November 26, 2012 archive
Nov 26
FIR #679 – 11/26/12 – For Immediate Release
Nov 26
Slides – Comcast’s Lessons Learned In Implementing DNSSEC
What lessons did Comcast learn in rolling out DNSSEC validation to their 18 million subscribers in the US? Did they have to make any changes to their network? What happened as they scaled up their deployment?
These were some of the many questions addressed by Comcast’s Chris Griffiths at the ICANN 45 DNSSEC Deployment Workshop on October 17, 2012, in his presentation titled, “DNSSEC Activities in North America: Comcast“.
Chris outlined how Comcast began working with DNSSEC and where it is today, but more importantly he highlighted questions that network operators need to be thinking about and discussed some of the issues they have seen. He also mentioned Comcast’s site at http://dns.comcast.net/ where they are now listing sites that are experiencing DNSSEC problems.
At the end, Chris highlighted some of the challenges they still see, such as dealing effectively with load balancers and content distribution networks, as well as solving the upload of DS records to many different registrars.
The slides are well worth reviewing and if you want to hear Chris’ presentation, the audio recording of the entire day is available from ICANN’s website (you’ll just need to jump ahead to Chris’ section).
We definitely appreciate that not only is Comcast deploying DNSSEC, but they are also having people like Chris go out and speak at technical forums about what they have done. Sure, it’s good publicity for them, but the information that they have learned is immensely valuable to share as a case study, and will only help expand the deployment of DNSSEC.
Now, we just need to see more network operators giving case study presentations like this! 
Nov 26
50% Off All O’Reilly IPv6 Ebooks TODAY On CyberMonday
Given that today is “Cyber Monday” the folks at O’Reilly are naturally joining in and offering a 50% discount on ALL their ebooks and discounts. All you need to do is go visit:
where you can learn more. Basically, you can use the discount code “CYBERDAY” when you check out – anytime up until 11:59 pm US Pacific time tonight.
You can naturally order “Migrating Applications To IPv6 or any other IPv6-related ebook… although in truth you can use the code for ANY ebook.
The great thing about buying from O’Reilly is that all ebooks are DRM-free, so you are not locked in to using them on any particular devices.
If you are looking for some good technical ebooks, today is a great day to do some shopping!
Nov 26
WordPress 3.5 Nears Completion – First Release Candidate Now Available
As noted in both posts, as well as the WordPress 3.5 schedule, the goal is to go through a couple more release candidates and then have the final release on December 5, 2012 - only 9 days away!
Whether or not the core team hits that goal will really depend upon how much testing they get (and they are looking for more people to test WP 3.5!) and what the status of the major issues are as the date draws closer.
For communicators/marketers, WordPress 3.5 continues the ongoing series of improvements to the WordPress "user experience" to make it even simpler and easier to use. I don't know that anything in 3.5 necessarily rises to the "MUST HAVE IT NOW!" category, but certainly the improvements look good. I am particularly interested in the rewritten media subsystem that will apparently allow for much simpler insertion and handling of images. One thing that has always bothered me about WordPress' media handling was the dialog boxes around setting a "Featured Image". From the tickets, this seems to be one of many improvements.
New WordPress Multisite Goodness
Another feature I'm looking forward to for new installations is the ability to set up WordPress Multisite in "subdirectory" mode versus "subdomain" mode. To date, Multisite has only worked when you used a subdomain as the base for all blogs. For instance, you might base the blog at:
blogs.example.comand then your individual blogs would be:
blogs.example.com/blog1
blogs.example.com/blog2
blogs.example.com/blog3
...This works fine (and is still in 3.5), but if you want to integrate your blogs into an existing web site, you weren't able to easily use Multisite. Now, with 3.5, you will be able to install WordPress Multisite into a subdomain, so that your base can be:
www.example.com/blogs/and then your individual blogs can be:
www.example.com/blogs/blog1
www.example.com/blogs/blog2
www.example.com/blogs/blog3
...This then allows you to continue using your main domain for SEO or branding purposes, but still have all the power of WordPress Multisite with regard to letting different groups have their own blogs with separate users, access control, etc. ... and all the other goodness you get from Multisite.
Now, this option can only be chosen when installing WordPress Multisite, so it doesn't help existing installations... but any new servers can be spun up in this mode if that works better.
The Normal Caveats Apply...
If you want to know more of the details of what will be in WordPress 3.5, the Beta 1 announcement had all sorts of good info. There's also a ticket with a rough list of changes in 3.5. All of that info should eventually make its way to the Codex page on WordPress 3.5 as the release date nears. There are some really good changes for developers that ought to improve WordPress performance and help in so many other ways.
You should, of course, not just drop WordPress 3.5 onto your production site, even after it has been fully released. There are changes to the underlying systems and so you should really test it with your theme(s) and plugins to make sure that they all work before you make it live. You also of course want to backup your system and make sure that you have the ability to restore if you need to do so.
WordPress also has a "WordPress Beta Tester" plugin for the more adventurous who want to run a site testing out the newest releases. Again, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for production servers given that things will break during the normal course of development. Rather than use that plugin you can also just download the 3.5 release candidate and try it out.
I'm looking forward to seeing what this new release brings and to trying it out on my own systems. Kudos to the development team for their hard work and aggressive schedules!
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