April 22, 2009

Back on Wordpress

I’ve been using Twitter lately for my short freeform thoughts (@maxclark if you are interested). Twitter has actually proven to be the perfect medium for the job – the side effect has been my untouched blog. In an effort to encourage more posting I’ve migrated back to Wordpress (to play around with the plugins and widgets) and I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised.

The export/import ran near perfect and the customizations and extensions for Wordpress have kept me interested in tinkering. Only serious side effect I’ve found so far (besides the expected image/upload broken links) has been the complete loss of text formatting (mostly do to the MT export). In the past I used Markdown syntax and need to experiment with what I want to do moving forward. That consideration is mostly based on the use of Marsedit or the WP-Admin moving forward. I still have some general category/tag cleanup to do and a rewrite of the template and I it should be good to go.

I’m thinking about using Amazon’s S3 moving forward for image and asset hosting for no other reason than it sounds cool.

March 12, 2009

Howto Subnet IPv6

I’ve been trying to get my head around IPv6 subnetting for some time now. Today was finally the day that forced the issue…

First some background:

All IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) are allocated in large blocks to a regional registry (ARIN, RIPE, etc…) these registries then in turn allocate addresses down to ISPs, ISPs to customers and so on. By default the registry will allocate a /32 to an ISP and the ISP is supposed to allocate a /48 to a customer. The IPv6 equivalent of a IPv4 /24 subnet is a /64 which is the space a customer should break their network segments into.

This is where my brain starts to hurt.

An IPv6 /32 is 2^16 (65536) /48 subnets, which in turn are each 2^16 /64 subnets. A /64 is 2^64 addresses, the square of the size of the entire IPv4 Internet. It took me a while to find a calculator that would actually give the expanded result – 18,446,744,073,709,552,000.

The numbers are just unbelievably large. Anyways back to the problem at hand, how does an ISP properly subnet their /32 space to customers (or better put what are the breakpoints in the subnets)?
The answer is incredibly simple, since IPv6 is going to be subnetted based on the existing “:” octet separator all you need to do is increase the number and volia. Phyber’s IPv6 allocation is 2637:f238/32 which means the subnets are:


2607:f238:0000/48
2607:f238:0001/48
2607:f238:0002/48

And so on and so on. Another trick, IPv6 isn’t just 0-9, the numbering is 0-9 + a-f or:


2607:f238:0008/48
2607:f238:0009/48
2607:f238:000a/48
2607:f238:000b/48

It is a ridiculous amount of IP space. I’ll post more when I figure out what we are doing for our cross connects and loopback interfaces.

December 7, 2008

Read the Man Page

For years I have been using the syntax:

$ find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

For some reason I took the time to read the man page for find today and guess what:

$ find . -type f -delete

Does the exact same thing and it is almost instant. Lesson learned, every now and again read the man page.

September 18, 2008

A Bit of Humor in the Current Market

An Italian walked into a bank in New York City and asked for the loan officer. He needed to borrow $5,000 for two weeks, but he was not a depositor of the bank. The loan officer said that the bank would need some form of security for the loan, so the Italian handed over the keys to a new $250,000 Ferrari out front and they could hold it until the loan was paid off in two weeks. The title was produced and everything checked out, the car was driven into the bank’s underground garage and parked, and the loan granted at 12%.
Later, the bank’s president and officers all enjoyed a good laugh on the Italian for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral for a $5,000 loan.

Two weeks later, the Italian returned, repaid the $5,000 plus interest of $23.07. The loan officer said, “Sir, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000?”

The Italian replied: “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $23.07 and expect it to be there when I return?”

August 31, 2008

Learning Python Complaints

I read an excellent post the other day discussing Python education. I personally identify with almost 100% the author has to say. With Perl and PHP online articles and available books provide task based examples. What better way to learn a programming language than to give examples on how to solve a specific problem. More than anything else the lack of task based instruction has stalled my adoption of Python.

http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/learning-python/

August 25, 2008

HOWTO Remove Emergency Dialing from Blackberry when Locked

I have what seems to be a relatively straightforward problem. I lock my blackberry, put it in my pocket and discover that a perfect series of motions result in the phone dialing 911. I find out the phone has dialed 911 when the emergency dispatcher calls me back to ask if I have an emergency. Should I be concerned when they accept my “no Sir/Maam, we do not”?

After scouring the Internet this weekend, and waiting on hold with AT&T my fears were confirmed. There is simply no way to remove the “Emergency Call” option when the phone is locked. However I did find another option which has been working just as good if not better. By holding down the mute key the phone will go into standby mode disabling all of the keys except the mute button. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to map the side keys to the standby function, but it is a step in the right direction.

August 2, 2008

Installing BES 4.1.6 on Windows 2008 Server

Don’t it’s not supported.

July 29, 2008

Earthquake

There was an Earthquake this morning in Los Angeles. If you are interested in the full details check out the USGS site here:

Magnitude 5.4 – GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA, CALIFORNIA

Reports are sizing the quake in the mid 5’s – which means if you are in LA you felt it. I must say it was in interesting experience looking out the window in my 28th floor office watching the world move.

As an unfortunate side effect the elevators serving the high rise (the upper floors) of the building are still out. This means each time I need to go to our main POP on the 7th floor I end up climbing 10 flights of stairs on the way down, and again on back on the way up.

July 21, 2008

mrtgsql Actually Used

So I just found out that a utility I wrote called mrtgsql (parses and records the values of the mrtg .log files into a SQL database is/was being used by a German hosting operation. Honestly I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would be using the software – very cool that it came to use by someone. I’ve long since re-written the utility to read directly from .rrd files. Maybe I should release that work as well.

mrtgsql

July 2, 2008

30 Million Domains No Profit

From Data Center Knowledge:

Go Daddy said this week that it is now managing more than 30 million domains.

I was actually thinking about the domain registration business the other day and what the actually costs associated are. GoDaddy is charging $6.85/year (plus the $0.20 ICANN fee) for a .com domain registration. If they are paying Verisign the list price of $6.42/year per .com name registered GoDaddy is making $0.43/year per domain (a 6.7% margin).

With 30 million registered domains that is 12.9 million/year in Gross after $192.6 million/year payment to Verisign. Who’s the real winner here?

To bad there are those pesky things called merchant fees. At a best case 1-2% of the sale price for Visa/Mastercard (higher for Amex) that margin goes away really fast. Ever wonder why the GoDaddy shopping cart is so cluttered with all those up sells?

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