Geek Style
IPv6 has been around for a few years now. Your Windows, Mac OS X, [put your favorite OS name here] supports IPv6 very well. Everyone knows IPv6 is cool! It solves your problems.
From an engineering point of view, IPv6 is an excellent protocol. It is well suited for our today internet. But it is rarely used.
The story begins. Some people are rambling about hardware upgrade headaches, other about learning curve, and some people about application transition issues.
As a home user, it is highly unlikely that your service provider offers you native IPv6 connectivity. I tell you, it is highly unlikely that your service provider even have native IPv6 connectivity to its upstream, and in most cases, ISPs even do not have their own IPv6 allocation yet. So if you are that type of geek who wants to see how IPv6 works, you should get an IPv6 tunnel from tunnel brokers.
Forget about hardware upgrades and training courses for now. Let’s see what an IPv6 connectivity will offer you. I am doing some basic DNS AAAA record lookups here. If you are not familiar with that, it means the DNS query for IPv6 address of a host, to see which web sites are offering you services over IPv6.
I start from major websites you will mostly use on a daily basis:
$ host -tAAAA www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
$ host -tAAAA www.l.google.com
www.l.google.com has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com is an alias for www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net
www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA lb1.www.ms.akadns.net
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.paypal.com
www.paypal.com has no AAAA record
So far so good. None of major web sites support IPv6. What about people who sell you pricey IPv6 gear? Lets see:
$ host -tAAAA www.cisco.com
www.cisco.com has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.juniper.net
www.juniper.net has no AAAA record
Interesting. None of them support IPv6 too. And the people who encourage you to use IPv6:
$ host -tAAAA www.ietf.org
www.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2610:a0:c779:b::d1ad:35b4
$ host -tAAAA www.iana.org
www.iana.org has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.arin.net
www.arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:1::80
$ host -tAAAA www.runningipv6.net
www.runningipv6.net has IPv6 address 2001:1af8:2:5::2
$ host -tAAAA playground.sun.com
playground.sun.com has no AAAA record
$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6forum.com
www.ipv6forum.com has IPv6 address 2001:a18:1:20::22
$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6tf.org
www.ipv6tf.org has IPv6 address 2001:7f9:1000:1::103
The result is very interesting. Most services on internet are only available on IPv4. Most service hosting providers have no native IPv6 connectivity. And most ISPs do not offer native IPv6 connectivity to customers.
I am not sure if I am actually helping this transition, but I started using IPv6 at home. My excellent super efficient IPv6 is tunneled over the deficient and weakly designed IPv4. Without IPv4 my IPv6 will not even work. And I am still visiting google.com on IPv4.
This was a rant from an end-user’s point of view. The IPv6 is far from the wide adoption. A hard 10 years is ahead of users and service providers, and 10 good years for network hardware vendors.
Ivan Voras has done a very good job by putting together a FreeBSD 7.0 based LiveCD.
The CD contains a very recent 7.0 installation + ZFS patches (usable!) and XFCE 4.2.
I spent half an hour to try the LiveCD and it worked fine for me on two different boxes.
I am sure Ivan is planning to bundle a firefox with the LiveCD, along with the graphical installer.
For a while, I have been switching browsers on Mac on a daily basis.
1- Safari is a very nice and polished browser, but has major problems with internationalized pages and crashes once in a while. Does not support plug-ins. Not my preferred browser at all. Excellent for simple searches and general web browsing. However, the development builds (Webkit nightly builds) shows there are numerous improvements I hope we see soon in next releases.
2- Firefox was my favorite browser in windows. But in OS X it is far from perfect. Its very slow, and is a different beast in comparison with other OS X softwares. It is excellent to have all those nice plug-ins I had on Windows, here on a Mac. Firefox in OS X is very slow and is no way like its windows version. Firefox is a software which is designed for Windows, not for Mac.
3- Camino is the little sister of Firefox, using the same engine with a Mac interface. It is something between Safari and Firefox. So far I had the best web browsing experience with this browser on Mac. However, It is almost as unstable as safari. And no plug-in support. But its very fast and feels much more like a OS X native software than Firefox.
4- Other browsers including Opera, Shiira, SeaMonkey, … . I would suggest you do not waste time on these browsers (on Mac). They seem to lost their goal. People want to enjoy web browsing. I really don’t want to switch from one browser to other on my daily browsing journey.
I have always been an ATI fan since nVidia did not exist. And so far it served well on my workstations. I don’t even care that they are part of AMD now.
However, something that was annoying me for a while was ATI’s driver which seems to not as good as nVidia’s in *nix, especially for their newer and high-end cards. I am not sure why ATI does not care much about their non-windows drivers, but I am sure that they are loosing lots of faithful customers and a good market share for just the same reason.
I have very limited resources at home to test new stuff (However I am planning to make a well equipped home lab like the one scott morris has soon). But I make good use of virtual machines on my Windows XP workstation.
I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (which is now free) at home because it is very light-weight and runs FreeBSD 7 very well. But at work I get the most out of VMWare Server ( free, too! ). VMWare is much bulkier and heavier, but gives you fine control over virtual machines. And officially supports FreeBSD and Solaris (my favorite ones) and has vmware-tools package for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Netware. However vmware-tools does not work on my fbsd7 installation (dumps core), but I don’t care because I don’t run X and use if_le driver and do fine tuning manually.
If you have limited resources, I strongly suggest Microsoft Virtual PC. Though it does not officially support non-microsoft operating systems, I have several FreeBSD installation on it without any problem. Excellent for trying out system for a limited time. But if you are planning to make serious use of your virtual FreeBSD, VMware would be your only choice as it officially supports FreeBSD (even runs 64-bit edition, but I never tried that) and runs X very well.
If you are thinking of running FreeBSD on VMWare, Ivan Voras‘ article has some very useful that would make life much easier.
The first thing I did after I finished installing Gran Paradiso Alpha 2, was checking if it passes Web Standard‘s ACID2 test, and unbelievably it did! And I was amazed to see it really passed the test!
The release notes says the browser is now completely standards compliance. Great!
There are other improvements that affect Mac version that I haven’t tested yet.
I finally found some spare time to try the PC-BSD 1.3 on a virtual machine. Despite the fact that I always use Windows and OSX as my Desktop OS of choice, I am always curious to evaluate open-source desktop environment, especially those who has something BSD related on underlying layers.
It did not last longer than a couple of hours on my harddisk before getting removed. But I had very good experience during this very short time.
First of all, if you are looking for 3D effects (Beryl and xgl) stuff, just go away and use Fedora or OpenSUSE. PC-BSD is not loaded with such stuff. Its only a functional and usable desktop, loaded with all necessary stuff. If you feel you need more packages than the pre-installed ones, feel free to take a look at PBIDIR for a pre-compiled package of most major open-source softwares.
Only a few things I noticed during the installation and using PC-BSD:
- Graphical installer is easy and powerful
- System configures a simple firewall which is enough for desktop use.
- There is a automatic online update mechanism in place. Excellent for novice users.
- It asks if you are installing a Server or Desktop during installation. So you can use it as server if you are interested.
- Window Manager is KDE 3.5.5 which looks good and easy to use as desktop
- All these stuff are running on FreeBSD 6.1
- HAL works very good. I tried a few removable stuff like external DVD-RW and USB thumb drivers, and it was as easy as just plugging in the hardware.
- It looks for SMP hardware, so no kernel re-compile is needed.
Conclusion: If you are looking for a hassle-free deskop OS that works on your old hardware, and you don’t want blazing 3D effects, PCBSD is a very good choice for you.
If you are still using FreeBSD 4.x somewhere, you should really consider upgrading to latest version as the project does not support 4.x anymore.
I would suggest upgrading to 6.x for production use or 7.x (-CURRNET) for your development use. However I consider -CURRENT mature enought to use for production in our environment.
If you like the way FreeBSD 4.x worked, I would also suggest you trying DragonFlyBSD. They just announced releasing 1.8 that offers quite a few major improvments.
Now that I am using OpenOffice.org 2 more seriously for a while (on FreeBSD you could guess), I am badly missing Microsoft Office. And to me, its not about the functionality. Its about pre-installed templates.
This shows up when you want to create pretty presentations or professional looking text documents. Now it seems like that OpenOffice people has figured out this problem and included some new templates in their recent release.
I wish they would also make it less memory hungry. Opening a very simple spreadsheet on my workstation takes up to 130MB of memory.
I always wonder how idiot some vendors are. Just see this screenshot:
(taken from Acrobat download site)
Despite the fact that most people just ignore update notifications, If 6.0.1 is vulnerable, why do you let people download and install it?
You judge!
My Book
Network Administration with FreeBSD 7 is a book for intermediate and advanced system and network administrators who wants to get more familiar with internals and extract the full potential of FreeBSD 7 operating system.
