Via Twitter we learned that the OpenDNSSEC team is asking for user feedback to help improve the software. If you are a current user of OpenDNSSEC, please help the them by filling out their short survey!
June 2012 archive
Jun 15
OpenDNSSEC Team Seeking User Feedback Via A Survey
Jun 11
Why World IPv6 Launch Matters to Communicators / PR / Marketing
As a user of a browser, the answer is that right now you as a communicator probably don't have to worry all too much... odds are that your operating system and browser will all work just fine with IPv6 once you have IPv6 connectivity from your Internet Service Provider(ISP).
However, as a PUBLISHER of content (ex. websites, videos, images, audio, articles, etc.) out on to the Internet, communicators NEED to understand what is going on with the transition to IPv6 - and how you can enable your content to be available to people over IPv6. To put the reasons succinctly, they are:
- Speed - As areas of the world run out of IPv4 addresses, networks will be established with IPv6. Those networks will have "gateways" to content that is still on IPv4, but those gateways will inherently add latency / delays to people getting your content. If you want people to get to your content as quickly as possible (and to get to your content versus other content, since speed will increasingly count in search results), you'll want to make it available over both IPv4 and IPv6.
- Access to new/emerging markets - Best estimates are that around 2 billion people are currently on the Internet. That leaves 5 billion more who will be coming online in the months and years ahead. Odds are that a large number of those will wind up on IPv6 networks.
- Freedom / control - As IPv4 addresses continue to run out, some ISPs may put their entire networks behind a single public IPv4 address using something called "Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN)" or "Large Scale NAT (LSN)". The challenge for communicators is that these ISPs will then be in a position to be "gatekeepers" and either deny access to your content - or to charge customers, or YOU, for access to that content. Moving to IPv6 alone won't entirely prevent this from happening, but it will remove "IPv4 exhaustion" as an excuse for ISPs to do this.
- IPv6 is the "new normal" - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently issued a statement that pretty much ensures that all new standards will require IPv6... and you can expect new tools and services to emerge that are based on IPv6. Sooner or later you're going to need to have your content available on IPv6... why not be a leader instead of a laggard?
As to the "HOW", we've put together an IPv6 guide for content providers over at the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme that walks through the steps you need to consider.
In my recent reports into the For Immediate Release podcast I have covered this in some detail. First, in FIR 653, I spoke about WHY it is important for communicators / PR / marketing to understand what is going on with IPv6:
And then in FIR 654 I spoke at more length about HOW communicators can IPv6-enable their content, essentially covering the steps in the Deploy360 guide for content providers:
The reality is that the Internet of the future will be based on IPv6 - you as a computer need to understand how you can make your content available over this newer Internet.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
- subscribing to the RSS feed.
Jun 11
Deploy360 Team Gathering This Week To Plan Site’s Future – How Can We Help You?
Today the Deploy360 team will be gathering for a week-long planning session to plot out in greater detail our activities for the remainder of 2012 and into 2013. Over the past 6 months, we’ve received a LOT of great feedback, both from this site and our social network accounts, as well as our ION conferences. We’ve got some exciting plans already and we’re looking forward to making it all happen!
To that end, we really want to hear from you! How can we help you deploy IPv6 and DNSSEC more easily? In particular, we’d love to hear your feedback on our content roadmaps:
as those are the documents we’re using to plan out future content curation and creation. We’re also going to be considering better ways to organize the site, additional content we can create and just in general better ways we can communicate with you all.
In a nice change for me personally, Richard and Megan are journeying up “he-ah” to Keene, New Hampshire, where I am based. Away from all offices (including my home office), we’re looking forward to some very focused time diving into what comes next!
Again… please do let us know how we can help you with IPv6 and DNSSEC!
Jun 08
Site Changes – And Returning To The Regular Mix of DNSSEC / IPv6 Postings
As you may have noticed, for the past three weeks our blog and our accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have all been pretty much “All IPv6, All The Time!” We joined with our colleagues to focus on what turned out to be the massively successful World IPv6 Launch and so we’ve been extremely focused on that event.
With IPv6 now launched, we’ll be turning our attention back to how we can enable more people to successfully deploy IPv6… and we’ll be bringing DNSSEC back into focus! So you can expect to see us returning to our usual mix of covering both IPv6 and DNSSEC on our blog and in our social media accounts.
While we have your attention, there’s two minor temporary changes to the site that we’ll note:
1. IPv6 Detector removed from front page – Ever since we’ve launched the site we’ve had this fun widget on the front page that showed whether you were connecting to the site using IPv4 or IPv6. Unfortunately, in the run up to World IPv6 Launch there was concern about how our web sites would withstand the expected load and so some caching technology was introduced into our infrastructure. Sadly, the caching servers interfere with that widget and so everyone was showing up connecting via IPv6 (don’t we wish!) and with an address of “::1″. So until we can sort out the issue we’ve removed the widget from the front page. Hopefully we’ll be able to get that back soon.
2. Facebook and Twitter signin for comments removed – We’ve been getting a lot of blog comment spam that was not being caught by the Akismet spam filter we’ve been using. After noticing that it was all coming from supposed Facebook logins, we removed the ability to login via Twitter or Facebook to leave a comment to see if that will reduce the comment spam (and it seems to have done so). So we need to figure out what’s going on there before we re-enable that capability. You can still leave comments… you just have to type in your name, email address, etc.
That’s the news for the moment. Thank you again for all the incredible feedback and support you’ve given us!
Jun 08
aaaa-check – a small little program to check for IPv6 DNS records (AAAA)
As I was helping out last week approving website participants for World IPv6 Launch, I found that sometimes I wanted to check for the existence of a AAAA record to know if the domain was already running IPv6. I was using the good old “dig” command for a while, but wanted an easier way to do it. I looked around for a tool that would do what I wanted… and when I couldn’t find one I dusted the cobwebs in my brain off of my python coding and wrote up a little app in python:
It also gave me an excuse to play with the dnspython library developed by Bob Halley (and also available on Github). Once you follow my installation instructions and make the file executable (or call it with “python” first), it just lets you enter in domain names and it will tell you if there is a quad-A or not:
$ ./aaaa-check.py Domain name = www.internetsociety.org 2001:41c8:20::29 Domain name = www.google.com 2607:f8b0:4002:802::1011 Domain name = www.facebook.com 2a03:2880:10:1f02:face:b00c::25 Domain name = www.wikipedia.org 2620:0:861:ed1a::1 Domain name = www.cnn.com No AAAA Domain name = www.youtube.com 2001:4860:800a::5b Domain name = www.yahoo.com 2001:4998:f00b:1fe::3001 Domain name = ^C Goodbye! $
I didn’t do anything fancy for commands… you just press Ctrl+C to exit.
What I was then doing was copying the domain name from the World IPv6 Launch web page and pasting it into the command window where I was running the app.
It worked well for what I needed… I probably won’t do too much more with it, although I might add on the capability for it to read a flat file from the command line, so you could just do “aaaa-python <filename>” and have it run through a list and tell you which domains have AAAA records.
Anyway… it’s out there and if any of you find it of interest please feel free to play with it. And if you feel like extending it in some way, feel free to send some patches (or if you are on Github, just fork it and then send me a pull request).
Jun 07
Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open Internet
As I say in the video (below), my big fear is that IPv4 address exhaustion will create a situation where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will use what is called "carrier-grade NAT (CGN)" or "large-scale NAT (LSN)" to put all their subscribers behind a single public IPv4 address.
The ISPs then become the gatekeepers. They can determine what you will view - or what you will pay to view certain types of content. They could also potentially restrict customer's access to the next great new service... the next Twitter or Facebook, for instance... until that service pays the ISP for access to customers.
It can completely flip the Internet around from one that thrives on "permission-less innovation" where anyone can create any service and make it available to all... to an Internet that is "permission-based" with gatekeepers controlling access at key points.
The migration to IPv6 does not, of course, remove the threat that the Internet very well could move toward a permission-based network... but the move to IPv6 removes IPv4 address exhaustion as an excuse to implement walled gardens.
To me, deploying IPv6 is a critical step to keeping the Internet open to innovation!
To learn more about IPv6 and how you can get started, check out the resources we are listing at the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
- subscribing to the RSS feed
Jun 07
Hell Hath Truly Frozen Over: Microsoft WindowsAzure Supports Linux
In the category of “Things I Never Thought I’d See In My Lifetime“, given all of Microsoft’s intense animosity toward anything related to Linux (ex. Steve Ballmer’s infamous “Linux is a cancer” quote), I was shocked – but pleased – to see that Microsoft’s WindowsAzure cloud platform is now supporting Linux virtual machines:
Now, it’s no surprise, on the one hand. If Microsoft wants to see WindowsAzure remain competitive as a cloud platform with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace Cloud and a hundred other vendors they need to support both Windows and Linux.
Still, given all the anti-Linux venom coming from Microsoft in those early years of Linux, I never thought I’d see this kind of change!
Jun 06
Updated Version of “Migrating Applications to IPv6” Book/Ebook Available Through O’Reilly
If you’ve bought the ebook or printed version of the book within the past few weeks, you should have received the most recent updated version. As I mentioned previously, I submitted to O’Reilly a range of updates – and have confirmed that an updated version is now shipping. It includes:
- Added new section on recent events and changes that make it critical for application developers to be thinking about IPv6.
- Added section on connecting to DNS servers over IPv6 and about DNS and DHCPv6
- Added sidebar about RFC 5952, “A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation”
- Expanded text about “Happy Eyeballs” algorithm and included mention of RFC 6556 for testing for happy eyeballs.
- Added brief info about lessons learned from World IPv6 Day
- Added info about World IPv6 Launch in 2012
- Added new section on testing resources
- Added new section about setting up an IPv6 test network
- Updated IPv6 NAT info to point to RFC 6296
- Added warning about SMTP’s way of showing IPv6 addresses
- Added additional resources, including a new section about some informational RFCs that may be of interest to application developers.
If you previously purchased the book directly from O’Reilly, you should have been notified of this update.
I’m very appreciative of the feedback received thus far – and definitely welcome further feedback! I’ve also received many kind words and comments that the book has been very helpful. That’s great to hear… and exactly why I wrote it!
Jun 06
IPvFoo and IPvFox Provide An Awesome Way To See IPv6 / IPv4 Usage By Websites
Want to know how well a website you visit works with IPv6? Whether the site uses components that are only available over IPv4? Or even whether you are connecting to a site using IPv6 or IPv4?
If so, there are two outstanding extensions/add-ons that you can use:
In both cases, what happens is you get an addition to your browser’s location bar that shows you either a “6″ or a “4″ when you connect to a site. Even more useful, it can show you when a web page requires pieces or components from other sites – and the addresses used by those sites:
I’m using this in all my browsers now and it has in fact helped tremendously when I was trying to debug a connection issue. It also very much highlights the fact that websites today build pages by making calls out to many other websites… so creating an web page that is entirely available over IPv6 can turn out to be challenging. These extensions can help you see where the reliance on IPv4 continues.
Plus with World IPv6 Launch upon us, it’s admittedly just a bit fun to see how many sites you connect to do indeed have IPv6 connectivity.
Jun 06
Google Promoting IPv6 From Their Main Search Pages
As World IPv6 Launch has been rolling out over the past hours, it’s been great to see Google placing a link right on their main search page:
The link brings you over to Google’s excellent explanation of IPv6, complete with drawings of pipes. 
Kudos to Google for doing this and helping potentially educate people who have no clue about IPv6 and who just go to Google to search.
