Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Oct 14
FIR #725 – 10/14/13 – For Immediate Release
Introducing TV at Work on the FIR Podcast Network; FIR listener survey starts Tuesday; David Armano promoted at Edelman; Quick News: reputation is top strategic risk, e-reader and tablet owners read more books, how B2B marketers use Twitter, UK PR firms expanding services as budgets rise; Ragan promo; News That Fits: 12 rules for building a PR agency, Michael Netzley's Asia report, Google's Hummingbird update and its impact on communicators, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, study reveals Facebook comments more civil than newspaper website comments, Dan York's report, results of Digital Transformation study; music from Seraphim; and more.
Oct 11
Administrative Update: Resetting user passwords for authors
If you are an author here at Voice of VOIPSA and are wondering why you just received an email about a password change, I went through and reset all the passwords on our user accounts. There was no security issue – I just realized that some of the accounts have not been used for a long time and I had no idea about the strength of the passwords. If you want to login you’ll need to use the “Forgot my password” reset link to generate a link to a new password (or contact me and I can reset it). My apologies for any inconvenience.
P.S. In doing this, I found a really nice random password generator at: http://sandbox.coderlab.net/rpg/index.php
Oct 10
TDYR #040 – The First Night Of Curling This Year
TDYR #040 - The First Night Of Curling This Year by Dan York
Oct 10
Microsoft: The Best Xbox One Gaming Experience Will Be Over IPv6
Do you want the best gaming experience using the upcoming Xbox One console from Microsoft? If so, you should ask your network operator if you can get IPv6! Or, if you are a network operator, you should look at rolling out IPv6 to your customers!
Yesterday at NANOG 59 in Phoenix, Arizona, Microsoft’s Chris Palmer explained that the Xbox One gaming console uses IPv6 for the peer-to-peer (p2p) communication between gamers. His slides are now available from the NANOG site and they walk through the IPv6 support and the rationale for the continued use of the Teredo transition technology so that Xbox One will work over IPv4. (The video is also included below.)
A key point on Palmer’s second slide is this:
Network operators that want to provide the best possible user experience for Xbox One users:
- Provide IPv6 Connectivity
- Allow transition technologies such as Teredo to function
- Allow for IPsec transport mode to function
So… if you are a network operator and you want your gaming customers using the Xbox One to have the best possible gaming experience, make IPv6 available to your customers! (Find out how to get started with IPv6)
For more about getting started with IPv6, see:
I learned of this talk through a post via Wes George in the Google+ IPv6 community and there has been some discussion there. There has also been a good bit of discussion in the IPv6-ops mailing list (to which you can subscribe if you are interested) with concerns being raised about the continued usage of Teredo and the challenges of using that particular transition technology. Christopher Palmer answered some of the questions and also pointed to a more detailed technical document about the Xbox One and IPv6 available in Word form from Microsoft’s web site. Dan Wing also pointed out that there are other similar P2P usage of IPv6 such as Apple’s Back To My Mac (documented in RFC 6281) and Microsoft’s Direct Access.
Even with the concerns this is definitely a great step forward in getting more consumer electronics not only IPv6-enabled but actively using IPv6 in their operations. Kudos to Christopher Palmer and the rest of the Microsoft team for making this happen!
The video of Christopher Palmer’s presentation is also available for viewing:
Now… can we get the rest of the gaming consoles to please work over IPv6? And will this move encourage more network operators to get serious about rolling out IPv6 to their customers?
UPDATE: This post seems to have attracted some attention and there are some interesting discussion threads over on Hacker News and also over on Reddit.
Oct 07
Speaking About BCOP At NANOG59 TODAY In Phoenix, Arizona
If you are attending the 59th meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) in Phoenix, Arizona, please do say hello to Chris Grundemann, our new director of Deployment & Operationalization (DO), under which the Deploy360 Programme sits.
Chris is of course no stranger to NANOG as he has been very involved with setting up the regional “Best Current Operational Practices (BCOP)” efforts happening within NANOG.
In fact he will be speaking on a panel about BCOP from 4:30 – 6:00 pm MST TODAY. [1 - see note below about timezone] Chris will now be able to speak not only about the BCOP work within NANOG but also the broader picture of how we are intending to help encourage more BCOP creation and sharing around the world.
A livestream of NANOG59 is available at:
The full agenda can be found on the NANOG website. Beyond his BCOP presentation, Chris will be around the NANOG event meeting with people in his new role. If you are interested in reaching Chris, you can email him at grundemann@isoc.org.
[1] Arizona does not use Daylight Savings Time and so Phoenix has remained on “Mountain Standard Time” (MST) which is UTC-7 and the same as US Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). So you can think of it as being the same time as it is in California and the rest of the US west coast.
Oct 07
FIR #724 – 10/7/13 – For Immediate Release
Scoble-Israel interview is up; FIR On Strategy episode 2 is up; Ron Shewchuk brings TV at Work to FIR Podcast Network; listener survey is coming; Quick News: politicians and agencies turn to Twitter during shutdown, email trumps social networks for sharing, Twitter's IPO has implications for B2B communicators; Cotap app wants to change the way we communicate at work; Ragan promo; News that Fits: Edelman report expands on brand sharing, Dan York's report, closing in on a definition of who's a journalist, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, the science behind changing behaviors in online communities, spam surges on social media; how to comment; music from Kara Square and Piero Peluche; and more.
Oct 06
TDYR #039 – Birthdays In The Age Of Social Media
TDYR #039 - Birthdays In The Age Of Social Media by Dan York
Oct 04
Slides: DNSEC And DANE Deployment – Trends, Tools and Challenges
On Wednesday, October 3rd, I spoke about DNSSEC and DANE at the ENOG 6 event in Kiev, Ukraine. The video of the session recorded by the ENOG team should be online in about two weeks but in the meantime I thought I’d share my slides that are posted to SlideShare:
It was a great event with some excellent questions and some ideas for further work!
Oct 03
SIP Forum IPv6 Task Group Call – Weds, Oct 3rd, 19:00 CEST, 1:00pm US Eastern
The SIP Forum IPv6 Task Group will be having its next conference call today, October 3, 2013, at: 19:00 CEST, 18:00 BST (UK) and 1:00 pm US Eastern (and see other times). Task Group co-chair Andy Hutton sent out this agenda and call-in information:
- Status of the draft for developers
- Status of mine and Gonzalo’s draft to update RFC 3263
- Happy Eyeballs for SIP
3.1. Connection oriented
3.2. UDP - IPv6 and related protocols
4.1. MSRP
4.2. XCAP/HTTP
4.3. ICE/turn
4.4. Other related protocols
Anyone is welcome to join the SIP Forum’s IPv6 mailing list and also to join in the effort. The group is working to “evaluate current best practices and enable and promote migration to SIP over IPv6.”
It’s great to see the work they are doing because we definitely do need to have IP-based telecommunications working over IPv6!
Oct 02
Successful Live Video Streaming Over IPv6 Using Google+ Hangouts On Air and YouTube
SUCCESS! We did prove this week that you can do live streaming of video from an event out over IPv6. As we wrote about earlier this week, one of our objectives at ION Krakow was to prove that we could to a live stream / webcast out of an event over IPv6. Well, to be more precise, we wanted people to be able to receive the livestream over IPv6.
As it turned out, the network at PLNOG 11 (where ION Krakow occurred) was IPv4-only so we were streaming our video signal from ION Krakow only over IPv4 out to Google’s servers which were then streaming the video out over both IPv4 and IPv6.
We did have a few challenges with the actual broadcast (which I mention at the end), but the key point is…
it worked!
People were able to watch the live stream on both Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) and YouTube over IPv6 connections. In our article we’d asked if some people watching could send us screen shots and several people did exactly that – as shown below.
Live Streaming To A Dual-Stack Computer
Longtime IPv6 advocate Shumon Huque tweeted out a screenshot showing that he was watching the live stream on our YouTube channel and was getting most of the video stream connections coming in over IPv6 (click/tap the image for a larger view):
He’s using the very cool IPvFoo/IPvFox browser extension to show the connections from the web page and whether they are over IPv4 or IPv6. Being on a dual-stack computer, Shumon’s web browser is going to use a “Happy Eyeballs” algorithm to determine for each requested connection whether IPv4 or IPv6 is fastest and so you will see situations like this where parts of the connection are still over IPv4.
Live Streaming To An IPv6-ONLY Computer
Lee Howard at Time Warner Cable took it a step further and turned IPv4 completely OFF on his Macbook Air. He then sent us this screenshot showing he was watching the video streaming over Google+ Hangouts on Air and also showing the output of a terminal window showing that his wireless interface had only IPv6 running (click/tap the image for a larger view – and yes, we blanked out part of his IPv6 addresses for his own privacy):
This proved to us rather definitively that our live stream was fully available to people over IPv6!
Challenges Unrelated to IPv6
We did have a couple of challenges with the actual broadcast content that were unrelated to IPv6. First, I missed a key setting in Google+ HOA where you specified the audio connection separate from the video connection. As a result for the first hour and 45 minutes until we figured out the problem we were streaming audio from my laptop’s microphone instead of from the event a/v system! (Oops!) The good news is that I was also running a separate audio recording directly from the mixer and so now I can go back and upload a new video that merges the camera video with the full audio stream.
The second issue was that we unfortunately discovered that Google+ Hangouts On Air have a 4-hour maximum time limit when the HOA stopped broadcasting right in the middle of the IPv6 panel! We had to restart the HOA which restarted the YouTube stream and required all viewers to go to new URLs to watch. The good news here is that I was separately recording the video stream to disk so even though we weren’t broadcasting the stream I have a local copy that I can now cut up and upload to YouTube.
There were a host of other “lessons learned” for this experiment that we’ve captured for the next time we do a live stream using Google+ HOA. Thank you to everyone who participated in our experiment!
Conclusion – It Worked!
The great news out of all of this is that we proved that you can run a livestream for an event in such a way that people can watch the video stream over IPv6 – including on an IPv6-only network. This is excellent to see and a good step for the continued IPv6 deployment.
Kudos to the teams at Google for making both Google+ Hangouts / HOA and YouTube all work over IPv6. Given the large size and ease of use of those services, this is great to have available.
The great thing is, of course, that livestream producers don’t have to do anything to make their live streams available over IPv6. Simply by using Google+ HOA or YouTube the livestream becomes available over both IPv4 or IPv6.
This is how it should be!
And notice again that the live stream goes out over IPv6 even if you are broadcasting from an IPv4-only network. (Again, as it should be.)
We look forward to learning that other livestreaming services provide a similar functionality and allow viewers to watch a live stream over IPv6. We’ll probably look to use this Google+ HOA setup again for our next livestream, although we may also try out “YouTube Live” to see if that works any better for us. (And if there are other livestreaming services out there that will be supporting IPv6, please do let us know and we’ll be glad to look at your service.)
Many thanks to everyone who joined in to help us prove that live video streaming could be done over IPv6 using readily available services[1], and thanks in particular to both Lee and Shumon for sending in these screenshots to confirm availability over IPv6! We’ll be uploading the individual sessions to our YouTube channel and I also intend to write up some general guidelines for live streaming over IPv6.
Great news!
[1] Yes, we could have installed one of the various live streaming servers on our own infrastructure and run it over IPv6, but not every company or organization has the ability to do this. We wanted to try out the existing public live streaming services that anyone can easily use.
UPDATE: In speaking with someone today about this test and the livestreaming, it occurred to me that this really is NOT a milestone, i.e. “the first live streaming over IPv6″, because the reality is that everyone using Google+ HOA or YouTube for live streaming has been getting IPv6 connectivity for those viewers with IPv6 networks. This “live streaming over IPv6″ has just been part of what Google has been offering for some time now. We may have been one of the first ones to actively try to measure and demonstrate that we were live streaming over IPv6… but lots of other people have been doing it for quite some time now… but they just haven’t necessarily known about it.
And really, why should they care? Live streaming over IPv6 should “just work” without the users on either the broadcasting or viewing end ever noticing.
