Personally I would avoid DD-WRT v24 completely as it has proved quite unreliable for me (couldn't get several laptops to work with WPA using this version). Either use v23 or preferably Tomato 1.19 (not sure if it does v6 but it has great QoS setup including nice bandwidth graphing by class of service).
Comcast will give homes IPv6 only, because if they use dual stack they still need far too many IPv4 addresses - they've already exhausted the 10.x address space so NAT is not an option unless you have multiple instances of the same address within Comcast, which makes it painful to manage the set top boxes and cable modems remotely. Search for 'durand ipv6' for more about this, there's a good presentation available.
How about Comcast? They have already deployed IPv6 in their core and aggregation networks, and will be using it for all-IPv6 homes (if they aren't already). Search for 'durand ipv6' for more about this.
An elderly relative ran Windows for many years and I recently converted her to Ubuntu. The best thing about this is being able to *reliably* remote control her PC using VNC over an SSH tunnel. Once set up it requires very little maintenance, so it's best if you use a stable version of a distro (e.g. Ubuntu 8.04.1) - install 'unattended-upgrades' to get automated security updates in the background without the user having to know about this.
One thing to watch out for with randomly chosen SSH ports is traffic shaping - I used port 119 (NNTP) for SSH at one point and only realised after some time that the ISP's Ellacoya traffic shaping hardware was configured to prioritise port 22 and greatly de-prioritise 119. Switching to port 22 greatly improved things. Of course this is ISP specific and they don't usually publish their traffic shaping policy rules including ports...
Whatever software you put on a server to handle replication could have vulnerabilities. I don't see why BitTorrent peers should be more vulnerable than anything else, and it's possible they are sufficiently well tested out on the Internet that they are more secure than a tool used only within the enterprise.
The number of TCP sessions *makes no difference at all* to an ISP - assuming they are not doing deep packet inspection of course. Apart from that case, all IP packets are routed, with no inspection of the TCP header, so there's no way the number of sessions could make a difference.
If you want to use no. of TCP sessions as a weak indicator of P2P activity, go ahead, but BitTorrent developers will develop workarounds (maybe this is one of them) - ultimately everything may end up as encrypted UDP traffic that's really hard to traffic shape even using DPI.
I generally agree that you get what you pay for - there are shared pipes all over the place, so if people use BT 24/7 and fill their DSL/cable access link, they should expect to pay more than people who simply do email, surfing and occasional video clips. Traffic shaping and usage caps are just different approaches to making behaviour fit the costs of running the network.
I really wish people would stop repeating this myth that the UK (and Europe) are free of software patents. There many, many software patents here - you just have to write the patent in a certain way that gets around the very weak restrictions. See http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html for sample of these patents with summaries, from an anti-patent group.
None of this goes in your will. The will is actually public information at least in some countries such as the UK - see my other posting. You need a separate document that's confidential to your executors (who sort out your affairs based on will) with bank accounts, social network passwords, or whatever.
Don't put ANYTHING confidential such as passwords in your will. At least in the UK, once a will has been granted probate (i.e. government has agreed you can wind up estate because inheritance tax is paid), it is actually published for all to see. Probate is a complex process and varies between countries, but take legal advice before doing 'innovative' stuff with your will.
You need a will, and separately a master password in a safe deposit box or wherever, which is used to decrypt all other passwords in a text file also held in safe deposit box.
Other things to consider: a living will, and a power of attorney for cases where you are completely incapacitated (e.g. stroke) but would want a spouse or trusted relative to look after your affairs.
I meant to say Xubuntu for up to 200 MB RAM, but you are right - it does run quite slowly on such systems particularly for large apps like Thunderbird and Firefox, but once launched they run OK.
Codeweavers are a great company but they haven't done a good job of preparing for a slashdotting - after all, Slashdot survives a slashdot every day and runs considerably more complex Perl software than the original Codeweavers form, which only had to generate a license key. Perhaps the license key is based on the email address, but it would have been good to test very high volumes before actually announcing this promotion... They have done quite a good job of reacting to the slashdotting after it started.
If it's not installed in the GUI then you can't run it anyway - you'd google for the name of a suitable app and install it with Synaptic.
For codecs, Ubuntu is generally good at notice that a video/audio file needs a particular codec and popping up a dialogue box that asks permission to install the required codec. Ditto for Flash and other plugins apart from sites that try to do their own plugin-not-there code paths in JavaScript.
UPnP is also known as "the protocol that lets malware on client PCs talk outbound through your firewall" - not exactly a good security model. Although IPv6 will have a similar issues with firewalls that aren't doing any NAT.
The parent was talking about connections - no matter how many addresses behind a NAT it can only handle about 64K connections, i.e. 64K inbound port numbers. At one service per host, that's 64K hosts.
There are simple solutions for all your 'problems':
Re (1), you can already get dynamic DNS services for IPv4 - they can simply expand to providing low cost DNS for your home IPv6 addresses. Or buy a nice domain name from any web host and map its subdomains to your hosts.
Re (2), IPv6 already solves this, and it's called Mobile IPv6 - you have one 'real' IPv6 address which changes all the time as you move between IPv6 access networks (e.g. WiFi hotspots, WiMAX, 3G, etc), and one 'static' IPv6 address that remains the same regardless. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IPv6 for more about this. IPv4 has something like this but imposes 'triangular routing', i.e. basically packets to mobile node must always go via a tunnel which is often inefficient compared to direct routing. Mobile IPv6 isn't fully standardised yet but the drafts have been around a long time.
Re (3), once you have Mobile IPv6 the VoIP issue is solved.
Which bit of "IPv6 is running out in 2-3 years" don't you understand, and why do you think something better is going to appear before that time runs out? IPv6 has taken at least a decade to develop and complete - there is a complete suite of updated and some new protocols around it. There is absolutely no change of a "better than IPv6" protocol before IPv4 runs out - the only options are to accept a future of no-growth, or NAT everything (making VoIP and BitTorrent work much less well, for example), or get started on deploying IPv6.
There is plenty of space for network research beyond IP core protocols, e.g. ad-hoc routing etc.
The horizon is now quite short - just 39 x/8 ranges (16 million each) remained as of May 08, and we are consuming 13 x/8's every year (at least we did in 2007). So it's easy to see we run out in 3 years including 2008, assuming steady state - in reality there is growth in consumption, and possibility of an "IPv4 exhaustion panic" when the horizon is down to a year or less. See http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/oecd_durand_20080616.pdf for a presentation by the Comcast IPv6 guy that quotes these stats.
IPv6 will be deployed through provider push in my view, not consumer pull. A given provider, whether cable, telco or wireless, will decide it's going IPv6 and roll it out from the core through aggregation, access, and to home networks (or handsets). Once they reach the home network stage they will simply provide IPv6 devices / set top boxes to customers, who will mostly have no idea they are on IPv6. Customers will still be able to access the IPv4 internet of course, but the provider can manage the home network properly since it's no longer NATed.
If you want to go IPv6 early at home, there are various ISPs in most countries offering it (my UK ISP has done for years), and you can always use IPv6 tunnel brokers over IPv4 access in the interim - this is now very easy to do.
* IPv4 addresses will run out in around 2010 to 2011
* Businesses that need new addresses (mostly ISPs and telecom operators) will need to go IPv6 just to keep operating in longer term (even if there are short term workarounds, they don't work forever - this is why Comcast already has IPv6 live in its core network)
* Planning ahead will be important to avoid an interruption in business (can't get new IPv4 addreses so can't activate customers)
* Around 2009/2010, the stock market will start to assess public companies as to whether they have an IPv6 transition plan, and the press will start to hype "IPv4 is running out - another Y2K is on the way" - companies that don't have an IPv6 transition plan will find their ratings and stock prices fall
If you want to continue expanding as a telco/ISP, and to have a healthy stock price (after the current dip), you will need a serious plan to move to IPv6. It's that simple.
This article was generally quite pro IPv6, the summary was atrociously slanted against v6. But that's Slashdot for you...
Kopete works fine under GNOME or whatever - the only overhead is some RAM for the extra libraries, but if you have a reasonable amount of RAM (512 MB upwards) you shouldn't notice the overhead. And it lets you easily use the full Yahoo smileys which is strangely important when migrating Windows users to Ubuntu...
I had exactly this problem back in 2005 or so, and have never used LVM snapshots since I read they were dodgy at the time. I was on kernel 2.6.12 / Ubuntu 5.10, but still use LVM on more recent Ubuntu versions - see my other post in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I would avoid DD-WRT v24 completely as it has proved quite unreliable for me (couldn't get several laptops to work with WPA using this version). Either use v23 or preferably Tomato 1.19 (not sure if it does v6 but it has great QoS setup including nice bandwidth graphing by class of service).
Comcast will give homes IPv6 only, because if they use dual stack they still need far too many IPv4 addresses - they've already exhausted the 10.x address space so NAT is not an option unless you have multiple instances of the same address within Comcast, which makes it painful to manage the set top boxes and cable modems remotely. Search for 'durand ipv6' for more about this, there's a good presentation available.
How about Comcast? They have already deployed IPv6 in their core and aggregation networks, and will be using it for all-IPv6 homes (if they aren't already). Search for 'durand ipv6' for more about this.
An elderly relative ran Windows for many years and I recently converted her to Ubuntu. The best thing about this is being able to *reliably* remote control her PC using VNC over an SSH tunnel. Once set up it requires very little maintenance, so it's best if you use a stable version of a distro (e.g. Ubuntu 8.04.1) - install 'unattended-upgrades' to get automated security updates in the background without the user having to know about this.
One thing to watch out for with randomly chosen SSH ports is traffic shaping - I used port 119 (NNTP) for SSH at one point and only realised after some time that the ISP's Ellacoya traffic shaping hardware was configured to prioritise port 22 and greatly de-prioritise 119. Switching to port 22 greatly improved things. Of course this is ISP specific and they don't usually publish their traffic shaping policy rules including ports...
Whatever software you put on a server to handle replication could have vulnerabilities. I don't see why BitTorrent peers should be more vulnerable than anything else, and it's possible they are sufficiently well tested out on the Internet that they are more secure than a tool used only within the enterprise.
The number of TCP sessions *makes no difference at all* to an ISP - assuming they are not doing deep packet inspection of course. Apart from that case, all IP packets are routed, with no inspection of the TCP header, so there's no way the number of sessions could make a difference.
If you want to use no. of TCP sessions as a weak indicator of P2P activity, go ahead, but BitTorrent developers will develop workarounds (maybe this is one of them) - ultimately everything may end up as encrypted UDP traffic that's really hard to traffic shape even using DPI.
I generally agree that you get what you pay for - there are shared pipes all over the place, so if people use BT 24/7 and fill their DSL/cable access link, they should expect to pay more than people who simply do email, surfing and occasional video clips. Traffic shaping and usage caps are just different approaches to making behaviour fit the costs of running the network.
I really wish people would stop repeating this myth that the UK (and Europe) are free of software patents. There many, many software patents here - you just have to write the patent in a certain way that gets around the very weak restrictions. See http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html for sample of these patents with summaries, from an anti-patent group.
None of this goes in your will. The will is actually public information at least in some countries such as the UK - see my other posting. You need a separate document that's confidential to your executors (who sort out your affairs based on will) with bank accounts, social network passwords, or whatever.
Don't put ANYTHING confidential such as passwords in your will. At least in the UK, once a will has been granted probate (i.e. government has agreed you can wind up estate because inheritance tax is paid), it is actually published for all to see. Probate is a complex process and varies between countries, but take legal advice before doing 'innovative' stuff with your will.
You need a will, and separately a master password in a safe deposit box or wherever, which is used to decrypt all other passwords in a text file also held in safe deposit box.
Other things to consider: a living will, and a power of attorney for cases where you are completely incapacitated (e.g. stroke) but would want a spouse or trusted relative to look after your affairs.
I meant to say Xubuntu for up to 200 MB RAM, but you are right - it does run quite slowly on such systems particularly for large apps like Thunderbird and Firefox, but once launched they run OK.
It does run on low-end software with the right Ubuntu flavour - Ubuntu for up to 200 MB RAM, or Ubuntulite / Fluxbuntu for up to 100 MB RAM.
Codeweavers are a great company but they haven't done a good job of preparing for a slashdotting - after all, Slashdot survives a slashdot every day and runs considerably more complex Perl software than the original Codeweavers form, which only had to generate a license key. Perhaps the license key is based on the email address, but it would have been good to test very high volumes before actually announcing this promotion... They have done quite a good job of reacting to the slashdotting after it started.
If it's not installed in the GUI then you can't run it anyway - you'd google for the name of a suitable app and install it with Synaptic.
For codecs, Ubuntu is generally good at notice that a video/audio file needs a particular codec and popping up a dialogue box that asks permission to install the required codec. Ditto for Flash and other plugins apart from sites that try to do their own plugin-not-there code paths in JavaScript.
I don't use swap for paging typically, but having a swap partition (not file) set to the same size as your RAM means that hibernate is possible.
For Windows, try Foxit Reader, it's very lightweight and generally works fine. For Linux, try Evince, it's also very lightweight.
UPnP is also known as "the protocol that lets malware on client PCs talk outbound through your firewall" - not exactly a good security model. Although IPv6 will have a similar issues with firewalls that aren't doing any NAT.
The parent was talking about connections - no matter how many addresses behind a NAT it can only handle about 64K connections, i.e. 64K inbound port numbers. At one service per host, that's 64K hosts.
There are simple solutions for all your 'problems':
Re (1), you can already get dynamic DNS services for IPv4 - they can simply expand to providing low cost DNS for your home IPv6 addresses. Or buy a nice domain name from any web host and map its subdomains to your hosts.
Re (2), IPv6 already solves this, and it's called Mobile IPv6 - you have one 'real' IPv6 address which changes all the time as you move between IPv6 access networks (e.g. WiFi hotspots, WiMAX, 3G, etc), and one 'static' IPv6 address that remains the same regardless. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IPv6 for more about this. IPv4 has something like this but imposes 'triangular routing', i.e. basically packets to mobile node must always go via a tunnel which is often inefficient compared to direct routing. Mobile IPv6 isn't fully standardised yet but the drafts have been around a long time.
Re (3), once you have Mobile IPv6 the VoIP issue is solved.
Which bit of "IPv6 is running out in 2-3 years" don't you understand, and why do you think something better is going to appear before that time runs out? IPv6 has taken at least a decade to develop and complete - there is a complete suite of updated and some new protocols around it. There is absolutely no change of a "better than IPv6" protocol before IPv4 runs out - the only options are to accept a future of no-growth, or NAT everything (making VoIP and BitTorrent work much less well, for example), or get started on deploying IPv6.
There is plenty of space for network research beyond IP core protocols, e.g. ad-hoc routing etc.
The arguments are getting more solid - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion for some good links.
The horizon is now quite short - just 39 x /8 ranges (16 million each) remained as of May 08, and we are consuming 13 x /8's every year (at least we did in 2007). So it's easy to see we run out in 3 years including 2008, assuming steady state - in reality there is growth in consumption, and possibility of an "IPv4 exhaustion panic" when the horizon is down to a year or less. See http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/oecd_durand_20080616.pdf for a presentation by the Comcast IPv6 guy that quotes these stats.
IPv6 will be deployed through provider push in my view, not consumer pull. A given provider, whether cable, telco or wireless, will decide it's going IPv6 and roll it out from the core through aggregation, access, and to home networks (or handsets). Once they reach the home network stage they will simply provide IPv6 devices / set top boxes to customers, who will mostly have no idea they are on IPv6. Customers will still be able to access the IPv4 internet of course, but the provider can manage the home network properly since it's no longer NATed.
If you want to go IPv6 early at home, there are various ISPs in most countries offering it (my UK ISP has done for years), and you can always use IPv6 tunnel brokers over IPv4 access in the interim - this is now very easy to do.
The real business case is very simple:
* IPv4 addresses will run out in around 2010 to 2011
* Businesses that need new addresses (mostly ISPs and telecom operators) will need to go IPv6 just to keep operating in longer term (even if there are short term workarounds, they don't work forever - this is why Comcast already has IPv6 live in its core network)
* Planning ahead will be important to avoid an interruption in business (can't get new IPv4 addreses so can't activate customers)
* Around 2009/2010, the stock market will start to assess public companies as to whether they have an IPv6 transition plan, and the press will start to hype "IPv4 is running out - another Y2K is on the way" - companies that don't have an IPv6 transition plan will find their ratings and stock prices fall
If you want to continue expanding as a telco/ISP, and to have a healthy stock price (after the current dip), you will need a serious plan to move to IPv6. It's that simple.
This article was generally quite pro IPv6, the summary was atrociously slanted against v6. But that's Slashdot for you...
Comcast already have an enormous IPv6 rollout, driven by the sheer number of customers that they have. Their IPv6 core is already live according to this NANOG presentation: http://www.6journal.org/archive/00000265/01/alain-durand.pdf
This is mostly driven by need to remotely manage devices like set-top boxes and cable modems. Once you need to do this, IPv4+NAT becomes a real pain.
Kopete works fine under GNOME or whatever - the only overhead is some RAM for the extra libraries, but if you have a reasonable amount of RAM (512 MB upwards) you shouldn't notice the overhead. And it lets you easily use the full Yahoo smileys which is strangely important when migrating Windows users to Ubuntu...
I had exactly this problem back in 2005 or so, and have never used LVM snapshots since I read they were dodgy at the time. I was on kernel 2.6.12 / Ubuntu 5.10, but still use LVM on more recent Ubuntu versions - see my other post in this thread.