Signal

A request from CAIDA and WIDE to (hopefully) happy Unix IPv6 users for IPv6 connectivity data gathering:

http://www.caida.org/data/how-to/scamper/ipv6-collection-2007/

In March 2005 CAIDA and WIDE coordinated a global collection of IPv6 topology measurement in order to generate a IPv6 AS core map. We would like to repeat this experiment with probe runs between Tuesday 27 November and 4 December 2007. Please help us measure the IPv6 Internet! Instructions below.

[From my friend Philippe]

The RIPE-55 meeting takes place this week in Amsterdam. The hot matter currently is the expected death-by-[address-]exhaustion of IPv4.

So, on Monday, the main matter was IPv6 deployment (a lot of interesting stuff, most presentations are accessible as PDF files).

IPv4 address depletion was on the agenda Tuesday afternoon:

IPv4 Depletion Session

• ETNO Common Position on IPv4 Exhaustion - Mark McFadden, BT - pdf [ 29 KB ]
• Changing IPv4 Allocation Policy - Remco van Mook, VIRTU - pdf [ 76 KB ]
• IPv4 Depletion and the Afterworld - Geoff Huston, APNIC - pdf [ 2.25 MB ]
• Open Microphone / Discussion

Tuesday’s first two presentations reflect on future IPv4 address allocation policies. They don’t agree on what needs to be done; the first one, from ETNO (European Telecommunications Network Operators Association), is firmly opposed to a would-be “IP address marketplace”. The second document, from VIRTU (a Netherland-based hosting provider) holds almost the opposite view, saying that the various regional RIRs should be able to exchange address blocks to adapt to local needs, and leave LIRs invent and apply their own policies regarding address trading.

My personal conclusion is that a lot of wrestling over IPv4 addresses is to be expected in the coming years, and it will only get worse and worse with time.

The third document is a must-read, an updated version of the Geoff Huston presentation I already wrote about [fr] . I liked the train crash illustrations :-). The conclusion obviously remains: we’ll need to transition to IPv6 no matter what, and the sooner the better.

In that spirit, RIPE is discussing a Community Resolution (draft) on its IPv6 and Address-allocation mailing lists. Such a communication is desperately needed: most professionals (network administrators, network consultants) I spoke with about the Geoff Huston documents had a skeptical reaction along the lines of “Transition? Yeah right, I’ve been hearing that for 8 years now, so maybe one day”.

In preparation for the impending doom of IPv4, and in order to put my money where my mouth is [fr], I decided to make this blog natively accessible through IPv6.

The first problem I ran into is that my blog runs in a FreeBSD jail. Jails are a fine way to run a virtualized environment but they only support IPv4 at the moment. So I had the following options:

• implement IPv6 in jails myself (this wouldn’t have happened overnight);
• wait for someone else to;
• abandon the idea;
• find a workaround.

Finally I found a workaround, using Apache mod_proxy as a separate server to provide a IPv6 frontend (a configuration called reverse proxy). (more…)

Like many other people, I was somewhat perplexed by the Summer announcement of the Mozilla Foundation that Thunderbird would be further developed by a separate structure, a spin-off of the Mozilla Foundation.

The foundation has a huge heap of money generated by Firefox (Google donates a lot of it), whereas Thunderbird generates no significant revenue. Separating structures means that the Mozilla Foundation will have to inject cash (currently $3M as seed funding) to keep the new structure running until it is self-sustaining (which probably won’t happen overnight). It also means that Thunderbird will lose some of the huge visibility associated with the Mozilla Foundation.

From a strategic standpoint, I was perplexed. So I assumed that other, internal considerations went into play. Accounting, management, organizational reasons; whatever; I don’t know.

Last month, the new structure (dubbed Mailco for now) was finally announced.

Just a few days ago, both full-time (paid) lead developers of Thunderbird announced, in turn, they would leave the foundation next Friday. They will continue working on Thunderbird as (unpaid) volunteers. They didn’t explain why they were leaving, one can only assume they disagree with the new setup.

So now I’m even more perplexed. Things don’t seem to bode very well for Thunderbird, at least in the immediate future.

Note: from now on, my articles will be tagged either en or fr according to the language they’re written in, as I don’t intend to translate every article. This will hopefully make it a tiny bit easier for readers. I haven’t yet figured out a way to generate separate RSS feeds for that, though.

Photographs here under Creative Commons license.

The plan

(sorry French readers, this one is better suited to English)

Participate from ENST, Paris, France in Mozilla 24, a multi-site, multi-continent, high-quality video conference operated from Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Two simultaneous video streams (one from our conference room to Japan, the other one back) allow interactivity between the speakers in our room and audiences on the other sites.

The room setup

Video from Paris to Japan has been sent using a laptop running FreeBSD 6, with a Firewire card and a 100 Mbps ethernet port. The PC receives the DV video from a professional camera on the Firewire port and reemits it, encapsulated, on the ethernet port. Here’s a picture of the setup:

The blue cable is the 100 Mbps ethernet cable. The other cable is the firewire cable, plugged on the PCMCIA adapter.

(more…)