How come all the talk about IPv6 comes with illustrations like 2001:db8:1234:abcd::321? When we eventually adopt IPv6, is some person or company going to find all the students, hackers and IT novices hitting the same network addresses just because they were mentioned in the IPv6 text books and cheat sheets? Will the eventual owners of these addresses be like current SlashDot victims, overloaded with unexpected traffic?
No. In fact, you are encouraged to use the 2001:db8 block of IPv6 addresses in your documentation (and possibly some illustrative code) precisely because it is reserved for that purpose. RFC 3849 explains that “the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) allocated a unicast address prefix for documentation purposes”, so we can safely use [click title to read more…]
It took over an hour to figure this one out this morning. Setting up Drupal 6 on Windows 7 (instead of Linux, which would be my preferred platform but this time I’d no choice). Everything went smoothly until I got the White Screen Of Death (blank page) when I tried to launch the install.php. OK, probably screwed up the MySQL URL in settings.php. Nope. That’s the usual usr:pwd@localhost/db format, too simple to get wrong. Apache errors? Nope, nothing in the logs. Apache .htaccess or <Directory> options? Nope, I’m using familiar and well-tested boilerplate. And on it went down the diagnostics rat-hole.
Eventually I checked the MySQL session connections and there was no sign of anything inbound. Uh oh… Double check [click title to read more…]
IP (Version 4) is based on four octets (bytes) to create an addressing space af 2 to the 32nd power, but as it has been arranged in slices, the actual collection of available numbers is less than you would think. John Curran of ARIN earlier today at the W3C TPAC said that based on the current demands, IPv4 addresses will be completely exhaused in 717 days. (He pointed out that this number will vary from day to day for many reasons, and this variability is part of the reason why people are not taking the issue seriously.) When the space is exhaused, it will be impossible to add more servers or clients to the Internet.
The solution is IPv6, but [click title to read more…]