The Lair

Yeah, so new job. And I thought that my days of reading near-incomprehensible papers was at an end. Little did I know. I am currently suffering from acute brain hurt after reading tons of incomprehensible spec sheets (Web Services, WS-Addressing and WS-Policy among many others).

It’s fun stuff. As in grad school, I start with a vague idea about the thing, read the spec (paper) and emerge completely confused. Sometimes near suicidal. And then I get to make (hopefully) intelligent recommendations about how such things can be implemented in a crippled braindead and completely obsolete product used by the client. This is easier than you’d think because most often, the answer has been - “um. yeah. So we can’t do that with your product. Perhaps you’d like to move to some other product and save us the pain of going through these meetings?”.

Client responds with “Uh. No. We wants. Make happen. Here. Munniez.”

As a result, I’ve had nothing approaching a life for the past month or so while I’ve been trying to figure out how to uh… do the equivalent of bailing out the floods of Ratnapura with an ice cream cone. Yeah, one of those crunchy cones that goes soggy after a while.

But there is hope yet. During bouts of feverish reading of specifications, I have also started re-reading the Wheel of Time series. Confessor (read on Saturday) was, by the way, horrendous. I will now wait for the Terry Goodkind detractors to say “I told you so“.

So, ICANN switched the root servers over to IPv6 a few days ago. This is a big deal, because although IPv6 has been “officially” deployed since 1999, adoption has been extremely slow. The most commonly used existing addressing scheme (IPv4) is estimated to run out in 2-3 years. Then again, analysts have been screaming about peak oil for a while too, so perhaps it’s all hyperbole.

Part of the reason for the slow adoption rate is because everyone (myself included) has the “if it ain’t broke yet, why bother fixing it” mentality. That’s pretty much why GoPHP5 was started, that’s also why a large number of websites still use Apache 1.3 over Apache 2.0 or 2.2. Anyway, I decided that I would figure this mysterious IPv6 thing out and did a bit of digging.

The problem is, even without knowing that I do - I tend to be quite reliant on the existing addressing scheme. How so? Let me count the ways.

One application area that has seen a fair few advances (for IPv4 addresses) is geolocation technology. For example, it’s currently easy to identify the geographic location of an IP address (see zonefiles - I use this as a quick and easy geolocation service). More comprehensive services are also available ie:, ip2location, hostip.info and the daddy, Maxmind’s GeoIP. With the vastly larger address space of IPv6, the geolocation mapping will need to be reconstructed; and even then the sheer size of addresses may allow a descent into anarchy. The IANA (which governs over IP address allocation) will probably be far less inclined to rigourously police the assignment of IPv6 addresses.

Another spiffy application area that will take a hit (at least in the short term) is the DNSBL system (DNS blacklists) - which publish a set of unsavoury IP addresses. I rely on quite a few of those services (project honeypot, botsvsbrowsers and sorbs) to help head off spammers at the pass. With more addresses than you can shake a stick at, denying by IPs is going to get a little bit harder too.

So, I want IPv6 to turn up soon, yet I don’t. The problem is, there isn’t an easy way yet to test out how IPv6 will work. Most of the internet doesn’t actually seem to know how to route things to and from the spiffy new IPv6 adddresses. That’s where places like Sixxs and Hexago come in. They allow IPv6 addresses to be tunnelled via the existing IPv4 infrastructure.

So, I’m off to get myself a IPv6 tunnel set up.

I had an insightful, interesting (screw it, who am I kidding? it was painfully uncomfortable) conversation with a relation recently. Said relation has offspring of a certain age. I’ve written about the offspring before, specifically in the context of how they tend to like playing role playing games on the internet with total strangers (ancient history)

Anyway, said relation had been chatting over the watercooler with others and had (belatedly) come to the realization that the internet is, as they say, srs bzns. And now, having hunted down my email address with all the determination of a parent who figures that their precious snowdrop needs protecting, she wanted to know how she could “block all those nasty sites. You know, like porn and hacking sites and things like that“.

Pause. Deep breath. Roll eyes and refuse the chance to take a swipe at the hacking vs cracking debate, part eleventy billion. Tell her that this isn’t possible.

But you’re practically a [insert qualification here] in Computers. Surely you can do something?

No. I really can’t. *sigh* People need to stop watching stupid movies. Seriously.

And if anyone needs me for the rest of the week, well - I’ll be playing with KDE for Windows. As astonishing as it sounds, I like individual K-apps (Kopete, aKregator, Cervisia, Konqueror). I’m looking forward to this, broken though things probably will be on Windows.