking, employers understand that workers may have quite a few entries on their CV (England is almost America at this point). Since /. is mostly American oriented, I would say that a few job hops in a few years is not a big deal, but 4 changes in 16 months would be a red flag for most recruiters, even in the U.S.
.NET becomes as fashionable as COBOL (very serious possibility in 10 years), you'll need to show something other than 40 jobs in 10 years. Concentrate on getting into a stable long term job soon, it's more than just income, it's an investment in your long term employability.
For more experienced workers, i.e. those with more than a decade of experience, a few different employers can be a good thing. But for workers just starting out, it is rather imperative to have at least one long stretch of employment, to show that you can keep a job, be a team player, and all the other buzzwords that recruiters tend to bandy around.
Is being branded as a 'hot potato' enough to keep you from switching?
It depends on your job history. I started my career with nearly a decade at one company, and many recruiters have told me that one sign of stability is still more important than all my recent successful projects. I've been contracting most of the last 10 years, and have 20 successful projects listed on my CV for that period. But recruiters look for stability more than skills and experience for 95% of the people they have to hire. Rarely, and I do mean rarely, a recruiter (HR drone or other) has to find someone with a specific skill for a short term contract and then they'll be looking at recent projects only. So now with 30+ years of work experience, I don't worry too much about getting branded 'unreliable', but if I'm talking with a recruiter from France or Germany, I'm always defending my long and varied track record. Most German recruiters will just toss a CV with more than 2 jobs on it, it's a constant battle for hiring managers because they know that their HR people are stuck in the 1800's mentality of hiring practices and good people are always ignored.
If your resume/CV has too many jobs on it at the beginning of your career, with no long successful project to show you are also stable and good enough for employers to keep you for a few years, you will do serious harm to your career later in life. If someday
the AC
The article is the usual tabloid trash which confuses the issues and has some strange tie-ins to Chernobyl in the hopes of spreading panic. Exactly what I've come to expect on /.
The story everywhere is that servers are getting more efficient, smaller, and more dense. This means that data centres all over Europe are at their capacity for supplying electricity and cooling, with lots of empty space they can't rent out. Even the newer centres designed a few years ago are having problems. I hear the same thing about centers in the U.S. The electricity companies are struggling to keep up for the data centres not directly on the main distribution grid, requiring the replacement of transformers and transmission lines. The smarter data centres build right next to major sub-stations/switching stations. Google got smart and are building a massive data centre right next to a hydro-electric dam at one of the main crossroads of the western US power grid.
Currently, customers with dense server racks are asking for 2.5KVA per square metre, but there aren't any centres that can supply more than 1.5KVA/m2. There are newer racks coming out that will require 3KVA/m2 or more. With every watt (or BTU if you count that way), there needs to be an equal amount of cooling, which is always slightly less efficient.
Many server farm companies are turning to hiring case modding "tuning" specialists who can build water cooled equipment, and lashing up entire floors full of servers that use more efficient cooling so they can put their cooling energy budget into powering the servers. Interesting to see a whole floor of servers without all the fan noise.
On the other side of the equation, consumers want more and more content. Broadband is taking off (well, except in some places), carrier bandwidth is keeping pace with more capacity at ever lower costs, but the content providers are running into a wall with being able to grow their server farms fast enough. As server capacity grows, the energy costs will grow, but the amount of content served will be significantly higher.
the AC
I guarantee anything Steve did was over Wifi.
It looked like he had the demo unit on a docking connector, which raises the hope for full wired internet connectivity when plugged into a computer running iTunes 8.x. Which means they'll break DAAPd again, so it will have to get fixed again.
Did you note the difference in presentation skills between Jobs and the blimp at the head of Cingular? He read from flip cards, didn't connect with the audience at all, and certainly didn't understand any of what he was saying. Oh, you poor 'merkins, tied into that company for the next two years.
the AC
Similar state of affairs here in ETSI-land, a 9 month minimum lead time from filing before regulatory approval, with most of the filing becoming public information 3-6 months after the first filing. Plus the fun of dealing with 30+ regulatory regimes, all twisty little passages nearly identical with subtle differences. Any of the companies who perform certification here navigate the process on a daily basis, so it's just a matter of time before Apple gets its CE mark.
:-)
GSM carriers in Europe will have from now to the end of 2007 to figure out how to deal with a truly "smart" phone getting on their networks. Working call duration and GPRS/EDGE traffic counters, random access voice messaging, and an OS which will probably allow the user to install all kinds of nifty applications like SIP phones. Include with that the ability to exchange ringtones, photos, and all other info stored on the phone through bluetooth, wifi, or a working USB connector, bypassing the carrier and their outrageous charges altogether, and interesting times are ahead. Perhaps we'll see something like a pre-installed "Orange App bundle" which adds carrier specific functions to applephones when sold through an Orange shop front with an Orange service contract. Suddenly I sense a great need for experienced OS-X programmers, obfuscated email above if you want to throw large quantities of money my way
given how difficult it is to do a cellphone (very - carriers are very picky
If Apple wants to tap the largest GSM mobile market in the world, and they will, they'll be forced to sell these phones without any crippling of features and without any tie-in to carriers. The nice thing about Europe is local consumer protection laws that prohibit tying one product or service to another. So any phone store can buy mobiles from any manufacturer, and sell them without contracts. Any consumer can walk into any carrier storefront and ask for service without ever showing which phone they have (but they still have to provide official government issued photo-ID, there is no such thing as an anonymous phone call any more).
Sure, carriers can resell a phone with a contract for a discount, but consumers can just pay a little extra and walk out the door with one. Should make for a dynamic grey-market in the U.S. while Cingular has their monopoly until the end of 2008. After the end of the 2 year tie-in with Cingular, there may be a free-for-all in the U.S. market, but the complete lack of free market over there may cripple the uptake for a long time.
the AC
When this shows up in Europe by the end of the year, there will be even more EU regulations preventing tying a phone to a contract. Any phone offered with a contract or tied to a single provider must also be available unlocked without any service or contract. So you can just pay more for an unlocked phone and put your existing SIM into the phone.
It will be interesting to see how Apple licenses the interfaces to their features (like random access voicemail) to carriers in Europe.
By June we'll know if us Europeans can pop on over to NY and buy one without a service and bring it back unlocked. Certainly by next December unlocked phones will be on the market in Europe.
the AC
I rememember trolling by morse code back when slashdot was a ham radio channel.
Youngsters these days. Back then it was called dashdot, it predated even radio, the oldest of us trolled with semaphores. With the introduction of electrickity, the whole telegraph scene took off. Then some guy named Morse forked the project and publicised the code as his own. It's been downhill ever since.
Hitches up his braces, fires some chaw in the spittoon, waits for someone older to out-troll
the AC
In a similar vein, when Americans leave the comfort of their super-safe society, many are quite concerned at how dangerous the rest of the world seems.
Tourists often ask why there aren't safety rails everywhere, why there aren't warning signs in English, why everything seems to be more dangerous than normal. It's quite a phenomenon with some of the sensitive ones, not having the false sense of security at every turn.
the AC
Yeah, I admitted during the last interview my /. login was Anonymous Coward. Big mistake.
One thing I forgot to post was that we've noticed getting rejected by Google is now a badge of honour. My 5 interviews don't even leave me in the running compared to some who went through 10 or 15 interviews and never hearing anything back, or getting a reject email 6 months after the last interview.
the AC
How in the hell did my post get modded up to 4? Flamebait, pure and simple, but I can't mod my own posts
The solution to this is to interview with them, and somehow screw up.
;-)
Google has a strange recruitment process, they never ask what you are currently doing or where you live, they just find a few old web pages in their cache and assume they're current. It was on the 5th interview when the Google interviewer suddenly realised I wasn't a programmer, but I knew enough CompSci to have struggled through 4 interviews. They had the idea I was a major F/L OSS programmer based on all my activity in mailing lists, not a guy just helping test one project. They had also found an old Irish mobile phone number that forwards to my current phone, and assumed I lived in Ireland.
After a few mumbled promises to send my current CV to the right group, within hours I received a "No Job For You" form letter and I seem to have been put on a black list internally. The stream of recruitment emails have trickled off to maybe one every two months.
It's funny, because I run into senior Google people at trade events who try to recruit me because they know my reputation. When I tell them I've already been rejected for a junior level programmer position in an HR blunder a couple years ago, you can see their faces fall. They know that once Google rejects someone, there's little chance of getting them in past HR, but some senior guys are working to reform their broken system.
Getting rejected is a great solution if you never want to work there and limit those spammish requests. Since they are offering you a job, tell them you want to be head of HR
the AC
What a strange site. Very busy, if your machine is infested with flash, useless otherwise.
/. to place an advertisement on their front page in the guise of a normal article.
After finding a few places on the site which claims the service is free in exchange for personal information, I found an order site that wants a US$5,000 sign up fee, plus US$1,020/year subscription. Just another commercial site that has paid
There doesn't seem to be anything there that a person responsible for security couldn't cobble together as a normal part of their job. But they only have to get a few gullible companies to sign up to earn back their hiring a couple of ADD afflicted flash developers.
the AC
One of my best clients did that one year, back in 2002 when the Euro was new. He struggled through the year (beginning of the dot bomb cycle), and managed to be the last company in his industry still in business at the end of the year.
He gave every one of us who worked for him during the year an envelope with a single 500 Euro note inside. Quite a nice bonus, at a time when the IT economy was really bad. About 45 people, not a small amount for a small company.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2003 he was audited, and the undeclared cash transaction caused some serious problems. He still gets audited every 6 months, and I think part of the "don't throw me in jail" agreement he has to do that for another few years. Still, he earned some loyalty from a lot of people, and he can hire easier than most because people want to work for a company like his.
the AC
Damn, just when I had almost made it through 2006 without adding a new webcomic link to my bookmarks. This afternoon is going to be shot to pieces checking the archives.
/. and other sources, he could have a nice map soon enough. Pretty enough to buy a copy or two
the AC
He needs to show the reserved Class E block as such (the whole upper right corner), as well as many other reserved blocks. With corrections/suggestions coming in from
ADSL2+ speeds long ago left 10BaseT speeds behind. Now that ADSL2+ is becoming obsolete, and fiber is going in, expect that 3rd world countries will pick up the kit for cheap. 20Mbps sustained downloads are pretty common in Europe, 8-10Mbps in the UK. I know of many companies that have a single ADSL line for the 20 to 50 PCs in the office, its enough bandwidth for casual internet use.
Of course, if you live in a country with a corrupt administration and a broken telecoms regulator, then you will never know the joy of gigabit speeds or even relatively sluggish 24Mbps.
the AC
That would be Pages Jaunes, which is pretty cool for things like finding a restaurant you once ate at, but can only remember what it looked like and approximately what street it was on. Also good for seeing what a place looked like when the pictures were taken (1998 to 1999 era). The site hasn't been much updated, it was a massive effort to take all those photos in the first place. Because French law doesn't allow publishing a photo where an individual can be identified without the persons express written permission, the photo trucks had to take multiple passes, and every photo had to be checked to make sure people couldn't be recognised in each shot.
the AC
I've also been working with developpement programmes in Africa for quite a few years now. Mostly francophone sub-saharan regions. I don't know of any area there where US$100 could feed a village for a year.
;-)
There is a large "middle class" in Africa. Many people live in adequate homes, they have jobs, they have a reasonable level of education, electricity as reliable as the national network, basic levels of health care. They have money, not huge amounts by western standards, but enough to live well by local standards. Africans love to show off their wealth. After they have their neatly painted house, a car, some nice clothing, they look further down Maslow's hierarchy for where to spend their money. What every one wants are flashy consumer electronics. Most have mobile phones. Many have computers, TVs, VCRs and DVD players, and satellite dishes. What they are all screaming for right now is internet access. Just having access to email from their home is a way of not only showing off wealth, but showing a touch of modernity.
I helped a group set up a wireless network a while back. Every time one of their guys came up to Europe for a meeting or vacation, they'd head back down with two suit cases full of Linksys routers. We had found them a good bulk rate of about 30 euros per box. They had good technicians back in Africa who would reflash with OpenWRT, combined with some home crafted antennas, then they would set up relays across their country, radiating from the capital along major highways out to villages and wealthy sub-divisions. The wealthy would pay to get a flashed linksys box and an outside antenna setup, just to upstage their neighbors. Internet access outside the country would be just a trickle, but P-2-P inside the wireless network ran at reasonably good speeds.
Young people in a poor village in Africa are no different than anywhere else
You are right. There are cyber cafés everywhere with a small LAN, and every evening the places are full of kids playing counterstrike
I'm constantly amazed at the perception in Europe and the U.S. that Africa is mostly mud huts. There is wealth there, much of it from petroleum and mining, and as the education level comes up, outsourcing/globalisation is adding to local economies. Yes, there are some extremely poor people in the rural areas, but as long as their farms don't fail they get by well enough with sustenance levels.
I came to this thread hoping to get in a flamingly indignant post about the wrongness of the article, but I'm glad that many other slashdotters have already covered it for me. Kudos.
the AC
Depending on how adventurous you feel about getting linux running on strange hardware, you could buy a used cisco or foundry L2/L3 box for cheap. I know there are a lot of linux projects at cisco, there must be something you can google about how they went about compiling for the platform. The CPUs inside will be something non-mainstream, i.e. not a pentium, but chances are there is a linux distro for it. It shouldn't be that hard to find some archived info on how to bootstrap a linux distro onto one of those boxes.
Used cisco 3500s or 2950s with 24 or 48 ports are on the market for a few hundred (dollars or euros) each. Foundry workgroup switches are less than 100 euros right now. Cisco 7200s are just PCs inside, but their PCI buses are a different layout to allow hot swapping. Cisco Pix 515s are just commodity 1U intel pc motherboards, cisco didn't even bother doing a redesign to remove the superfluous connectors.
If you have enough money for a PCI-ish box and many quad ethernet NICs, then you probably could afford a used Juniper M5. It already runs BSD, and pretty much looks like standard PC hardware inside. A used M5 without any interface cards should be had for less than a new PC, its the interface cards that will cost you dearly.
If you follow my advice, then with any luck you will document everything you did along the way, and release a linux distro for some otherwise proprietary hardware. I'd like to see a cisco 2950 turned into a linux box with all kinds of extra linuxey features. What I'd love to see is openBSD's pf on a switch, so I could set per port ACLs and bandwidth shaping.
the AC
My internet connection is a fibre from my main router to my house. I convinced a supplier to lease me a section of their inter-city fibre that was lying dark, and I paid a crew to pull a fibre from the local pop to my place. I normally have a cisco 3550 on the end of the fibre, and the data centre end is a router with multiple Gig connections to various parts of the internet. I traded my local town for some right-of-way in exchange for the fibre going past the main municipal buildings, so I became the ISP for their IT guys. It works out for all of us, nobody really pays bills in either direction.
For initial tests of the 10GigE equipment, I put a pair on my fibre to see if their promised wan-phy interfaces actually worked. The layer 1 was acceptable and layer 2 worked barely. But with only 4x 1GigE connections further on, there just wasn't any difference moving from 1GigE to 10GigE for home use except for bragging rights. I have a lot of geek friends always trying to out-gadget each other, but nobody has ever topped me in the bandwidth category.
In GPON, the multiplexing depends on the constructor, but typically it is shared between the 16 customers with an ethernet style of contention. Some bandwidth is kept reserved for all the services, internet access is always lowest priority. A few people running popular web servers from their homes might notice each other at peak times, but a few web servers wouldn't hurt. Gamers love GPON because the interleave is so short they see sub milliSecond pings to nearby game servers.
the AC
These are European capitals I was talking about. Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam. I've talked with a company trying to do a rollout in London, but they are running into a bureaucratic nightmare with Ofcom playing obedient lapdog to moneyed interests. I know there are some upgrades going on in Stockholm and Helsinki where much fibre already exists. Other cities have plans, but it all depends on the local telecoms regulator keeping the incumbents from screwing over the free market.
There are supposed to be over 200k GPON lines lit and generating revenue by the end of this year around Europe. I have serious doubts about hitting that target, mostly because the companies will not hire enough experienced engineers and the marketing campaigns suck. There remains a huge investment in developing the features at the headends, such as TV on Demand, and the CPE boxes are still lagging in features. The sweet spot for pricing is supposed to be around 80 euros per month for a quad package, but the first installs are going for 120 euros or more, and uptake is slow.
The biggest problem right now is the cost of the GPON equipment, the makers just can't get the prices down to where they promised they would be.
the AC
The prices of 10GigE switches were outrageous just a year ago, but they've fallen quite a bit as cheap chinese and indian switch makers are getting their production lines cranked up.
I'm seeing about 200 euros per port for a 24 port 10GigE switch, much less for a switch with a few 10GigE ports and 24 10/100/1000 ports.
Give it another year for 10GigE. Where the price savings are now starting to happen is with the real, working 1GigE switches with jumbo packet support, flow control, and non-blocking switching fabric. Those just started hitting about 100 euros for an 8 port switch, and they make a nice home switch for power users.
the AC