March 6, 2012 archive

3 Months To World IPv6 Launch… Are You Getting Ready?

World IPv6 Launch is only 3 months away on June 6, 2012 -

What are you doing today to be ready?

If you don’t already have plans underway, can you think of a simple project to get started?  Perhaps look at how to get your home network running IPv6?  Or get your website running IPv6?

Here at the Deploy360 Programme, we’ve got some resources that can help – and we’ll be adding more and more to those resources over the next few months:

Beyond our constant stream of new Deploy360 blog posts related to IPv6, you can also now follow World IPv6 Launch activities directly in social media and interact with others who are launching IPv6:

Please follow, like or add the World IPv6 Launch accounts to a circle… and help spread the word that IPv6 launches permanently on June 6, 2012!

And please let us know how we can help you get started with IPv6!

Gandi.net Adds Support For DNSSEC DS Records

Gandi netOn Friday we learned that Gandi.net is joining the ranks of domain name registrars supporting DNSSEC. In a blog post on their “Gandi Bar” site, “Thomas” outlines the level of support Gandi.net is providing and points over to a wiki post explaining in more detail how to set up DNSSEC for your domains.

It’s important to note that Gandi.net is not providing DNSSEC-signing services – and in fact you cannot use Gandi.net’s own DNS servers for hosting your DNS as their hosting servers do not provide DNSSEC support yet. However, if you host your DNS records on a service that does support DNSSEC, Gandi.net can handle all the relevant Delegation Signer (DS) records for you. We previously provided a step-by-step example of configuring DNSSEC in this manner using GKG.net. It seems that Gandi.net works in a similar manner although it appears you provide them with your full public key and they then generate the relevant DS records.

What is nice to see is that Gandi.net supports a wide range of top-level domains (TLDs), including:

  • .be
  • .biz
  • .com
  • .de
  • .eu
  • .fr (+ .re, .yt, .pm, .wf, .tf)
  • .net
  • .se
  • .us

Further, in their blog post they commit to providing support for even more TLDs in the future.  Given that ICANN’s list of DNSSEC-enabled registrars only lists a few registrars supporting multiple TLDs, this news out of Gandi.net is great to see.

We’ve queued them up to add to our list of tutorials for signing your domain with DNSSEC using domain name registrars and look forward to seeing more DNSSEC-signed domains coming out of Gandi.net customers.

P.S. Have you signed your domain today?

Congrats to Skype On Hitting 35 Million Online Users!

Skypelogo-shadowCongrats to the folks at Skype as they cross over the milestone of having 35 million users online at the same time, just a week after crossing over the 34 million mark! That's certain a great accomplishment and the recent growth is quite interesting.

It's not entirely clear to me the source of the growth, but perhaps it is most attributable to the Windows Phone beta version of Skype they released last week. Any Skype users with Windows Phones (and given that they are part of Microsoft now there are probably a good number just within Microsoft) are now going to have a way to stay online more. Perhaps it's also the new Skype-enabled TVs. Regardless, it's great to learn of the growth.

Of course, on the Mac 5.5 version of Skype I can't see the growth myself as there still seems to be no way to see the number of online users in the Mac client.

As I wrote about way back in November 2010, the Skype 2.8 client used to show the number of online users in the lower right corner of the client:

skypeusercount.jpg

Now that number is nowhere to be seen. As I noted in that article, with the early 5.0 version for the Mac there was a "/mac users" command you could type in a chat window to get the number, but that command no longer works in the 5.5 client.

So I haven't a clue how we in the Mac world can know for ourselves the number of people online.

UPDATE: It turns out that simply "/users" in any Skype chat on the Mac will give you the number of online users. Here's an example:

[3/6/12 8:24:01 AM] System: There are 32,145,771 Skype users online

Thanks to Jim Courtney for confirming this after a tip from a Skype contact.

Not that it really matters... I mean... I'd far rather see a Skype developer work on giving us the ability to see multiple chat windows simultaneously (like Skype for Windows users can) than to work on a way to display a number that is perhaps only of interest to techies like me. Still, it would be fun to have some way to see it. (And the lack of such a display is probably why I haven't written about milestones like this since back in January 2011 when Skype crossed over 27 million.)

I left a comment asking about this on Skype's blog post, but it hasn't yet been approved. We'll see if it gets posted and if there is an answer.

Regardless of all of that, I'll again say CONGRATULATIONS to the folks at Skype... and I'm looking forward to seeing Skype's continued growth in the months and years ahead.


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