Don Box, an architect for Microsoft's.NET Developer Platform team, said HTTP presents a major challenge for Web services, for peer-to-peer applications and even for security.
why is Slashdot so interested in DownUnder? Most of these telco idiosynchrocies come from Telstra, not Optus.
Sometimes you want to read about the 'networking third world' after having read about another person who can only select from 2 cable isp's and 3 dsl isp's somewhere else in the world;)
..there are laws passed to prevent people from "tweaking" search engine results so their page comes up with or even before one of the "big guys."
When I did research because a certain company was telling me idefix.net infringed on their copyrights I searched on similar cases and I found that in a few cases of 'misleading domain names' in the Netherlands as part of the verdict the 'cybersquatter' was also ordered to 'remove misleading results from search engines'. It did not tell exactly *how* the 'cybersquatter' was supposed to do that.
This really sounds like cable company thinking. Wake up and smell the coffee: Internet protocols don't work that way.
Cable companies are used to consumers of one or more of their products who can't do anything more with that product then choosing to consume it or not, after having paid for it. You pay for a cable subscription, one or more extra packages and you hope to receive them when you want to watch. As long as the signal is available everywhere, no problem. Your customers cannot influence the cable reception of their neighbours.
Some 'bad' customers get a cable splitter and connect a second TV to the same cable connection (oh the horror! the cheapskates!). By the way, in my country (the Netherlands) I can't get a second cable subscription in the same house. I'll have to get my own splitter and/or amplifier.
Then cable modems came. And all of a sudden there is a lot more diversity to what people can and can't do with their cable (modem) connection. Even send data back to the Internet! (gasp!). Or even worse, somehow have that Internet available on more then one computer!
So cable companies have to play ISP. Do really new stuff like provide reliable mail and reliable connections to the Internet.
And make users somehow pay for their usage. They try to make this fit into simple models..
Joe Sixpack home user who would have otherwise dialed into AOL for many hours and Brent Bussinessman who wants to be online for the office. Because their billing model can only deal with so many different pricing structures.
There is a different system that might work. The cable company provides 'IP transport' between your cablemodem and the ISP, and the ISP connects you to the Internet and your e-mail, your news and other services.
This model now works for (A)DSL in the Netherlands. The phone company doesn't play ISP, they just connect my line to the DSLAM in the exchange. By my login I select the ISP I want and the rate I want to use (my adsl login is koos@xs4all-basic-adsl) and the router in the telco network sets up a virtual circuit with my ISP, xs4all.
This can work with any transport protocol that supports logins and sessions, like PPPoE and PPTP. Which also lowers the chance of unauthorized hookups and cable packet sniffing.
I get two bills, one from KPN, the phone company for the adsl link and one from XS4ALL, the ISP for the Internet connection and services. If I use too much bandwidth I may get charged extra for that (XS4ALL isn't clear on this matter, I just wish they would say N bytes per month and extra bytes cost you this fee).
Why don't the cable companies go to this model ? The only reason I can think of is that they always had virtual monopolies and don't want to have competitors on their turf. The ISP's are no competitor for KPN since KPN is not an ISP itself. (KPN indirectly owns a number of the ISP's that offer ADSL connections but in the day-to-day reality KPN and the ISP are two different parties to deal with).
This model has its disadvantages. The problem with your connection is in the equipment of the (Telco, ISP) depending on who you ask (ISP, Telco). At this moment, moving from one address to the other and trying to keep a working ADSL connection is a nightmare.
About running servers at home and sharing the connection for multiple computers.. XS4ALL encourages the users to do just that. XS4ALL had deals on cheap routers and tells people that they can run their own webserver, gameserver at home. As long as you don't use up too much bandwidth, which is the only thing that XS4ALL will count for your connection.
Any other classification of your traffic ('business use') is also a violation of your privacy.
Going back to the cable company, the only difference between a 'consumer' and a 'business' subscription would be (for me) that the business connection would be available for at least a certain percentage of the day and that outages longer then a certain time would automatically mean that I get part of the subscription money refunded (a service level agreement).
How about the enormous chunk of Linux webservers? Last I read, Linux has supported IPv6 for some time now.
Yes, but does your cable or DSL provider route IPv6 ? Do they help you get your own/48 routed to your home if you want it ? I wish my cable provider supported IPv6 and/or multicast.
And your Linux webserver might have a bit of a problem serving IPv6 clients out of the tarball. Apache 1.3.x still needs a set of patches (available from the kame ftp server). Apache 2.0, still in beta supports it now.
Banks will be interested in high-security facilities. Crypto-companies. A computer that generates ssl certificates.
Or companies that have activities that attract protestors (terrorist bombing attacks being the ultimate form of protest).
#ifdef SHAMELESS_PLUG Virtu secure webhosting in the Netherlands is setting up a similar facility in the vault of a bank. Great building to visit.
(I'm a satisfied customer:) #endif/* SHAMELESS_PLUG */
That shouldn't be a big problem, as most of the traffic over the trans-Atlantic links usually goes in the other direction. In general users in Europe
download a lot more data from the US than vice versa, which means that there should be a lot of unused capacity.:-)
You might be wrong. A few years ago I heard it the other way around: the traffic from porn downloads on European servers to US customers was a lot bigger. This may have changed though.
HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.
What percentage of pages actually meet the DTD? It'd be a pretty sad figure if you ask me. Admittedly it would help if browsers properly supported the standards...
That's the thing I like about developing for WAP in wml. wml is an XML. You specify the DTD. You close each tag you open. And the checking is damn strict: one syntax error and all you see on the phone is 'invalid tag'. It would be nice if some popular browsers did that.
Maybe we should let all 'web developers' test their site sitting behind a VT-terminal which loads the page over a 9600 bps ppp line:)
About gopher at minnesota, I'm trying to remember a bit about licensing of the gopher server or protocol which really killed what was left of gopher when the web was taking off.
the 24.0.0.0 address space is owned by the entire @home network.
The 24.0.0.0/8 address space is reserved for 'cable modem use' and @home has the first part
(24.0.0.0 - 24.23.255.255). Other cable providers have other parts (such as UPC/A2000 here in the Netherlands, who has 24.132.0.0 - 24.132.255.255).
At the last RIPE meeting, the ICANN director told that this special use of 24.0.0.0/8 addresses for cable modems would come to an end since it gave them more hassle and Cable modems aren't that special anymore.
About the story in general: I can only repeat remarks made before. For some reason the "DHCP for security" myth seems to be very active lately.
"Email" in Dutch means something totally different
on
"e-mail" vs "email"
·
· Score: 1
I try to use "e-mail" for Internet mail because the Dutch 'email' means enamel, which can be confusing.
In the dutch movie De lift (Movie data from Filmview and Imdb) a big role was played by an elevator controlled by an 'organic' computer that started a killing spree and at the end killed it's maker.
Maybe I don't like the idea of organic computers that much:)
Mandating laptops is all well and good, but for what? Will they insist that it's from one particular manufacturer, and that it runs their mandated OS and software (and we all know what that'll be), or will students be given the choice?
I'm getting quite interested in the answer to this question as the whole story never mentions the price of software. This would mean only free software could be installed on them.
Ok, in reality at least part of the laptop will probably have some sort of windows install. A quick browse of the umass LAN support pages suggest it's a Novell shop. But with their own local redhat mirror so they promote 'choice' in operating systems.
All I am getting interested in is, are they going to support wireless LAN ?
I used to work in a university and one of our 'very far future' ideas was to support wireless lan for students who brought their own laptops and wireless nics to save on computer rooms.
Sounds familiair, and what you don't want to get into as a network admin at an educational institution is the 'us against them' situation. Both sides lose, and both sides end up feeling bad. You for having a lousy job with lousy students making your work impossible, the students for the Internet connection being 'unusable'.
There are a number of possible solutions, and I'll mention some possible solutions.
Firewalling napster ports. This is just the start of an arms race. You block one port, clients move to another port, repeat until bored.
Using proxies and nothing can be done without using such a proxy. Not an ideal situation and you make any server a student wants to run inaccessible where such a server could be very usefull and nice (hey, slashdot started on a student account:)
Traffic measurements per IP. Using IP accounting you can find out quite fast who abuses the network. Set a policy in advance (no 'fair use' blabla, a 'more then 768 megabytes Internet traffic in one week and your connection is dead' or whatever number works best). Have that policy be accepted as school policy by the people in charge. It's not your rule (those pesky network admins at it again), it's the school rule for using the school's resources.
Traffic shaping. Allocate an amount of bandwidth to the dorms, maybe allocate a larger amount after hours. Maybe allocate bandwidth per IP. (Can perfectly be combined with the previous one).
Remember one thing and don't be afraid to repeat it : The school is not an ISP and is therefore not obliged to give its student Internet access. Internet access is an aide to your studies. If you need more Internet access then that, get your own access and be prepared to pay for it.
Succes, and good luck, and I hope you find a way to keep your student network users as friends so you can do your work a lot easier.
Exactly. A measurement with an exact description of the test environment up to the IRQ tuning and all software versions. Just a different webserver (TUX).
My opinion about Apache without any data to back it up:
I have configured an Apache webserver for a high number of hits (with nearly all static content) and found out that the limiting factor in the end was bandwidth, the server was still waiting until it was time to actually do something instead of those boring http requests. On opening day I did find what the compile-time limit of the serverpool is:)
Looking in the stats I find it has endured at it's peak 158024 http/hits per hour.
For the Netherlands, the local-loop monopoly KPN started with their ADSL service mxstream (correct pronounciation unknown) around last March, in a number of cities. Standard subscription is 512 kbit down/64 kbit up, fast is 1024 kbit down/128 kbit up.
They offer ISP-choice and you have to sign up via your ISP. Since then they have been plagued by disconnections up to an entire weekend, routers needing resetting and sucky software.
Technically you need to setup a PPTP connection with the ADSL network and then go to the mxstream web portal and select Internet access from the great portal with services. Ofcourse people started writing scripts to automate this. According to rumors (!) the url's to log in get changed from time to time so people have to see the great (..) stuff available other then IP access and cannot use autologin scripts.
A large Dutch provider, Cistron is building their own Telco/adsl network where getting an ADSL connection means they take over the local loop and you don't have to deal with KPN anymore. Speed isn't rate-limited, meaning a theoretical 8 mbit downstream could happen (2 mbit guaranteed) and 1 mbit upstream.
Since KPN decided to skip my phone exchange, I am waiting for Cistron. Cistron is looking very good sofar, but I actually have to see them connect large amounts of customers.
Since kerneltraffic (a very good site) got a bit slow I mirrored the page from kt for now (minus stylesheet) so it can also be viewed at
http://idefix.net/~koos/kt20000925 _86.html#13.
but I'd like to find out what others are doing for making their own web stats.
I use Webalizer. It's GPL, it works, it's fast and very configurable. It logs search-strings (very configurable) so you know what people were looking for. It can detect a 'visit' reasonably (with a configurable timeout).
By default, weird inetd daemons like fingerd and telnet are open to security threats,
Only if you install Redhat as a server. I did a RH 6.2 workstation install here (it is a workstation, dammit). It doesn't even have inetd.
If you install a server, you get a server.
Plus, surely if this is used in a big way it's going to severely increase the load on akamai's servers?
Akamaitech is in the business of providing web services that can handle extreme loads (it's their core business to think in megabytes/second and not in hits/day). They will handle. Whether they like this is something else.
But Akamaitech is used by big sites with loads of visitors (like yahoo) or by big providers of banner-adds. Sites that obviously have money to make sure (part of) their content is available as fast as possible.
This does not seem to match with the average site that gets blocked by censorware because it should not be viewed by office workers/kids. So I don't think the above is going to effect censorware a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess Microsoft needs to think outside the box.
I saved a good story/rant about Australian Internet prices.
Cable companies are used to consumers of one or more of their products who can't do anything more with that product then choosing to consume it or not, after having paid for it. You pay for a cable subscription, one or more extra packages and you hope to receive them when you want to watch. As long as the signal is available everywhere, no problem. Your customers cannot influence the cable reception of their neighbours.
Some 'bad' customers get a cable splitter and connect a second TV to the same cable connection (oh the horror! the cheapskates!). By the way, in my country (the Netherlands) I can't get a second cable subscription in the same house. I'll have to get my own splitter and/or amplifier.
Then cable modems came. And all of a sudden there is a lot more diversity to what people can and can't do with their cable (modem) connection. Even send data back to the Internet! (gasp!). Or even worse, somehow have that Internet available on more then one computer!
So cable companies have to play ISP. Do really new stuff like provide reliable mail and reliable connections to the Internet.
And make users somehow pay for their usage. They try to make this fit into simple models.. Joe Sixpack home user who would have otherwise dialed into AOL for many hours and Brent Bussinessman who wants to be online for the office. Because their billing model can only deal with so many different pricing structures.
There is a different system that might work. The cable company provides 'IP transport' between your cablemodem and the ISP, and the ISP connects you to the Internet and your e-mail, your news and other services.
This model now works for (A)DSL in the Netherlands. The phone company doesn't play ISP, they just connect my line to the DSLAM in the exchange. By my login I select the ISP I want and the rate I want to use (my adsl login is koos@xs4all-basic-adsl) and the router in the telco network sets up a virtual circuit with my ISP, xs4all.
This can work with any transport protocol that supports logins and sessions, like PPPoE and PPTP. Which also lowers the chance of unauthorized hookups and cable packet sniffing.
I get two bills, one from KPN, the phone company for the adsl link and one from XS4ALL, the ISP for the Internet connection and services. If I use too much bandwidth I may get charged extra for that (XS4ALL isn't clear on this matter, I just wish they would say N bytes per month and extra bytes cost you this fee).
Why don't the cable companies go to this model ? The only reason I can think of is that they always had virtual monopolies and don't want to have competitors on their turf. The ISP's are no competitor for KPN since KPN is not an ISP itself. (KPN indirectly owns a number of the ISP's that offer ADSL connections but in the day-to-day reality KPN and the ISP are two different parties to deal with).
This model has its disadvantages. The problem with your connection is in the equipment of the (Telco, ISP) depending on who you ask (ISP, Telco). At this moment, moving from one address to the other and trying to keep a working ADSL connection is a nightmare.
About running servers at home and sharing the connection for multiple computers.. XS4ALL encourages the users to do just that. XS4ALL had deals on cheap routers and tells people that they can run their own webserver, gameserver at home. As long as you don't use up too much bandwidth, which is the only thing that XS4ALL will count for your connection.
Any other classification of your traffic ('business use') is also a violation of your privacy.
Going back to the cable company, the only difference between a 'consumer' and a 'business' subscription would be (for me) that the business connection would be available for at least a certain percentage of the day and that outages longer then a certain time would automatically mean that I get part of the subscription money refunded (a service level agreement).
Finally, a patch is available from the wu-ftpd.org website.
And yes, check heatsinks after moving computers.
Yes, but does your cable or DSL provider route IPv6 ? Do they help you get your own /48 routed to your home if you want it ? I wish my cable provider supported IPv6 and/or multicast.
And your Linux webserver might have a bit of a problem serving IPv6 clients out of the tarball. Apache 1.3.x still needs a set of patches (available from the kame ftp server). Apache 2.0, still in beta supports it now.
Or companies that have activities that attract protestors (terrorist bombing attacks being the ultimate form of protest).
#ifdef SHAMELESS_PLUG :) /* SHAMELESS_PLUG */
Virtu secure webhosting in the Netherlands is setting up a similar facility in the vault of a bank. Great building to visit.
(I'm a satisfied customer
#endif
You might be wrong. A few years ago I heard it the other way around: the traffic from porn downloads on European servers to US customers was a lot bigger. This may have changed though.
HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.
That's the thing I like about developing for WAP in wml. wml is an XML. You specify the DTD. You close each tag you open. And the checking is damn strict: one syntax error and all you see on the phone is 'invalid tag'. It would be nice if some popular browsers did that.
Maybe we should let all 'web developers' test their site sitting behind a VT-terminal which loads the page over a 9600 bps ppp line :)
About gopher at minnesota, I'm trying to remember a bit about licensing of the gopher server or protocol which really killed what was left of gopher when the web was taking off.
The 24.0.0.0/8 address space is reserved for 'cable modem use' and @home has the first part (24.0.0.0 - 24.23.255.255). Other cable providers have other parts (such as UPC/A2000 here in the Netherlands, who has 24.132.0.0 - 24.132.255.255).
At the last RIPE meeting, the ICANN director told that this special use of 24.0.0.0/8 addresses for cable modems would come to an end since it gave them more hassle and Cable modems aren't that special anymore.
About the story in general: I can only repeat remarks made before. For some reason the "DHCP for security" myth seems to be very active lately.
I try to use "e-mail" for Internet mail because the Dutch 'email' means enamel, which can be confusing.
Maybe I don't like the idea of organic computers that much :)
I'm getting quite interested in the answer to this question as the whole story never mentions the price of software. This would mean only free software could be installed on them.
Ok, in reality at least part of the laptop will probably have some sort of windows install. A quick browse of the umass LAN support pages suggest it's a Novell shop. But with their own local redhat mirror so they promote 'choice' in operating systems.
All I am getting interested in is, are they going to support wireless LAN ?
I used to work in a university and one of our 'very far future' ideas was to support wireless lan for students who brought their own laptops and wireless nics to save on computer rooms.
You seem to have a bit of a lag.. analog modem ?
(Couldn't resist).
There are a number of possible solutions, and I'll mention some possible solutions.
- Firewalling napster ports. This is just the start of an arms race. You block one port, clients move to another port, repeat until bored.
- Using proxies and nothing can be done without using such a proxy. Not an ideal situation and you make any server a student wants to run inaccessible where such a server could be very usefull and nice (hey, slashdot started on a student account
:)
- Traffic measurements per IP. Using IP accounting you can find out quite fast who abuses the network. Set a policy in advance (no 'fair use' blabla, a 'more then 768 megabytes Internet traffic in one week and your connection is dead' or whatever number works best). Have that policy be accepted as school policy by the people in charge. It's not your rule (those pesky network admins at it again), it's the school rule for using the school's resources.
- Traffic shaping. Allocate an amount of bandwidth to the dorms, maybe allocate a larger amount after hours. Maybe allocate bandwidth per IP. (Can perfectly be combined with the previous one).
Remember one thing and don't be afraid to repeat it : The school is not an ISP and is therefore not obliged to give its student Internet access. Internet access is an aide to your studies. If you need more Internet access then that, get your own access and be prepared to pay for it.Succes, and good luck, and I hope you find a way to keep your student network users as friends so you can do your work a lot easier.
My opinion about Apache without any data to back it up: :)
I have configured an Apache webserver for a high number of hits (with nearly all static content) and found out that the limiting factor in the end was bandwidth, the server was still waiting until it was time to actually do something instead of those boring http requests. On opening day I did find what the compile-time limit of the serverpool is
Looking in the stats I find it has endured at it's peak 158024 http/hits per hour.
They offer ISP-choice and you have to sign up via your ISP. Since then they have been plagued by disconnections up to an entire weekend, routers needing resetting and sucky software.
Technically you need to setup a PPTP connection with the ADSL network and then go to the mxstream web portal and select Internet access from the great portal with services. Ofcourse people started writing scripts to automate this. According to rumors (!) the url's to log in get changed from time to time so people have to see the great (..) stuff available other then IP access and cannot use autologin scripts.
A large Dutch provider, Cistron is building their own Telco/adsl network where getting an ADSL connection means they take over the local loop and you don't have to deal with KPN anymore. Speed isn't rate-limited, meaning a theoretical 8 mbit downstream could happen (2 mbit guaranteed) and 1 mbit upstream.
Since KPN decided to skip my phone exchange, I am waiting for Cistron. Cistron is looking very good sofar, but I actually have to see them connect large amounts of customers.
Yes, all internal links are broken :)
I use Webalizer. It's GPL, it works, it's fast and very configurable. It logs search-strings (very configurable) so you know what people were looking for. It can detect a 'visit' reasonably (with a configurable timeout).
I'm building a new homerouter with a Digital Multia (Alpha chipset) and Linux on it. Works ok although the disk is too small to build 2.2.17 kernels :)
Only if you install Redhat as a server. I did a RH 6.2 workstation install here (it is a workstation, dammit). It doesn't even have inetd. If you install a server, you get a server.
Akamaitech is in the business of providing web services that can handle extreme loads (it's their core business to think in megabytes/second and not in hits/day). They will handle. Whether they like this is something else.
But Akamaitech is used by big sites with loads of visitors (like yahoo) or by big providers of banner-adds. Sites that obviously have money to make sure (part of) their content is available as fast as possible.
This does not seem to match with the average site that gets blocked by censorware because it should not be viewed by office workers/kids. So I don't think the above is going to effect censorware a lot.