The Internet Show – Give Away Congratulations

Published November 9th, 2011 by bsmith

As some of you may have noticed, either from our previous posts or attending the event, Anchor was at The Internet Show . While it wasn’t to the same scale as the expo prior to this, the enthusiasm and calibre of the attendees was fantastic.

While at The Internet Show Anchor presented a talk regarding ‘Why hosting management is important to your online business‘.

For illustrative purposes only, we were dressed better.

It was a fantastic opportunity, for US, to present the facts and benefits face to face with the next crop of online success stories. For everyone who made the effort to sit and watch (and ask questions especially!), thank you. Opportunities to interact with the public in such a candid and personal manner are few and far between. So if you were ever racked by indecision regarding attending a Anchor talk, we not only encourage you to attend, but ask some hard questions while you’re there.

Besides the talk, we unintentionally provided much amusement to attendees via these two trouble makers:

Floating fish that swim, who'd a thunk it?


It was however, with deep regret that Nemo, easily the favourite at the event, decided the ceiling was a far nicer location than the expo floor. At present we are unsure as to his fate, but we have his remote and his left fin to keep us company..

For those of you out there still confused about these things click here.

As a thank you for everyone who stopped by our booth, we also ran a prize draw. This time round, rather than an iPad2, we went for the latest craze. Not only did we update the prize option, we made it an option at the same time!

First prize: iPhone 4S

Shiny.

Second prize: A Harbour Cruise for two including dinner!

First place winner was Adam Stead from Reach Local! The timing was impeccable for Adam, as his trusty iPhone 3GS had been wounded in the course of duty (i.e. the screen was cracked).

The second place, Harbour Cruise, was won by Ben Davey from Mobile Nation! (We were assured that he isn’t prone to sea sickness).

A big thank you to everyone who stopped by and had a chat. We hope to see you all at the next ‘The Internet Show’ event.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in FTW

 Leave a comment

1
Comment

Global connectivity monitoring

Published March 19th, 2009 by matt

funny-pictures-the-internet-is-a-series-of-tubes

If you manage a network on the Internet, you are committing to providing connectivity to practically the entire world, while only having direct control over your local connectivity. Worse still, you usually only have good visibility into local network conditions, which makes knowing about (as well as investigating and resolving) connectivity problems from other parts of the world a massive pain.

Clever people on the Internet, though, have already noticed this problem and are here to help. My network tool of the week is traceroute.org, which offers a huge list of publically-available traceroute servers sorted by country. You give one of these traceroute servers an IP address or hostname, and they’ll show you how they got to it from wherever they are. If the utility of that isn’t immediately obvious…

There’s also lists of BGP looking glasses and a bunch of other handy info too, but just the ability to see a traceroute to your network from Azerbaijan is worth the price of admission and more.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in FTW

 Leave a comment

1
Comment

The Future Of The Internet

Published January 30th, 2009 by oliver

On day two of Linux Conf I was able to attend two presentations on IPv6 – System Administration Consequences of the Endgame of IPv4 and the Deployment of IPv6 by AARNET’s Glen Turner and Google and IPv6 by Angus Lees. Both were extremely informative and made it clear to me that we need to start gearing up for IPv6. By “we”, I mean the world.

Don’t get me wrong – if you are the average home user IPv6 (or even IPv4) will mean nothing to you and the advent of IPv6 addressing en masse will likely pass you by without you even noticing. Much like the Y2K bug though, it will only be with the coordinated efforts of the best network and systems administrators around the world that we’ll be able to jump the hurdle again so gracefully.

Glen painted a fairly grim picture – by around 2010 we should expect to run out of IPv4 addresses. Admittedly there are large historical allocations which have very little usage but we can expect these to turn into lucrative commodities, bought and sold for whatever price the seller decides. IPv4 addresses will still be available, but at insanely inflated prices. The upshot of this? You can expect ISPs to start dealing in Enterprise NAT. Publicly routable IP addresses for anyone who isn’t willing to pay the price will disappear, as will end-to-end connectivity. The new cash cow for ISPs will be selling broker services for any applications requiring end-to-end connectivity such as VoIP and gaming.

In actual fact, this consumer-driven environment may spell doom for IPv6. ISPs will be able to make more money by selling services that work around the limitations in IPv4, thus it is in their best interests to not make IPv6 available. Everyone would benefit from IPv6 but it needs to be made available first. Angus Lees presented a report on the IPv6 survey conducted last year by Google. Using a variety of techniques piggy-backing on their search interface they were able to determine that around 0.2% of their users have IPv6 access. However almost half of these are not working properly. This is not enough of a userbase for which to enable IPv6 fulltime, and certainly too many non-functional deployments for which to risk breaking their search engine.

Will we all benefit from IPv6? Yes. Is it necessary to ensure the Internet continues working effectively? Definitely. Is it that hard to deploy? Maybe not.

Anchor has decided to commit to deploying IPv6, and to demystify this process we will document our progress publicly. You can view our progress on our public wiki at http://www.anchor.com.au/hosting/IPv6. If you want to make the Internet a better place by pushing for the widespread deployment of IPv6, talk to your ISP and ask them what their IPv6 deployment plans are.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in FTW

 Leave a comment

1
Comment