Derick Thomas

How To Browse IPv6 Websites

2009-09-01T04:24:00.001+05:30

IPv6 is gaining popularity. Many sites are having IPv6 versions also. These days, I can see many torrents exclusively available on IPv6. In this post, I will guide you through a step by step procedure on how to browse IPv6 webpage on your windows box.

First, you need to have an IPv6 address. IPv6 Tunnel Brokers would help you achieve this. You can have an IPv6 tunnel created from Hurricane Electric's free Tunnel Broker.

Get an Account from Hurricane Electric

It will take you to registration page. Fill in all the details.

Fill the registration form

Now it is time to login to your account.

Now that you have logged in, you can create a tunnel.

Let us create a tunnel

Just enter your IPv4 IP address. You can select a nearby location or Hurricane Electric will select one for you.

"Let us enter the IPv4 address and nearby server

You will be taken to a page containing details of the created tunnel. You can select the OS and click the button.

Select the OS and Click the Show Config button

It will show the configuration generated.

Configuration for your platform is displayed

Open Command Prompt.

Open Command Prompt

Copy paste the configuration in the command prompt.

Now ping the IPv6 server IP address from the command prompt.

Ping the IPv6 Server IP

Now let us try if we can open a web page. Type http://ipv6.google.com in the address bar of your browser.

You should now see Google's IPv6 Home Page - with bouncing logo.

Google IPv6 Home Page

Hurricane Electric Free IPv6 Certification

2009-06-20T19:05:00.000+05:30

You might have heard of IPv4 address depletion. A new version of Internet addressing system was prepared sometime back. But since everyone was using IPv4 address, the migration has not been implemented in a large scale. If we continue to use IPv4 address as on today, the entire range would be used up in less than two years. Public IPv4 addresses are mainly used by Internet hosts. Intranets can use private IPv4 address which are not reachable from Internet. Although many methods like NAT (Network Address Translation) and CIDR (Classless Inter Domain Routing) were implemented to stretch the IPv4 address usage, it seems that it is reaching a level of saturation now.

It is sure that everyone will have to migrate to IPv6 address within a couple of years. Internet registries are not so liberal in assigning IPv4 address now. If you want to learn about IPv6 and make sure that you have skills to administer IPv6 address and servers, Free IPv6 certification from Hurricane Electric is a great way to begin. You can register for this certification at: http://ipv6.he.net/certification/index.php. I will give a brief overview of this test in the following section.

Through this test set you will be able to:

Prove that you have IPv6 connectivity

Prove that you have a working IPv6 web server

Prove that you have a working IPv6 email address

Prove that you have working forward IPv6 DNS

Prove that you have working reverse IPv6 DNS for your mail server

Prove that you have name servers with IPv6 addresses that can respond to queries via IPv6

Prove your knowledge of IPv6 techonologies through quick and easy testing

You will also demonstrate that you are familiar with IPv6 concepts such as:

the format of IPv6 addresses

AAAA records

reverse DNS for IPv6

the IPv6 localhost address

the IPv6 default route

the IPv6 documentation prefix

the IPv6 link local prefix

the IPv6 multicast prefix

how to do an IPv6 ping

how to do an IPv6 traceroute

common IPv6 prefix lengths such as /64, /48, /32

and more!

There are seven levels of certification available now. The breakdown of each are given below:

NewB: Read the primer, be able to answer some quick and easy questions.

Explorer: Verify that you can access an IPv6 website (ours!)

Enthusiast: Verify that you have an IPv6 capable web server that we can connect to and fetch information from. This should be entered as a FQDN and not an IPv6 address, or you will have issues once you start working on the Guru level.

Administrator: Verify that you have a working IPv6 capable MTA by sending you an email only over IPv6.

Professional: Verify that your MTA has working reverse DNS (ex: dig mx $domain +short ; dig aaaa $mx +short ; dig -x $mxAAAA +short)

Guru: Verify that the authoritative NS for your domain have AAAA records, and respond to queries for the domain (ex: step 1 is dig ns $domain ; dig aaaa $ns | step 2 is dig aaaa $domain @$nsAAAA)

Sage: Check to see if your domain's authoritative NS have IPv6 glue with their listed TLD servers. Meaning the TLD server can directly answer for the host record (ex: dig +trace ns $domain to get the TLD server list then dig aaaa $ns @TLD +short for the glue).

All the above given information is taken from Hurricane Electric Website and Forums.

You need IPv6 address to complete all these tests. Your ISP may not support IPv6 now, but still you can complete this test. You can make use of Tunnelbrokers, which essentially creates a tunnel from your PC to tunnelbroker server. From the tunnelbroker server, the connectivity is IPv6. Hurricane Electric provides a free tunnelbroker service also. You can access the tunnelbroker at: http://www.tunnelbroker.net . If you have registered for IPv6 test, you may use the same login for tunnelbroker also. When you register, you will have to select a nearest gateway. Also, you need to have a public IP which is pingable from outside. Most of the internet connections provide you with a IPv4 public IP. Once you create a tunnel, you can select your correct OS from the list given in the bottom and configuration needed to make the tunnel up will be shown. Just paste that in the command line and you are ready to browse IPv6 websites. A video tutorial is available in youtube.

To complete tests beyond Explorer, you need to have a domain name. If you do not have a domain name, you can use a free DNS service like afraid.org to create a subdomain. You need to know about DNS and configure DNS, Mail Server and Web server for completing all the tests. A piece of advice for newbies: Make sure that your DNS (including reverse DNS) works before you continue with all other tests beyond Explorer. That will make your life easy and you will not have to spend valuable time in resolving basic issues.
I have completed all the tests sometime back. I would recommend this test for everyone who manages a web server or DNS server either at work or at home for hosting sites. It was very challenging and fun! Last, but not the least - Hurricane Electric Staff are very helpful. Just post a ticket if you are clueless about some problem. They will help you out for sure. You may first search the forums before sending a mail. Their support rocks!

Here is my certificate:

Windows 7 RC1 Vs. Linux Mint 7 RC - Review

2009-05-17T17:36:00.000+05:30

In the beginning of this month, two prominent Operating System distributions released their Release Candidates - Popular Microsoft Windows and Linux Mint. I had a chance to try both of them out in my Dell 6400 Laptop. Here is how the things appeared to me:

Windows 7 RC1

Microsoft released first Release Candidate of their brand new Operating System Windows 7, in the beginning of this month. The RC1 will not expire for an entire year! Yes, Microsoft is in Damage Control Mode after bad reviews it got for Windows Vista! Even my laptop came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I used it for one year, till the warranty expired and then switched to Linux. This time around, I heard very good reviews of Windows 7 and decided to give it a try.

Anyone can download a copy of Windows 7 RC1 from Microsoft website for free and use it for one full year. You will get all the updates. The download is a DVD image of size 2.35G.Â It did not take my much time to download but I had to burn the image on a DVD to give it a try. The install screen looks very nice and completes without much problem. The install was completed in 15 minutes approximately. The computer restarted three times during the install.

The first thing you notice in the new Windows is the Startup Screen. It looks awesome. The artwork of Windows has made considerable progress in the last few years. The system booted to new desktop with very thick taskbar and large icons. Since Vista, Microsoft made so many changes in the menu appearance and positioning of the menu items - which to me is very perplexing at first. You need to get adjusted to find the things out and may spend a lot of time initially to get the things right. There are a couple of good themes also. Overall the looks seems to be attractive at first.

The I tried to play some songs and videos. MP3 songs played without any problem. But the problem started when I played a video in some other format. It failed to play. I heard that Windows 7 will support most of the codes native. I was out of luck this time. I checked the memory usage - it was 544 MB. My laptop comes with Intel 945 Express Chipset. So the graphic performance was not that good. I think you need a separate video card to make the best use of Windows 7. Another issue - I don't know if I can call this an issue - is that I was unable to open any office document. I am not asking Microsoft to include Office Suite in Windows 7, but they could have included at least Word, Excel and PowerPint and Visio viewers in this. One need to either buy Office or download Open Office to view documents.

In general, I could not see any drastic improvement in the performance of my machine with 1G of RAM. It may work perfectly for people who have got separate video card and more memory, but not for me. One thing Microsoft has done good is the installation size of the OS. It was using less than 7G of hard disk space compared to 10G used by Windows Vista. There may be some services which can be turned off and you can increase the performance. But I did not have the patience to do those things. I shut down the PC and started installing linux - Windows 7 disappointed me. I gave the installation disk to my friend also, who tried it on is AMD machine. He was not at all impressed with Windows and he too removed the Windows installation within an hour. His graphics card was not properly detected - something which you never expect with Windows. I will give it aÂ score of 6/10. It is not for me, at least.

Linux Mint 7 RC

When Linux Mint 7 Gloria (Release Candidate) was announced, I downloaded it immediately. After I installed Windows 7, I decided to remove it and installed Linux Mint 7 RC. The download size of ISO is 686M. I made a boot able USB with UNetBootin. I restarted the system and bootted from USB disk. The Live CD (rather USB), was very quick and I was presented with a very smooth looking desktop in minutes. I started the installer, which asked me a few questions. I selected custom disk partitioning and ext4 is the default file system in this release. The installation completed in 3-4 minutes and I restarted the PC.

The initial boot took around 2 minutes, but the subsequent boots took very little time. There isÂ an improvement in the boot response. The new theme which comes with Gloria looks awesome and the Login Manager also looks impressive. Above all, the system was very fast. The memory usage was 190M and the processor usage was around 7% on both the cores on the default GNOME desktop. The new Mint Menu is also very impressive. I however, chose the classical one as I was accustomed to the old one. The bigger test came when I started playing media files. Every file format in my notebook was played correctly. I did not have to install any codec. Also, most of the applications you need comes pre-installed, including OpenOffice 3.0. The only changes I did was adjusting the icon zoom size to 66% and adjusting the font size to 9px. Font size of 10px looked too big for me. The distro is very stable and is ready for everyday use. It comes with Python 2.6 which disappoints may people because of some backward incompatible changes made in the language. I would give Gloria a score of 9.5/10.

I have one complaint about major linux distributions. The directory structure is very confusing for the normal user. If someone new to the linux comes and see file structure he will not understand any thing. The folder names need to be more descriptive. Folder names like bin, root, home, dev, etc, sbin etc. confuses many users and does not makeÂ a very good impression. Apple has done a great thing by changing the folder names in Mac OS. Although Mac OS is built on top of BSD, it does not carry the folder naming convention used by BSD or Unix. That has, in my opinion, contributed a lot to the success of Mac.

Now I am using Linux Mint 7 RC at my home and Windows XP at work. For me Linux Mint is the linux distro which can be a brand ambassador for linux. It has got everything to satisfy a new user coming to the linux world! Welcome to the world of Choice and Freedom!

GMail - Compose Email in Hindi Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu

2009-03-31T17:15:00.000+05:30

Yes, the much awaited feature is now available in Gmail. This time, Google has done a fantastic job by integrating Indic Transliteration with Gmail.

[caption id="attachment_238" align="alignnone" width="454" caption="Compose Email in Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil"][/caption]

Here is a screenshot of the new feature. You can just click on the button to enable composing in local language and start typing. You can switch back to English by clicking the button again.

Update: Here is the entry from official gmail blog.

Why Internet Access Is Expensive In India?

2009-03-09T01:04:00.000+05:30

Most of us would have thought of this at least once. In this post, I will try to explain the reasons for expensive Internet access in India. I have tried to make this article very simple to understand. The broad technical details are far from what can be explained in this article.

The reason is connected with the beginning and development of Internet itself. Internet was started as a Defense Project in USA. As with any new technology, Internet gained popularity in US and was finally opened to commercial interests. When people realized the advantage of the new system, it became more popular, especially email. Again, most of the operations were based out of US, Canada and UK.

This has lead to establishment of more Internet based companies and websites in later years, with most of them based out of US. In the mid and late 1990's it gained popularity all over the world and different countries have became a part of this big network either through some government agency or though some commercial establishments.

The cost factor comes from the fact that most of the servers are based out ofÂ United States or United Kingdom. To get a connectivity to US and get access to the network, Internet Service Providers has to do two things:

Get a physical link from India to US and UK.

Handover the traffic to an upstream provider.

Since most of the servers are based out of US, the physical links to US will be of higher capacity. There are many web servers in UK also. UK acts as a gateway to Europe also. At this point of time, the capacity from India to US would be of the order of 10G. Again, there are two paths to reach US - one via Pacific and other via Atlantic. Both the capacities will be of the order of 10G. Also there would be connectivity from India to UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. This connectivity is very expensive. There are some segments where there is bandwidth constraint also. So again the prices would go up.

What will happen to the traffic once it reaches US or UK? We have to handover the traffic to someone who has the connectivity to the server which is being accessed. Again, this access is not free. ISPs have to pay their US counterparts for carrying traffic in their network. Such an agreement is called a Transit Agreement. At some point of time, if both the parties feel that both of them can gain from each others traffic, the Transit agreement may change to a Peering agreement, which would be free - only port charges are applicable.

There are some government regulations also. Internet exchanges are a way of exchanging local traffic locally. Think of a situation where provider A and provider B do not have a direct connection India. For A to reach B's network, the traffic should be carried to US or UK or some other handover location and then come back to India. That is not a good thing for end users as they will feel that the connections to the other network is very slow. To avoid such a situation, we have a regulatory authority in India called NIXI(national Internet Exchange of India). All the service providers in India has to have peering in NIXI to exchange the local traffic.

Again, owing to the fact that most of the servers are located in US, the Internet access would continue to be expensive. I personally do not think that the prices would fall be low a certain level. Again, since Americans do not have to carry much of their Internet traffic all over the world, their Internet Access would be cheaper. Most of the International Internet links will have more political interests, than the commercial ones.

If you would like to hear more about this or some related subjects, do let me know. I will continue more on this and related topics.

Guide - Replying to emails

2007-11-06T04:46:00.000+05:30

In a corporate environment, you will get a lot of mails. Some of these mails will be having a lot of people in Cc and To. One thing I have noticed is that there is a tendency for people to press "Reply To All" button always. When I also came to the corporate world, I used to do the same thing, until my boss corrected me. That was a point when I gave a thought about that. Since then I have been watching a lot of such mails. I have seen many senior people also indulging in this kind of chain mailing. Later when I spoke to people about this, many of them said that this kind of chain mailing happens in each and every company.

Basically you should not put so many people in Cc and To. Address to the person you want to communicate. Think of someone who is getting around hundreds of genuine mails a day, and one chain mail can contribute a significant amount to that. If you find that mail continues for a long time than expected, it is better to call up the concerned party and talk to him directly. This will certainly help.

Another question is what you can do if you are also in the loop? If you need to reply to the mail, only keep the concerned parties only in the loop. This way, even if someone gives a "Reply To All" to your mail, it will make sure that chain mails don't flow again.