Certainly welcome in the data centre world
on
100 Gbps Via Ethernet
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· Score: 5, Informative
This is a natural progression of ethernet speeds. 10GigE switches are getting to the price point now that we are installing them everywhere. I even had a 10GigE switch on my home fibre for a week of testing, but slashdot just doesn't load any faster.
All the broadband providers are moving to larger pipes now, with GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) going in everywhere, as consumers are clamoring for more than ADSL2+ speeds (24Mbps down, 2Mbps up) in city centres. I'm designing the back end of a GPON network, where every neighborhood gets 2.5Gig down, 1 Gig up, shared between 16 residences. Of course, there is going to be more than just internet on pipes that big, quadruple play to start, and as new services become available even more bandwidth will be needed. Once you start piling up the 10GigE connections, it will be nice to have a working trunk/etherchannel/bonding solution for those long hauls between data centres.
Have you ever been on a network full of Macintoshes running OS-X? There are all kinds of wonderful little functions that take advantage of ZeroConf/Bonjour/Rendezvous. PNRP is an attempt to do ZeroConf but on a wider scale, where the lack of NAT in IPv6 means that Vista machines can find each other no matter where they are on the internet.
What Apple has done with ZeroConf is pretty cool, and being able to listen to any of my cow-orkers iTunes libraries while in the office is a good example. Lets not mention beacons or DAAPD, which make iTunes far too useful:-)
Apple does need to make Bonjour/ZeroConf work better with IPv6, if fact most systems on IPv6 networks don't seem to take advantage of as much as they could.
What's this "We", luddite? Speak only for your own ignorance.
Those of us who want to stay employable in the near future have already learned about IPv6, work with it on a regular basis, realise that what was once the future is now here.
One of the nice side effects of IPv6 is that not only do poorly written anti-spam filters ignore it, but most web content filtering systems also don't know how do deal with IPv6 flows. That means that people in companies with strict no-pr0n rules can, for now, surf without getting blocked. The people running adult content sites realised this recently, and they are all clamoring for it. Probably half of the IPv6 traffic in Europe right now is Adult Oriented, because the people writing censoring filters haven't kept up.
With the Vista betas, all the ISPs around here have discovered people will be asking about IPv6, since not only is it enabled by default, some new features require a globally unique IPv6 address (as this article points out). When Vista starts hitting consumers in a few months, there will be marketing campaigns in place promoting "Vista ready internet (now with IPv6, not just the obsolete IPv4 of our competitors)".
IPv6 is becoming widespread everywhere except in the U.S. at this point. I would love to see slashdot get on IPv6, it would spur ISPs in the U.S. to adopt it faster. Hey, CmdrTaco and company, tell your hosting company to get their act together and get you IPv6, you'll be glad you did (in reality, you'll discover all the bugs and lack of support in PHP, Perl, Ruby and other en vogue programming languages)
Currently, every ISP that wants a first IPv6 allocation gets a/32, and they are encouraged to pass out a/64 to single end users, or at most a/48 for a company. Even a/64 for a home user is billions upon billions of available addresses, or can be routed into dozens of subnets with a cheap IPv6 router/firewall unit. Every LAN I configure gets its own/64, so every server or host on the LAN just autoconfigs or statically assigns the correct local address (for those systems with a static DNS entry)
GSM base stations measure the round trip time of the signals to determine the location of a GSM handset, the phone does the same thing with the base station. This is done for three main reasons, to adjust the timing of the send/receive windows so the transmissions are closely aligned with the other end, for echo cancellation, and to avoid contacting cell sites that are too distant. Handsets, if they are following the GSM spec, will limit their distance to 4000 metres if they can see more than one site.
When we install GSM sites on coastlines, those sites are specifically tuned for the maximum 25,000 metre distance to account for boating traffic off the coast. On the coast the antennas point out towards main shipping/boating lanes, and the lobes are shielded to prevent the signal from covering too much inland. Pretty much everywhere else, the maximum distance a site will respond to a handset is determined at site survey and commissioning. Inside towns, the maximum distance will be 800 metres, in the countryside about 3000 to 4000 metres, depending on a whole bunch of factors (nearby heavily travelled roads, cell site spacing, hills, mountains that may reflect the signal)
If you want your GSM handset to work to very high altitudes, launch along a coastline and let the balloon head out to sea. Recovery is an exercise left to the reader.
the AC Oh ye of little faith, you should have had the phone number on the payload with a +44 country code for when it was recovered on the continent
Using two ISP's is a relatively untapped resource today,
Certainly in the US it's fairly rare due to a whole range of issues, but here in Europe it's pretty common for any business with any income derived from the internet to have a minimum of two ISPs.
I have clients who provide this service. Customer gets two different ISP connections, either one cable + one DSL, or two different unbundled DSL providers. Client puts a cisco or other real router in the site, which then does multilink tunnels back to a concentrator in a data centre. If one internet connection goes down, the other is usually still up, with just reduced bandwidth for a while.
Some business oriented DSL companies (never the incumbents or cable operators) offer BGP feeds, so for clients who have their own AS number they can run their whole onsite network with a combination of DSL and leased line circuits. Current DSL speeds (20 down/4 up) can easily support a BGP feed, and with all the fibre going in with nice 80-400 Mbps symmetric speeds means that lots of companies will be multihoming soon for little cost.
Now, I work in the industry, so I may be more sensitive to this, but I know of hundreds of customers that do multihoming or multiple providers with an aggregator. These are small companies with 5 to 50 employees, not big organisations with matching big budgets. This is so common in Europe I was quite surprised on a visit to the US that nobody seems to offer this rather basic business function. There has been an explosive growth in RIPE AS number requests, and similar drop in ARIN AS# requests in the last couple of years. Just another indicator of the rest of the world moving ahead while the US falls way behind.
A system like this elsewhere might draw the Roland Piquepaille's away from/., leaving us with a slightly improved level of content.
I really expect the only "quasi-journalists" to be SEO scum who just pollute systems now with even more of their junk, because they can get paid for it. I'd much rather see a reward system for policing sites such as/. and digg to keep the link farmers out. Slashdot still has the occasional good article, but digg is completely awash in bogus links that scraped content from another site and changed the title and summary. Throwing money at the problem rather than a solution sounds like trouble.
There is a system like that here in Belgium. The first thing it has to do is determine which of the two official languages the caller would like to work in.
[in dutch] if you would like to speak in dutch, say "vlaams" [in french] if you would like to speak in french, say "français"
I say "fuck you" rather strongly
the machine responds in english, "please wait while we connect you with an operator"
It seems they haven't completely translated all their voice prompts yet. At least english language profanity is built into the system. I've tried a number of french and dutch curse words, but the shortcut doesn't work.
It's only a two way street when you are old enough and experienced enough to be able to ask the right questions. A very experienced worker should be able to ask enough questions during the interview to ferret out exactly what the company is looking for, and tailor any answers to reflect experience in the field.
I once spent two hours in an interview asking questions about the project, never once did the hiring guy manage to get a question in. I so completely led the interview that near the end the interviewer asked if he could get a question in, basically to ask what questions they should be asking of my assistants. Its nice to walk out of the first interview knowing you have the job, it gives you leverage in negotiations over price. This only happens when you have over thirty years in the industry, and the hiring company has enough clue to let it happen.
There are interviews where the company no longer has any competence left in its ranks, and don't know when they are getting good or bad answers. Even big, well known companies sometimes end up clueless due to extreme incompetence at an upper management level driving away all the real talent. If you are experienced enough to identify these situations, you walk away knowing you will find something better down the road. Let some n00b earn his battle scars in the miserable jobs.
Their responses left me with even more doubts about this scam, I was willing to believe they were on to something if they had some on-the-ball technical answers.
I support a number of gaming server companies, and online gaming is one of the biggest nightmares in the ISP/carrier world. The problem is all the short UDP packets really pound hard on the CPUs of all the big routers. I moved one large game hosting company from one client to another recently, and watched the network problems migrate from one to the other. Web traffic is mostly large TCP packets, high bandwidth but low Packets Per Second. Game traffic is low bandwidth and high PPS. PPS, especially UDP and ICMP traffic tends to touch the CPU more often, and if you look at all the big router companies they rate their boxes with PPS as more important than total bandwidth or throughput.
If KillerNIC really wanted to make a hot gaming product, they would optimise this for gaming servers, they already disclaim that it wont work on any multi-game server with many clients. Offloading all the unimportant traffic responses, such as ICMP echo/reply packets, would allow gaming servers to dedicate all their CPU power to updating game state, and would allow game hosting companies to spec much lesser hardware (i.e. save $$$ per box). Maybe make it part of a matched pair, that would allow gaming companies to advertise their use of ping acceleration technology.
They should really push the CPU offload feature, if it really works, for the hardcore gamers who play on GigEthernet LANs. It's there where offloading the CPU would help, and latency is a non-issue. Shaving a millisecond or two over broadband isn't going to make much difference to players who win because of skill and talent. Although I always see messages along the lines of "dtag players are complaining in the forums that ping times have gone up 3 mSec from 34mSec to 37mSec, can you fix that?", due to their lack of skill getting them fragged and they have to blame something.
I was joking around recently about creating a line of "Monster" Cat6 cables using gold plated solid silver wires with mu-metal shielding for game-o-philes. Something to go between their 3 euro realtek NIC and their 29 euro no-name chinese DSL modem with ping acceleration on their wanadoo/orange connection. There is probably a fortune to be made taking gameophool's money.
the AC
and a UDP accelerator cow magnet, a framerate cleanser, a joystick base resonance-reflecting granite stone slab for faster reflexes...
Those two are an essential part of BGP/MPLS routing policy. You forgot the highest layer of the protocol stack
10: Religious
Yes, financial obligations of the organisation may dictate where traffic flows, and political considerations of various suppliers may override that, but it's the religious views of the most technical person on the network that ultimately prevails. By religious, I mean along the lines of SBCATT sucks, Juniper vs. Cisco, linux vs. openbsd, vi vs. emacs, and other *ahem* non-trivial viewpoints.
the AC
The non-answers on the GDHardware site make me even more suspicious that this is a snake-oil product aimed at game-o-philes who think that gold plated cat5e cables increase their framerate by a noticable amount
LoJack and other professional security companies employ ex-law enforcement personnel for one big reason, to speak "cop", and to work their old contacts inside of police forces. I work with a number of serious security companies who specialise in computer/telecoms fraud cases. They all have a group of ex-cops on staff to make sure when they need to pursue a case once the perp has been identified, things will move along quickly. I've tried, and failed every time, to file cases 'through the front door' with various police organisations around Europe.
A detective level ex-cop with a good contact book and knowledge of their local system can jump from a mediocre salary as a public servant to private industry with a boost of 5 to 8 times their earnings.
The OP needs to find a private security company in his area with ex-cops on staff, or just put out some ads for ex-cops to do some free-lance security work for the company. So every time one of his scripts calls home with identifying info, the security consultant files the requisite paperwork with his drinking buddies, and the case ends up directly on their desk monday morning. Recover a few laptops like that (with extra added bonus of taking down some thieves), and the company may be able to renogiate their insurance premiums. Dangle the promise of significantly lower insurance premiums in front of management to get their approval to hire one of these guys for a few cases. In the US and the UK, you can even hire off-duty cops for this kind of work, depending on the jurisdiction.
There can't be that many USB wifi dongles out there with new universal binary drivers. Googling is kind of useless, the results tend to be just online stores with all the keywords. Looking at vendor sites hasn't turned up any universal binary driver upgrades.
So which ones have been updated and work with macbooks and MBPs? I'm asking because I've had several people wanting better reception ask me that same question. The reception in my MBP is certainly not quite good enough except for very local communication. I've tried the D-Link G122, but they only support (poorly) the older power books.
So I posted downthread about how I was going to sit back and wait for/.ers and treasure hunters to start posting.kmz files of the parent's property, and digging holes in the middle of the night. Then I went and looked at a few of the treasure hunter sites to see if they are ahead of/. in getting to the story first, and what did I find?
AOL has a new contest out called Gold Rush that started a few days ago. http://goldrush.aol.com/ (warning, flash, sound, possibly NSFW, datamining)
Its an advertising gimick to get people to watch AOL-TimeWarner TV shows in order to obtain clues embedded in the shows or commercials. The more confirmed personally identifying information you give them, the more clues they'll email to you. A spamme^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hn online marketer's dream database, also known as a suckers list.
The timing of this announcement strikes me as strange. Coincidence? I think not!
Maybe they need to get this spammer's gold for the prize
Yes, this is the type of criminal that is hard to pin down. He hasn't been convicted of a criminal offence, he just lost a civil case for scamming. He was smart enough to convert much of his ill gotten gains into easily hidden and transported precious metals, he never drove a flashy car or bought property which could be seized. He analyzed the risks and knew that the worst that could happen to him was forfeiture of his gains in a civil trial, so he purposefully worked to hide those gains.
Assuming he was smart, he has already moved some of the gold to another country and is living outside the US. What he buried on his parents property was safe for a while, and he could always return and dig it up as needed. What he didn't count on was AOL's private investigators finding his receipts for gold bars, which gave them a lead to how he hid his wealth.
Now AOL is trying to force his hand. If a large portion of the gold remains on his parent's property, he'll need to return and dig it up before AOL gets a court order. Presumably the property is under surveillance by private detectives who will get a share if they can detect exactly where the stash is hidden and give the courts precise information allowing a less costly recovery. AOL probably doesn't care much about getting the money for themselves as denying the spammer access to it. It sends a message to other spammers that no matter how hard they try to hide their wealth, AOL and the courts will eventually recover it.
It should be entertaining to see how many treasure hunters find his parent's property and start prospecting in the middle of the night. I'd expect after national news coverage like this, tonight there will be several new holes dug in his parents property, and within weeks most of the property will have been scanned by 'passers-by' who just happened to have a sensitive metal detector while taking a short cut from A to B. If AOL doesn't get in there soon, the gold will certainly be gone, either the parents know where it is and will recover it, the scammer will return some night to get it, or a treasure hunter will eventually get lucky.
I'm on the wrong continent, so I'll just sit back and wait for the first/.ers to post exact details of the parents property and.kmz files of the property in question. It shouldn't take long now.
the AC US$600,000 per month!?! Damn, I'm in the wrong line of work. Curse my parents for raising me with a sense of morality
I'll add another vote for pelican cases, as they are what I use. Strong, heavy and ugly, they are perhaps the best for the money. Z-H cases are just as good, show damage a bit more, and are more expensive. If you sprung for a black macbook, then you are the type to spring for a zero-haliburton. The pelican foam insert is easily configured for maximum protection.
One caveat for anyone flying with pelican or z-h cases. They have been the drug smuggler's cases of choice for years now, and have a tendancy to get pulled by drug agency enforcers with alarming frequency (close to 100% in my case). There is a myth that having a nice rubber seal around the edges keeps drug sniffing dogs from doing their job, and the number of drug couriers lingering in prisons around the world shows that dogs are better trained than that.
When you travel with an expensive case, always put it inside another bag, I use a backpack which makes it easier to transport, or it will attract thieves like nothing else. I've seen one computer guy who let his daughter decorate his pelican with pink hello kitty stickers after painting it fluorescent pink, it stood out in any crowd, and was a useful deterent to thieves walking off with it.
You can't lock checked bagage any more, so just put a security seal on the case to see if it was opened. Ensure that your laptop cannot boot without a password, and any and all sensitive data is on a fully encrypted partition, with full backups left at home or online. All the other things you can do, such as noting serial and model numbers of everything you check is important, since if you fly regularly the chances of finally losing the laptop to thieves approaches one. Put the list of valuables on a post-it inside your passport and carry it with you. Airlines will not reimburse you for the cost of a laptop, you have to take out additional insurance which specifies full replacement costs. If you buy your ticket with a credit card, they may claim to cover losses due to theft, but often the small print requires you to provide them with a list of items well in advance of flying in order to actually have coverage.
We can hope that will be the case. I noticed the update last night, but with no speed difference. This morning I checked the release notes, and it said for mac owners to just DL the whole image. Took a minute to do, and worth it for the speed advantage. Now they just have to fix the stop button:-)
Just tested with the newest macintel universal binary, and it is significantly faster than 1.5.0.2 (which also claimed universal binary, but they fucked up).
If you let software update happen on a mac intel, it doesn't update to 1.5.0.4 universal, but just updates the PPC image. You need to download the new universal image, and install that over the older version, and then it runs.
They still haven't addressed all the networking problems yet, but I really don't ever expect them to.
I don't see where you are getting the Bulgarian link from, it seems to be hosted on a shared server in Boston. The registrar is a local seattle company, and all their net presence is on a linux box with dozens of other domains on Savvis' network.
intouchtechnical seems to be a two person small time operation. I didn't even think it was possible to get a fractional T1 any more, except for grandfathered connections. And any company claiming on their website to be experts should have a Cisco router and some Cisco certs all around. None of this A+ crap either, but some solid knowledge of networks beyond "a snappy DSL line".
From the OP How do other businesses solve this problem of scaling bandwidth needs
Other businesses realise that in order to be seen as a competent technical company they have to contact local ISPs and ask what is available in their area. Seattle has SBC/AT&T (retch), Sprint, Global Crossing, AboveNet, and almost certainly a dozen other small time resellers. Find out what can be delivered to the office, either multiple T1s, a DS3, or maybe even fibre. A real router is an absolute must, used Ciscos or Foundrys go for under US$1000. Screwing around with a linux box and quagga is fine for learning about how not to do a network, but just doesn't cut it for a business.
If you have bandwidth problems, kick off P2P users. Period. No business can justify letting people leech bandwith, and the legal risks if someone is sharing copyrighted material is too great to ignore.
The best answer I can give isn't technical, its to hire a real networking person. Yes, this costs money, but they'll look at your problems and offer real solutions rather than the crap shoot of an ask/. posting. And update web pages, 2003 is long passed, hire a real web designer to build something a little more professional and update it every Monday morning with news. Then potential clients will have confidence you actually do some work.
There are a bunch of low-cost no-name recruiting agencies searching around for engineers to go to Pakistan for a WiMax project the last month or two. It doesn't hold too well for the project that they are trying to pay Paki prices, but expect to find experienced first world engineers.
I had a twisted conversation with one of them two weeks ago. They want all the usual impossibilities, such as 5-10 years of WiMax experience, 15-30 years industry experience but only 18-25 years old, have to be able to program in PowerPoint, etc. I played along, and tried to convince the HR droid to at least pass my CV on, as people closer to the core of the project are probably more competent and my chances of scoring the contract much higher. I told her that they needed to contact me soon, as I was also being recruited by Motorola to do another WiMax rollout so they had only 5 days to get back to me. The deadline has passed, so I guess my holding out for minimum wage was too much for them.
That's nothing. I'm engineering a large scale DSL rollout, around 80,000 installations in the first 2 phases during 2006, and a potential 4 million subscribers over the next 3 years. My technical analysis of the CPEs determines who makes the shortlist. I had a lot of fun at CeBit this March, watching the sales weasels fight over who would get first shot at my account.
I had even more fun letting the D-Link fuckheads know why they were on my blacklist. For two main reasons, the NTP theft of services from all the stratum 1's, and the mac ethernet framing problems. They were told quite clearly the non-response from their engineering team on these two show-stopper problems had left them permanently blacklisted. Its called schadenfreud, and it feels good.
i see no evidence of AS3549 (global crossing) as a provider to netvision
I saw that in several looking glasses, and since I have a router in AS3549 which shows a direct AS hop to AS1680, I'm pretty sure its there. And I've heard of Telia and BTN, since I'm in RIPE space.
even if they were and uunet and gblx both set a null route, traffic would still have come in via telia and btn
Only for traffic from ASes closely connected to Telia and BTN. If UUNet announced, wrongly, they had the prefixes for NetVision and then blackholed the traffic, then lots of providers in the U.S. would route traffic to AS701 rather than the further AS1680. This would effectively knock AS1680 off the net for U.S. traffic, but not effect European traffic as much. BGP screwups are very easy to see using looking glasses. I've done this, intentionally, on some of my netblocks, to play around with fixes, its very hard to recover from.
If I had the time, I'd go check out the new Team Cyrmu tools, they seem to have a historical search function. But its bedtime here in RIPEland.
On the ARIN whois lookup I was doing, I saw an address listed at GLBX, and it mentioned LLNW.NET. I didn't dig much further. This really isn't much of a problem for me, but any time I can help stick it to spammers, I'll spend a few minutes.
this is just more blathering nonsense, as with most of the rest of this thread
I agree with you there. Blue Security are making some wild claims, especially about the blackholing of their addresses. About the only way to do that is with BGP announcements, and I just haven't seen that. They are either completely incompetent (a strong possibility), or they know exactly what went on and they are hiding all details because there is a criminal investigation going on and they were asked to keep mum (a mild possibility).
Looking now, BlueSecurity seems to have moved their operations to Prolexic as of a few hours ago. This will buy them some DDoS protection. Prolexic is based in Miami, and most of my traceroutes are getting lost in Phoenix, but I can't tell if that's something Prolexic is doing or a very clever blackhole.
Netvision also seems to have GlobalXing/AS3549 as a transit provider.
My suspicion (since I don't have a looking glass with a historical search), is that someone with access to the main BGP reflectors inside of either UUNET or GlobalXing managed to make an announcement that they had a local router with a route to AS1680, and then that router just blackholed any traffic to those netblocks. It was happening during the L3/Cogent wars last year, L3 was announcing Cogent netblocks, and blackholing the traffic. If one major backbone such as UUNet makes a false BGP announcement, it could effectively block much traffic from the US to Israel, but European sites would still mostly see Israel as closer.
My next best theory is that someone at LimeLight Networks(AS3549, a GLBX reseller) is sending poison BGP announcements, but I don't see any in looking glasses.
That kind of technically advanced activity, especially with the potential for huge economic losses, should trigger an FBI investigation. Of course, the FBI isn't going to admit anything or post updates on/. until they hand up indictments to the court and make some arrests.
The earlier Biggs scene was certainly in the version shown in San Francisco during the first week of release, because I remember seeing it. When I saw star wars later in the summer in another market (maybe San Diego), the Biggs scene was cut. I remember noting a few changes at the time, but close to 30 years has dimmed those memories. Watching the youtube clips does bring back memories of that bar scene.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a natural progression of ethernet speeds. 10GigE switches are getting to the price point now that we are installing them everywhere. I even had a 10GigE switch on my home fibre for a week of testing, but slashdot just doesn't load any faster.
All the broadband providers are moving to larger pipes now, with GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) going in everywhere, as consumers are clamoring for more than ADSL2+ speeds (24Mbps down, 2Mbps up) in city centres. I'm designing the back end of a GPON network, where every neighborhood gets 2.5Gig down, 1 Gig up, shared between 16 residences. Of course, there is going to be more than just internet on pipes that big, quadruple play to start, and as new services become available even more bandwidth will be needed. Once you start piling up the 10GigE connections, it will be nice to have a working trunk/etherchannel/bonding solution for those long hauls between data centres.
the AC
Have you ever been on a network full of Macintoshes running OS-X? There are all kinds of wonderful little functions that take advantage of ZeroConf/Bonjour/Rendezvous. PNRP is an attempt to do ZeroConf but on a wider scale, where the lack of NAT in IPv6 means that Vista machines can find each other no matter where they are on the internet.
:-)
What Apple has done with ZeroConf is pretty cool, and being able to listen to any of my cow-orkers iTunes libraries while in the office is a good example. Lets not mention beacons or DAAPD, which make iTunes far too useful
Apple does need to make Bonjour/ZeroConf work better with IPv6, if fact most systems on IPv6 networks don't seem to take advantage of as much as they could.
the AC
What's this "We", luddite? Speak only for your own ignorance.
Those of us who want to stay employable in the near future have already learned about IPv6, work with it on a regular basis, realise that what was once the future is now here.
One of the nice side effects of IPv6 is that not only do poorly written anti-spam filters ignore it, but most web content filtering systems also don't know how do deal with IPv6 flows. That means that people in companies with strict no-pr0n rules can, for now, surf without getting blocked. The people running adult content sites realised this recently, and they are all clamoring for it. Probably half of the IPv6 traffic in Europe right now is Adult Oriented, because the people writing censoring filters haven't kept up.
With the Vista betas, all the ISPs around here have discovered people will be asking about IPv6, since not only is it enabled by default, some new features require a globally unique IPv6 address (as this article points out). When Vista starts hitting consumers in a few months, there will be marketing campaigns in place promoting "Vista ready internet (now with IPv6, not just the obsolete IPv4 of our competitors)".
IPv6 is becoming widespread everywhere except in the U.S. at this point. I would love to see slashdot get on IPv6, it would spur ISPs in the U.S. to adopt it faster. Hey, CmdrTaco and company, tell your hosting company to get their act together and get you IPv6, you'll be glad you did (in reality, you'll discover all the bugs and lack of support in PHP, Perl, Ruby and other en vogue programming languages)
the AC
Currently, every ISP that wants a first IPv6 allocation gets a /32, and they are encouraged to pass out a /64 to single end users, or at most a /48 for a company. Even a /64 for a home user is billions upon billions of available addresses, or can be routed into dozens of subnets with a cheap IPv6 router/firewall unit. Every LAN I configure gets its own /64, so every server or host on the LAN just autoconfigs or statically assigns the correct local address (for those systems with a static DNS entry)
the AC
GSM base stations measure the round trip time of the signals to determine the location of a GSM handset, the phone does the same thing with the base station. This is done for three main reasons, to adjust the timing of the send/receive windows so the transmissions are closely aligned with the other end, for echo cancellation, and to avoid contacting cell sites that are too distant. Handsets, if they are following the GSM spec, will limit their distance to 4000 metres if they can see more than one site.
When we install GSM sites on coastlines, those sites are specifically tuned for the maximum 25,000 metre distance to account for boating traffic off the coast. On the coast the antennas point out towards main shipping/boating lanes, and the lobes are shielded to prevent the signal from covering too much inland. Pretty much everywhere else, the maximum distance a site will respond to a handset is determined at site survey and commissioning. Inside towns, the maximum distance will be 800 metres, in the countryside about 3000 to 4000 metres, depending on a whole bunch of factors (nearby heavily travelled roads, cell site spacing, hills, mountains that may reflect the signal)
If you want your GSM handset to work to very high altitudes, launch along a coastline and let the balloon head out to sea. Recovery is an exercise left to the reader.
the AC
Oh ye of little faith, you should have had the phone number on the payload with a +44 country code for when it was recovered on the continent
Certainly in the US it's fairly rare due to a whole range of issues, but here in Europe it's pretty common for any business with any income derived from the internet to have a minimum of two ISPs.
I have clients who provide this service. Customer gets two different ISP connections, either one cable + one DSL, or two different unbundled DSL providers. Client puts a cisco or other real router in the site, which then does multilink tunnels back to a concentrator in a data centre. If one internet connection goes down, the other is usually still up, with just reduced bandwidth for a while.
Some business oriented DSL companies (never the incumbents or cable operators) offer BGP feeds, so for clients who have their own AS number they can run their whole onsite network with a combination of DSL and leased line circuits. Current DSL speeds (20 down/4 up) can easily support a BGP feed, and with all the fibre going in with nice 80-400 Mbps symmetric speeds means that lots of companies will be multihoming soon for little cost.
Now, I work in the industry, so I may be more sensitive to this, but I know of hundreds of customers that do multihoming or multiple providers with an aggregator. These are small companies with 5 to 50 employees, not big organisations with matching big budgets. This is so common in Europe I was quite surprised on a visit to the US that nobody seems to offer this rather basic business function. There has been an explosive growth in RIPE AS number requests, and similar drop in ARIN AS# requests in the last couple of years. Just another indicator of the rest of the world moving ahead while the US falls way behind.
the AC
I came here looking for a post like this.
/., leaving us with a slightly improved level of content.
/. and digg to keep the link farmers out. Slashdot still has the occasional good article, but digg is completely awash in bogus links that scraped content from another site and changed the title and summary. Throwing money at the problem rather than a solution sounds like trouble.
A system like this elsewhere might draw the Roland Piquepaille's away from
I really expect the only "quasi-journalists" to be SEO scum who just pollute systems now with even more of their junk, because they can get paid for it. I'd much rather see a reward system for policing sites such as
the AC
There is a system like that here in Belgium. The first thing it has to do is determine which of the two official languages the caller would like to work in.
[in dutch] if you would like to speak in dutch, say "vlaams"
[in french] if you would like to speak in french, say "français"
I say "fuck you" rather strongly
the machine responds in english, "please wait while we connect you with an operator"
It seems they haven't completely translated all their voice prompts yet. At least english language profanity is built into the system. I've tried a number of french and dutch curse words, but the shortcut doesn't work.
the AC
It's only a two way street when you are old enough and experienced enough to be able to ask the right questions. A very experienced worker should be able to ask enough questions during the interview to ferret out exactly what the company is looking for, and tailor any answers to reflect experience in the field.
I once spent two hours in an interview asking questions about the project, never once did the hiring guy manage to get a question in. I so completely led the interview that near the end the interviewer asked if he could get a question in, basically to ask what questions they should be asking of my assistants. Its nice to walk out of the first interview knowing you have the job, it gives you leverage in negotiations over price. This only happens when you have over thirty years in the industry, and the hiring company has enough clue to let it happen.
There are interviews where the company no longer has any competence left in its ranks, and don't know when they are getting good or bad answers. Even big, well known companies sometimes end up clueless due to extreme incompetence at an upper management level driving away all the real talent. If you are experienced enough to identify these situations, you walk away knowing you will find something better down the road. Let some n00b earn his battle scars in the miserable jobs.
the AC
Their responses left me with even more doubts about this scam, I was willing to believe they were on to something if they had some on-the-ball technical answers.
I support a number of gaming server companies, and online gaming is one of the biggest nightmares in the ISP/carrier world. The problem is all the short UDP packets really pound hard on the CPUs of all the big routers. I moved one large game hosting company from one client to another recently, and watched the network problems migrate from one to the other. Web traffic is mostly large TCP packets, high bandwidth but low Packets Per Second. Game traffic is low bandwidth and high PPS. PPS, especially UDP and ICMP traffic tends to touch the CPU more often, and if you look at all the big router companies they rate their boxes with PPS as more important than total bandwidth or throughput.
If KillerNIC really wanted to make a hot gaming product, they would optimise this for gaming servers, they already disclaim that it wont work on any multi-game server with many clients. Offloading all the unimportant traffic responses, such as ICMP echo/reply packets, would allow gaming servers to dedicate all their CPU power to updating game state, and would allow game hosting companies to spec much lesser hardware (i.e. save $$$ per box). Maybe make it part of a matched pair, that would allow gaming companies to advertise their use of ping acceleration technology.
They should really push the CPU offload feature, if it really works, for the hardcore gamers who play on GigEthernet LANs. It's there where offloading the CPU would help, and latency is a non-issue. Shaving a millisecond or two over broadband isn't going to make much difference to players who win because of skill and talent. Although I always see messages along the lines of "dtag players are complaining in the forums that ping times have gone up 3 mSec from 34mSec to 37mSec, can you fix that?", due to their lack of skill getting them fragged and they have to blame something.
I was joking around recently about creating a line of "Monster" Cat6 cables using gold plated solid silver wires with mu-metal shielding for game-o-philes. Something to go between their 3 euro realtek NIC and their 29 euro no-name chinese DSL modem with ping acceleration on their wanadoo/orange connection. There is probably a fortune to be made taking gameophool's money.
the AC
and a UDP accelerator cow magnet, a framerate cleanser, a joystick base resonance-reflecting granite stone slab for faster reflexes...
Those two are an essential part of BGP/MPLS routing policy. You forgot the highest layer of the protocol stack
10: Religious
Yes, financial obligations of the organisation may dictate where traffic flows, and political considerations of various suppliers may override that, but it's the religious views of the most technical person on the network that ultimately prevails. By religious, I mean along the lines of SBCATT sucks, Juniper vs. Cisco, linux vs. openbsd, vi vs. emacs, and other *ahem* non-trivial viewpoints.
the AC
The non-answers on the GDHardware site make me even more suspicious that this is a snake-oil product aimed at game-o-philes who think that gold plated cat5e cables increase their framerate by a noticable amount
LoJack and other professional security companies employ ex-law enforcement personnel for one big reason, to speak "cop", and to work their old contacts inside of police forces. I work with a number of serious security companies who specialise in computer/telecoms fraud cases. They all have a group of ex-cops on staff to make sure when they need to pursue a case once the perp has been identified, things will move along quickly. I've tried, and failed every time, to file cases 'through the front door' with various police organisations around Europe.
A detective level ex-cop with a good contact book and knowledge of their local system can jump from a mediocre salary as a public servant to private industry with a boost of 5 to 8 times their earnings.
The OP needs to find a private security company in his area with ex-cops on staff, or just put out some ads for ex-cops to do some free-lance security work for the company. So every time one of his scripts calls home with identifying info, the security consultant files the requisite paperwork with his drinking buddies, and the case ends up directly on their desk monday morning. Recover a few laptops like that (with extra added bonus of taking down some thieves), and the company may be able to renogiate their insurance premiums. Dangle the promise of significantly lower insurance premiums in front of management to get their approval to hire one of these guys for a few cases. In the US and the UK, you can even hire off-duty cops for this kind of work, depending on the jurisdiction.
the AC
There can't be that many USB wifi dongles out there with new universal binary drivers. Googling is kind of useless, the results tend to be just online stores with all the keywords. Looking at vendor sites hasn't turned up any universal binary driver upgrades.
So which ones have been updated and work with macbooks and MBPs? I'm asking because I've had several people wanting better reception ask me that same question. The reception in my MBP is certainly not quite good enough except for very local communication. I've tried the D-Link G122, but they only support (poorly) the older power books.
the AC
So I posted downthread about how I was going to sit back and wait for /.ers and treasure hunters to start posting .kmz files of the parent's property, and digging holes in the middle of the night. Then I went and looked at a few of the treasure hunter sites to see if they are ahead of /. in getting to the story first, and what did I find?
AOL has a new contest out called Gold Rush that started a few days ago. http://goldrush.aol.com/ (warning, flash, sound, possibly NSFW, datamining)
Its an advertising gimick to get people to watch AOL-TimeWarner TV shows in order to obtain clues embedded in the shows or commercials. The more confirmed personally identifying information you give them, the more clues they'll email to you. A spamme^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hn online marketer's dream database, also known as a suckers list.
The timing of this announcement strikes me as strange. Coincidence? I think not!
Maybe they need to get this spammer's gold for the prize
the AC
Yes, this is the type of criminal that is hard to pin down. He hasn't been convicted of a criminal offence, he just lost a civil case for scamming. He was smart enough to convert much of his ill gotten gains into easily hidden and transported precious metals, he never drove a flashy car or bought property which could be seized. He analyzed the risks and knew that the worst that could happen to him was forfeiture of his gains in a civil trial, so he purposefully worked to hide those gains.
/.ers to post exact details of the parents property and .kmz files of the property in question. It shouldn't take long now.
Assuming he was smart, he has already moved some of the gold to another country and is living outside the US. What he buried on his parents property was safe for a while, and he could always return and dig it up as needed. What he didn't count on was AOL's private investigators finding his receipts for gold bars, which gave them a lead to how he hid his wealth.
Now AOL is trying to force his hand. If a large portion of the gold remains on his parent's property, he'll need to return and dig it up before AOL gets a court order. Presumably the property is under surveillance by private detectives who will get a share if they can detect exactly where the stash is hidden and give the courts precise information allowing a less costly recovery. AOL probably doesn't care much about getting the money for themselves as denying the spammer access to it. It sends a message to other spammers that no matter how hard they try to hide their wealth, AOL and the courts will eventually recover it.
It should be entertaining to see how many treasure hunters find his parent's property and start prospecting in the middle of the night. I'd expect after national news coverage like this, tonight there will be several new holes dug in his parents property, and within weeks most of the property will have been scanned by 'passers-by' who just happened to have a sensitive metal detector while taking a short cut from A to B. If AOL doesn't get in there soon, the gold will certainly be gone, either the parents know where it is and will recover it, the scammer will return some night to get it, or a treasure hunter will eventually get lucky.
I'm on the wrong continent, so I'll just sit back and wait for the first
the AC
US$600,000 per month!?! Damn, I'm in the wrong line of work. Curse my parents for raising me with a sense of morality
I'll add another vote for pelican cases, as they are what I use. Strong, heavy and ugly, they are perhaps the best for the money. Z-H cases are just as good, show damage a bit more, and are more expensive. If you sprung for a black macbook, then you are the type to spring for a zero-haliburton. The pelican foam insert is easily configured for maximum protection.
One caveat for anyone flying with pelican or z-h cases. They have been the drug smuggler's cases of choice for years now, and have a tendancy to get pulled by drug agency enforcers with alarming frequency (close to 100% in my case). There is a myth that having a nice rubber seal around the edges keeps drug sniffing dogs from doing their job, and the number of drug couriers lingering in prisons around the world shows that dogs are better trained than that.
When you travel with an expensive case, always put it inside another bag, I use a backpack which makes it easier to transport, or it will attract thieves like nothing else. I've seen one computer guy who let his daughter decorate his pelican with pink hello kitty stickers after painting it fluorescent pink, it stood out in any crowd, and was a useful deterent to thieves walking off with it.
You can't lock checked bagage any more, so just put a security seal on the case to see if it was opened. Ensure that your laptop cannot boot without a password, and any and all sensitive data is on a fully encrypted partition, with full backups left at home or online. All the other things you can do, such as noting serial and model numbers of everything you check is important, since if you fly regularly the chances of finally losing the laptop to thieves approaches one. Put the list of valuables on a post-it inside your passport and carry it with you. Airlines will not reimburse you for the cost of a laptop, you have to take out additional insurance which specifies full replacement costs. If you buy your ticket with a credit card, they may claim to cover losses due to theft, but often the small print requires you to provide them with a list of items well in advance of flying in order to actually have coverage.
the AC
We can hope that will be the case. I noticed the update last night, but with no speed difference. This morning I checked the release notes, and it said for mac owners to just DL the whole image. Took a minute to do, and worth it for the speed advantage. Now they just have to fix the stop button :-)
the AC
Just tested with the newest macintel universal binary, and it is significantly faster than 1.5.0.2 (which also claimed universal binary, but they fucked up).
If you let software update happen on a mac intel, it doesn't update to 1.5.0.4 universal, but just updates the PPC image. You need to download the new universal image, and install that over the older version, and then it runs.
They still haven't addressed all the networking problems yet, but I really don't ever expect them to.
the AC
I don't see where you are getting the Bulgarian link from, it seems to be hosted on a shared server in Boston. The registrar is a local seattle company, and all their net presence is on a linux box with dozens of other domains on Savvis' network.
/. posting. And update web pages, 2003 is long passed, hire a real web designer to build something a little more professional and update it every Monday morning with news. Then potential clients will have confidence you actually do some work.
intouchtechnical seems to be a two person small time operation. I didn't even think it was possible to get a fractional T1 any more, except for grandfathered connections. And any company claiming on their website to be experts should have a Cisco router and some Cisco certs all around. None of this A+ crap either, but some solid knowledge of networks beyond "a snappy DSL line".
From the OP How do other businesses solve this problem of scaling bandwidth needs
Other businesses realise that in order to be seen as a competent technical company they have to contact local ISPs and ask what is available in their area. Seattle has SBC/AT&T (retch), Sprint, Global Crossing, AboveNet, and almost certainly a dozen other small time resellers. Find out what can be delivered to the office, either multiple T1s, a DS3, or maybe even fibre. A real router is an absolute must, used Ciscos or Foundrys go for under US$1000. Screwing around with a linux box and quagga is fine for learning about how not to do a network, but just doesn't cut it for a business.
If you have bandwidth problems, kick off P2P users. Period. No business can justify letting people leech bandwith, and the legal risks if someone is sharing copyrighted material is too great to ignore.
The best answer I can give isn't technical, its to hire a real networking person. Yes, this costs money, but they'll look at your problems and offer real solutions rather than the crap shoot of an ask
the AC
There are a bunch of low-cost no-name recruiting agencies searching around for engineers to go to Pakistan for a WiMax project the last month or two. It doesn't hold too well for the project that they are trying to pay Paki prices, but expect to find experienced first world engineers.
I had a twisted conversation with one of them two weeks ago. They want all the usual impossibilities, such as 5-10 years of WiMax experience, 15-30 years industry experience but only 18-25 years old, have to be able to program in PowerPoint, etc. I played along, and tried to convince the HR droid to at least pass my CV on, as people closer to the core of the project are probably more competent and my chances of scoring the contract much higher. I told her that they needed to contact me soon, as I was also being recruited by Motorola to do another WiMax rollout so they had only 5 days to get back to me. The deadline has passed, so I guess my holding out for minimum wage was too much for them.
the AC
That's nothing. I'm engineering a large scale DSL rollout, around 80,000 installations in the first 2 phases during 2006, and a potential 4 million subscribers over the next 3 years. My technical analysis of the CPEs determines who makes the shortlist. I had a lot of fun at CeBit this March, watching the sales weasels fight over who would get first shot at my account.
I had even more fun letting the D-Link fuckheads know why they were on my blacklist. For two main reasons, the NTP theft of services from all the stratum 1's, and the mac ethernet framing problems. They were told quite clearly the non-response from their engineering team on these two show-stopper problems had left them permanently blacklisted. Its called schadenfreud, and it feels good.
the AC
i see no evidence of AS3549 (global crossing) as a provider to netvision
I saw that in several looking glasses, and since I have a router in AS3549 which shows a direct AS hop to AS1680, I'm pretty sure its there. And I've heard of Telia and BTN, since I'm in RIPE space.
even if they were and uunet and gblx both set a null route, traffic would still have come in via telia and btn
Only for traffic from ASes closely connected to Telia and BTN. If UUNet announced, wrongly, they had the prefixes for NetVision and then blackholed the traffic, then lots of providers in the U.S. would route traffic to AS701 rather than the further AS1680. This would effectively knock AS1680 off the net for U.S. traffic, but not effect European traffic as much. BGP screwups are very easy to see using looking glasses. I've done this, intentionally, on some of my netblocks, to play around with fixes, its very hard to recover from.
If I had the time, I'd go check out the new Team Cyrmu tools, they seem to have a historical search function. But its bedtime here in RIPEland.
the AC
they're ethical, stand-up guys
Ok, I'll take your word on it.
limelight is not as3549. they are as22882
On the ARIN whois lookup I was doing, I saw an address listed at GLBX, and it mentioned LLNW.NET. I didn't dig much further. This really isn't much of a problem for me, but any time I can help stick it to spammers, I'll spend a few minutes.
this is just more blathering nonsense, as with most of the rest of this thread
I agree with you there. Blue Security are making some wild claims, especially about the blackholing of their addresses. About the only way to do that is with BGP announcements, and I just haven't seen that. They are either completely incompetent (a strong possibility), or they know exactly what went on and they are hiding all details because there is a criminal investigation going on and they were asked to keep mum (a mild possibility).
the AC
Looking now, BlueSecurity seems to have moved their operations to Prolexic as of a few hours ago. This will buy them some DDoS protection. Prolexic is based in Miami, and most of my traceroutes are getting lost in Phoenix, but I can't tell if that's something Prolexic is doing or a very clever blackhole.
/. until they hand up indictments to the court and make some arrests.
Netvision also seems to have GlobalXing/AS3549 as a transit provider.
My suspicion (since I don't have a looking glass with a historical search), is that someone with access to the main BGP reflectors inside of either UUNET or GlobalXing managed to make an announcement that they had a local router with a route to AS1680, and then that router just blackholed any traffic to those netblocks. It was happening during the L3/Cogent wars last year, L3 was announcing Cogent netblocks, and blackholing the traffic. If one major backbone such as UUNet makes a false BGP announcement, it could effectively block much traffic from the US to Israel, but European sites would still mostly see Israel as closer.
My next best theory is that someone at LimeLight Networks(AS3549, a GLBX reseller) is sending poison BGP announcements, but I don't see any in looking glasses.
That kind of technically advanced activity, especially with the potential for huge economic losses, should trigger an FBI investigation. Of course, the FBI isn't going to admit anything or post updates on
the AC
The earlier Biggs scene was certainly in the version shown in San Francisco during the first week of release, because I remember seeing it. When I saw star wars later in the summer in another market (maybe San Diego), the Biggs scene was cut. I remember noting a few changes at the time, but close to 30 years has dimmed those memories. Watching the youtube clips does bring back memories of that bar scene.
the AC