Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jan 19
TDYR #074 – NFL Playoffs: Fox Sports FAILed The Internet While CBS Sports Rocked!
Trying to watch the NFL Playoffs tonight over the Internet, one network (CBS Sports) rocked and let "cord-cutters" watch the game (with advertising) while the other network (Fox Sports) was still stuck in the legacy business model where they require you to login with your "TV provider", which, of course, I don't have as a "cord-cutter"...
Jan 19
Video/Slides: Case Study – Deploying IPv6 In 10 Days at 24Media (RIPE67)
Here’s a fun story… Tore Anderson decided that since he was going to RIPE 67 and it was sort of a “party” of network engineers, he ought to bring a gift – so he decided to make 24Media’s websites available over IPv6. Only problem was that RIPE67 was only 10 days away! So he had to get going rather quickly…. his slides are online and the video of his presentation is online:
Very cool to see!
How about you? Can you make your websites available over IPv6? Check our IPv6 resources for information that can help you!
Jan 18
TDYR #073 – The Curious Intersection Of Our Time In Ottawa And Tonight’s Continental Cup Of Curling
While watching the live stream of the Continental Cup of Curling tonight, I was pleasantly surprised to learn of a connection between the women's team we were watching and the city of Ottawa and the man who first taught me how to play the sport of curling...
Jan 18
Weekend Project: Set Up An IPv6 Tunnel
Don’t have IPv6 connectivity to your home or office network? Have you asked your ISP about getting IPv6 and they can’t give you a timeframe?
Don’t despair! One way you can get IPv6 connectivity for your home office is to set up an “IPv6 tunnel” from your network out over your IPv4 Internet connection to an “IPv6 Tunnel Broker” service that will then connect you out to the rest of the IPv6-enabled Internet.
An IPv6 tunnel can work quite well and was in fact what I used for most of two years until my local ISP just recently provided native IPv6 connectivity. The good news, too, is that there are IPv6 tunnel broker services that are available to you for free, operated by companies and organizations that want to expand the use of IPv6.
Two of the most well-known tunnel broker services are:
- Tunnelbroker.net, operated by Hurricane Electric
- SixXS
The general process for both of them is:
- Sign up and register on their website.
- Login to their website.
- Create/request a tunnel.
- Configure your local network to connect to the tunnel.
- Start using IPv6!
Now, step #4 may or may not be a bit involved. Some wireless home routers have a configuration tab somewhere for IPv6 where all you need to do is enter the tunnel information provided by the tunnel broker and away you go! At one point I used an Apple TimeCapsule and was impressed at how easy it was to configure an IPv6 tunnel. There are also some home server/gateway software distributions that also make setting up an IPv6 tunnel easy to do.
To help with this, the SixXS team provides a software client called “AiCCU” and documents the process in “10 easy mini steps to IPv6“. IPv6 advocate Olle Johansson wrote up his experience setting up an IPv6 tunnel through SixXS for his training center.
For Tunnelbroker.net, Hurricane Electric provides configuration information for different operating systems once you login and create a tunnel. They also have tunnelbroker user forums with a wealth of information and tutorials about how to connect from various kinds of systems.
Once you have your IPv6 tunnel connected, you should be able to go to a site like test-ipv6.com and see that you do indeed have IPv6 connectivity! What’s fun then is to install the IPvfoo/IPvfox extension/add-on to either Chrome or Firefox and then as you browse around the web you’ll be able to see what sites you are getting to over your nice new IPv6 connection.
If you’d like more technical information about how IPv6 tunneling services work, you may want to read RFC 7059 that compares different types of IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel mechanisms.
The cool part of all of this is that you can get IPv6 connectivity while you are waiting for your ISP to join the movement to bring about IPv6 everywhere!
P.S. If any of you want to also write up tutorials of the steps you went through to set up an IPv6 tunnel on your particular hardware or operating system, we’d love to have some more step-by-step tutorials to reference. Please just leave a comment to this post with a link to wherever you post your article. (Or if you don’t have a site to post an article on, drop us a note and we may be able to help you out.)
Jan 17
Watch Live This Weekend – Some Of The Best Curling Teams In The World At Continental Cup 2014
We have an amazing opportunity this weekend (Jan 17-19) to watch some of the best curling teams in the world competing against each other in the “Continental Cup” in Las Vegas. All of it will be streamed LIVE across the Internet at:
http://www.youtube.com/worldcurlingtv
The Continental Cup is a unique format that pits 6 US and Canadian teams in “Team North America” against 6 teams in “Team World” from Scotland, Sweden, Japan and Norway. In contrast to most other curling events that are a series of regular team games, the Continental Cup has team games, singles games, mixed doubles games and ‘skins’ games. The scoring is explained on the event web site.
The remaining games that will be live streamed are (all times US Eastern):
Friday 10 PM – Team
Saturday 12 PM – Mixed Doubles
Saturday 4:30 PM – Team
Saturday 9:30 PM – Team
Sunday 4 PM – Skins
Sunday 9 PM – Skins
According to the US Curling Association web site, NBC Sports Network will also televise two of the Saturday games… although they will be broadcast on Sunday.
The World Curling TV stream on YouTube will be streaming live, of course, and will probably be the best place to see all the action. It should be some outstanding curling so do check it out!
Jan 17
TDYR #072 – Phenomenal Curling Streaming Live From Las Vegas This Weekend
We have a chance to watch some *amazing* curling this weekend streaming live across the Internet as some of the best teams in the world compete in the "Continental Cup 2014" in Las Vegas. The live stream can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/worldcurlingtv
More info can be found at:
http://monadnockcurling.org/2014/01/17/watch-live-this-weekend-some-of-the-best-curling-teams-in-the-world-at-continental-cup-2014/
http://www.worldcurling.org/world-financial-group-continental-cup-2014
http://www.curling.ca/2014continentalcup-en
http://www.curling.ca/2014continentalcup-en/how-does-the-scoring-work-for-the-continental-cup/
Jan 17
New IETF “openv6″ Mailing List For IPv6 Application Developers
Do we need an “open interface and a programmable platform to support various IPv6 applications? That is the question posed for a new “openv6″ IETF discussion mailing list announced yesterday. The openv6 list, which is open to anyone to subscribe to, has this description:
This list is to discuss a open interface and a programmable platform to support various IPv6 applications, which may include IPv6 transition technologies, SAVI (Source Address Validation and Traceback), security, data center and etc. This discussion will focus on the problem space, use case and possible protocol extensions. The following questions are listed to be solved via this discussion:
(1) What are the problems and use cases existing in various IPv6 applications, e.g., multiple IPv6 transition technologies co-exist?
(2) How to enable the applications to program the equipment to tunnel IPv6 traffic across an IPv4 data plane?
(3) How this work can be done through a general interface, e.g., to incorporate the transition policies, simplifying the different stages through the transition and guaranteeing that current decisions do not imply a complicated legacy in
the future?(4) How to make the end-to-end configuration of devices: concentrator/CGN, CPE and the provisioning system?
(5) How to extend the existing IETF protocols, e.g., netconf, to support this open interface?
The list is not for forming a new IETF working group (WG). It is at this point purely for discussing this topic. The mailing list archive seems to be empty at the moment (or the link is not correct), but given that the list was just announced yesterday the list owners may be waiting for people to join the list before kicking off discussion. In searching IETF archives I found this recent draft from October 2013, “Problem Statement for Openv6 Scheme,” that may be part of the discussion. I expect we should see more information soon as the discussion begins.
Anyway, if you are an application developer looking to look at how you help your applications work over IPv6 this may be an interesting mailing list to join, if for no other reason than to monitor it and see what work is happening.
I’m looking forward to seeing the discussion begin!
Jan 16
TDYR #071 – A Very Cool Trick To Type Special Characters On A Mac Keyboard
I learned a very cool trick to type special characters while on a Mac... where before to type a "ü" I would press "Alt+u" to get an umlaut and then the "u" key, now I just use what I describe in this episode... VERY cool! (And presumably only for Macs - I don't know if there is a similar trick for Windows.)
Jan 16
W3C/IAB “Strengthening the Internet” Workshop: Deadline Monday to Submit Position Papers (Featured Blog)
How can the open standards organizations of the IETF and W3C "strengthen the Internet" against large-scale pervasive monitoring? That is the topic up for discussion at the "Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT)" workshop planned for February 28 and March 1, 2014, and jointly sponsored by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the W3C. The workshop is by invitation-only and has a deadline of Monday, January 20, 2014 (by 11:59 UTC) for submission of either position papers or Internet drafts. More...
Jan 16
Deutsche Telekom IPv6 Traffic Passes 15%, Verizon Wireless IPv6 Traffic Passes 40%!
The latest World IPv6 Launch measurements are up, and as noted in a blog post by Mat Ford, Deutsche Telekom has shown impressive growth over the past few months with this month’s metrics showing that 15.50%
Also rather significantly you can see in the list that now over 40% of the traffic coming from Verizon Wireless’ network is all going over IPv6! This is all through the fact that Verizon Wireless’ LTE network support IPv6.
The cool part of these World IPv6 Launch measurements is that they are a combination of data collected by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Akamai. All of those sites are available over both IPv6 and IPv4 and so the sites are measuring the connections that come in to their sites over each protocol.
This shows that as access networks roll out IPv6 availability the content providers are very definitely seeing the connections coming in to their sites over IPv6!
The networks around the world are changing over to IPv6! If you are a website operator or provide other content online, have you thought about how you can make your content available over IPv6?
