The imminent end of the Internet as we know it approaches – our IPv4 addresses are running out fast. Less than 10% of the original 4 billion remain. Internet service providers will have to ration their stocks of existing address blocks and growth will become more difficult.
The solution? IPv6 addresses are plentiful and easy to obtain. The problem is that the transition is already years behind of schedule.
Having completed internal testing and analysis, we’re delighted to announce that 2020Media will be rolling out IPv6 in 2010 to both hosting and broadband customers.
Problems still exist though: For instance, at the time of writing, there are NO consumer broadband modems that support IPv6. And of the top 500 websites (tracked by Alexa), only 1 supports Ipv6.
So even if you can get connected via IPv6, chances are you won’t be able to see any websites!
2020Media is participating in an ISOC project to map and present data on the takeup of IPv6 by the worlds leading websites and companies. More information on our plans.
If you’ve ever wondered how DNS works, and the technical explanations make your head spin, there’s a great new video on YouTube that cuts out the jargon and shows you what happens when you type a domain name into your browser, or send an email.
The video was produced by CENTR, a european trade association for all the european domain registries.
If you’re interested in getting more domain names, in different extensions, 2020Media is able to obtain them for you. Contact us, and we’ll be able to help.
Not sure if this qualifies as urban legend or not:
A phone call was received from a customer wanting to know why they were unable to log in to the computer system – The nice old lady was asked if she could go to the server to check it and nice as pie she said “oh no, we’ve been flooded, it’s under 3ft of water”
Last week we had the opportunity to catch up with our fellow network operators. Amongst the interesting topics discussed were IP address depletion updates – suggestions that broadband providers might NAT their entire customer bases!
As most users have NAT on their broadband already, this effectively means double NAT – if you rely on a fixed IP address to the outside world, this has major consequences.
We also enjoyed a humourous talk on care of fibre optic cables. Unfortunately the detailed warnings on only using specialised cleaning equipment costing thousands of dollars was left a little deflated after a quick wipe on someone’s jeans gave excellent results!
A Wiki is a collaborative website that can be edited by multiple people, usually without having to log in. The encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis. Ward Cunningham described a wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.
We’ve recently started a documentation project here at 2020Media. We started out using WordPress, but we’re now trying out a Wiki. WordPress has some advantages like alerting the administrator when comments are made to articles, but the Wiki approach allows us to quickly add new pages and content in the shortest possible time.
As we’re already familiar with Wikipedia (it’s so well ranked on Google it must make the SEO ‘experts’ green with envy) we decided to use the same free software, MediaWiki.
If you’re thinking about a new website, take a look at wikis. 2020Media have hosting plans that are perfect for any wiki website.
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The imminent end of the Internet as we know it approaches – our IPv4 addresses are running out fast. Less than 10% of the original 4 billion remain. Internet service providers will have to ration their stocks of existing address blocks and growth will become more difficult.
