Dan York

Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...

Author's posts

Apr 12

SegTEL/TVC Stringing Fiber Through Keene, NH – A New Internet Choice?

Segtel fiberWhen I look out my office window and see a bucket truck driving by with a guy up in the bucket attaching what looks like fiber optic cable to the polls, my reaction as a networking geek was naturally:
  • who is stringing new fiber?

Followed, of course, by "that's kind of a cool way to ride around town" (probably literally cool, today).

My initial thought was that it was upgraded wiring from either Fair Point Communications, our local phone company (who bought out Verizon's landline business up "he-ah"), or Time Warner Cable, who owns the cable franchise for Keene, NH.

It turned out to be neither, but rather someone new.

I walked out and met the crew up the street when they happened to be reloading connectors into the bucket. One of them said this was new service for "SegTEL". He said SegTel was a private company who had been recently bought out by someone and was planning to provide high-speed Internet access to businesses.

As I walked back to my house, my immediate reactions were:

  • Cool! Will there be a plan I can afford as an individual?
  • Will they offer IPv6?

To my surprise, SegTEL appears to have no functioning website! I did find that it has been acquired by Tech Valley Communications in New York, whose announcement of the acquisition completion in January included this bit:

segTEL was founded in 1998 and provides fiber optic telecommunication services to carrier, wholesale, and large enterprise customers throughout New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. segTEL has unique and extensive expertise in providing customized fiber optic loop, backhaul and transport services to Top-25 wireline and wireless carriers. All segTEL staff will continue their current operational activities with the combined company.

SegTEL was/is apparently located in Enfield/Lebanon, NH, about an hour north of me. In reading through TVC's news page it seems TVC received a substantial private equity investment in 2010 that made all of this possible. A Business Review article adds a bit more context to the acquisition. They also have some interesting links on the TVC news page about the growth of fiber.

An NTIA document refers to 10Gbps and 1Gbps Ethernet offerings (I'd take it!) and an FCC document from September confirms the transfer to TVC. It seems, though, that SegTEL and TVC both have been primarily targeting other service providers and large enterprises, not individuals. (Which does make me wonder why they were stringing the fiber through our very residential neighborhood.)

Sooo... given that a big fat fiber cable is connected to a pole that is literally about 25 feet away from my server, will I be able to play with a big pipe? Or will it be priced out of my range? (Probably!) And, important to my role, will it support IPv6?

And SegTEL or TVC folks, should you read this... you've got a willing beta tester for your new service offering! ;-)

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Apr 12

White House Summer Jobs Code Sprint Deadline is Monday, April 16, 2012

Summerjobs codesprintInteresting to see that the White House is sponsoring its first ever code sprint… from the announcement back on April 2nd:

Today we’re announcing the first ever White House Code Sprint. This is a call to developers around the country to use the Summer Jobs+ API to build job search apps for your favorite browsers, social networking platforms, smart phones and feature phones. Submit your apps using this form by Monday April 16th at 8 a.m. EST, and we’ll pick the most innovative ones to feature on WhiteHouse.gov.

The Code Sprint web page says a little bit more:

The White House and the Department of Labor have just released an API opening access to thousands of summer internships, training and mentorships opportunities through their Summer Jobs+ Bank. We’re challenging the developer community to build apps that reach kids throughout the nation on their browsers, Facebook, Android, iOS, SMS or any other platform.

This is the first ever White House Code Sprint and we’re excited to see what innovative apps you build over the next seven days. There is no ideal app, but keep in mind that our goal is to share opportunities in our job bank with as many youth as possible.

It’s good to see the White House seeking to tap into the energy and passion of the developer community… I don’t personally have the time to participate in this event, but I hope they do get some interesting application submissions. My one comment is that they didn’t allow much time… they issued the notice on April 2nd with a deadline, then, of April 9th. Not much time to publicize it and get interest… but we’ll see.

If you are interested, the deadline has been extended to this coming Monday, April 16th.

Apr 12

Comcast Enables IPv6 For Xfinity and Xfinity TV

Great news out of Comcast this week related to IPv6 – they have now made two of their major content portals available over IPv6!  From their comcast6.net page on April 10, 2012:

The newest part today moves two of our major portal sites to IPv6, including Xfinity andXfinityTV. This critical move was made possible via close cooperation with Akamai, our CDN vendor. Over time, we will introduce support for native IPv6 for all of our other key websites.

As we get closer to World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, it’s critical to get content (i.e. web sites) available over both IPv4 and IPv6 so that people joining IPv6 networks will be able to natively connect to these sites.

Kudos to Comcast for moving these two large sites over to IPv6 and we look forward to seeing even more of their content moving to IPv6 in the weeks and months ahead.

Apr 12

Video/Slides: IPv6 Autoconfiguration Tutorial

Want to understand more about how IPv6 addresses are configured using SLAAC and DHCPv6? (Want to understand what “SLAAC” is?) If so, Fred Bovy recently posted a video of a presentation he did about IPv6 autoconfiguration.  In the hour-long video, he explains how autoconfiguration works, provides some examples in Linux and then later gets into mobile IPv6 and other mechanisms involved with IPv6 addressing.  If you are looking for a deep dive on IPv6 address autoconfiguration, you may find this very helpful.

Fred’s slides are also available from SlideShare:

Apr 12

My Report into For Immediate Release (FIR) Podcast #646

In this week's For Immediate Release episode #646, my report covered:

If you are a FIR subscriber, you should have the show now in iTunes or whatever you use to get the feed. If you aren't a subscriber, you can simply listen to the episode online now.

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Apr 11

FCC Publishes DNSSEC Recommendations for ISPs

FCC CSRIC logoAre you are network operator or Internet service provider (ISP) seeking to understand what you need to do to implement DNSSEC within your network? Are you looking for guidance to help you understand how to proceed?

If so, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just published a set of “DNSSEC Implementation Practices for ISPs” through one of the working groups of its Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC).  The 29-page PDF is available at:

http://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/pshs/advisory/csric3/CSRIC-III-WG5-Final-Report.pdf

The document provides:

  • A brief overview of DNS and DNSSEC
  • A view of the current state of DNSSEC deployment
  • How Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can use DNSSEC
  • An analysis of the key drivers and challenges for implementing DNSSEC
  • Specific best practice recommendations to ISPs for deploying DNSSEC

The key recommendations of the working group include:

  1. ISPs implement their DNS recursive nameservers so that they are at a minimum DNSSEC-aware, as soon as possible.
  2. Key industry segments, such as banking, credit cards, e-commerce, healthcare and other businesses, sign their respective domain names. The FCC ask industry-leading companies in key sectors commit to doing so, in order to create competitive pressure for others to follow. These industries may be prioritized based on the prevalence of threats to each one, which would mean focusing on financially related sites first, followed by other sites that hold private user data.
  3. Software developers such as web-browser developers study how and when to incorporate DNSSEC validation functions into their software. For example, a browser developer might create a visual indicator for whether or not DNSSEC is in use, or perhaps only a visual warning if DNSSEC validation fails.

We’re very pleased to see these recommendations as they are very much in line with what we’ve been promoting here on the site about DNSSEC – and are very much in line with our recent analysis of DNSSEC challenges and opportunities.

If you are an ISP or network operator, these recommendations from the FCC are definitely ones to consider and act on.  Kudos to the CSRIC Working Group and the FCC for publishing this document.

Thanks to the DNSSEC Deployment Initiative for pointing out that these recommendations were published.

Apr 11

FCC DNSSEC Implementation Guidlines for ISPs

In March 2012, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a set of “DNSSEC Implementation Practices for ISPs” through one of the working groups of the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC).  The full report can be downloaded in PDF at:

http://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/pshs/advisory/csric3/CSRIC-III-WG5-Final-Report.pdf

The 29-page document provides the following:

  • A brief overview of DNS and DNSSEC
  • A view of the current state of DNSSEC deployment
  • How Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can use DNSSEC
  • An analysis of the key drivers and challenges for implementing DNSSEC
  • Specific best practice recommendations to ISPs for deploying DNSSEC

If you are a network operator or Internet service provider seeking to understand the steps you need to undertake to support DNSSEC, this document is highly recommended.

Apr 11

Network World Tests Six IPv6-Enabled Application Delivery Controllers (load balancers)

Back in February, Scott Hogg at Network World put together a “Clear Choice Test” on “IPv6-Enabled Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs)” that explored the idea of using an ADC (what we used to think of typically as a “server load balancer”) to IPv6-enable content that exists on IPv4-only web servers.  As the intro to the series of posts explains:

If an organization were to deploy an IPv6-capable Server Load Balancer (SLB) or, using the most current term, Application Delivery Controller (ADC), they could configure an IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP) and an IPv4-only server farm.

This would allow Web apps hosted on IPv4-only servers to appear to the Internet user as IPv6-applications. The way it works is that clients would connect to the IPv6 VIP, and the ADC would perform a reverse-proxy function and terminate the IPv6 HTTP Internet connection, then create a new IPv4 HTTP back-end connection to the IPv4-only application servers. The server would not necessarily know the IP version being used by the client and it would happily return the data to the ADC appliance using IPv4. The ADC appliance takes that IPv4 response from the server, copies the HTTP application data and transmits it back to the IPv6-connected client.

Essentially, you are using your load-balancing infrastructure to also proxy the IPv6 to IPv4 connection.

It’s quite a useful and interesting idea for enterprises who want to make their content available over IPv6  (particularly with World IPv6 Launch approaching) but are concerned about making changes directly to their current web servers.  It may be easier as a first step to make changes to your ADC infrastructure (or even to install such an infrastructure).

Sadly, Network World has now locked this good content behind a registration wall and so you can only read their full report if you sign up to be an “Insider”. This is “free” in cost but does require you to provide info for them to track and monitor your usage.  If you are registered already or are okay doing so you’ll be able to read the full report and recommendations.  If you don’t want to register, the idea in general may be worth pursuing and you should explore your options.  (Wikipedia has a nice writeup on Application Delivery Networks that provides names and links to some of the vendors involved.)

Apr 11

Twitter Can Help You Escape Kidnappers (in South Africa)

Fascinating story at Ars Techica: "Twitter helps free kidnapped South African from trunk of his car." A man in South Africa was stuffed into the trunk of his own car when thieves stole it, but they neglected to take his mobile phone from him... and so he texted his girlfriend... who then turned to Twitter!

Twitter and kidnappingIt's actually quite a good example of how Twitter can be used by a variety of different people to help deal with a situation happening right now. We've seen this kind of response using Twitter with disasters and natural events... nice to see the Twitter network effect also helping in the case of an individual.

And very good to hear that the gent in question made it out safely.

The full story is worth a read...

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Apr 10

Video: Short Documentary on 2012 Curling Nationals in Philadelphia

A gent named Jeff Albertini produced this great short video about the 2012 US National Curling Championships in Philadelphia:

Philly Curling Nationals 2012 Documentary Short from Jeff Albertini on Vimeo.

Nicely done!