Technical

IPv6 Day – the aftermath

Graph of website traffic to 2020Media on IPv6 day
We got some extra traffic to our site

As we reported in an earlier post, 2020Media took part in World IPv6 Day, which took place on 8th June 2011. For 24 hours (or more) major websites around the world turned on IPv6 access to test how well this technology actually worked in practice.

Organised by the Internet Society, the project was intended to raise awareness about the need to start the global transition to IPv6 and to enable participants to gather data about potential glitches

2020Media’s website and blog were reachable over IPv6 (in addition to IPv4 of course), and we saw an increase in our normal website visitors on the day. We had no reported problems and our servers coped without any errors, so we consider the day a success.

Not so the boffins at Nominet, who were hosting one of the probes monitoring UK connectivity. For the early part of the day, routing problems there made UK sites, including the BBC look patchy.

ISOC measurements
ISOC measurements

One good thing about IPv6 day was that where there were any kind of routing problem, because everybody was watching, those problems were resolved fast.

Continue reading IPv6 Day – the aftermath →

Tips and Tricks

Spell it out with IPv6

Calculator showing b00b7e55Today is World IPv6 day –  a day for websites around the world to test their IPv6 readiness. One unexpected consequence is that IPv6 address are hex – and therefore contain the letters a-f. This hasn’t been lost on the network boffins at the big sites that are taking part in todays experiment.

  • 2020Media has gone for the simple: [2a00:19e8:20:20::20]

SysAdmins everywhere will enjoy inserting their favourite beverage into addresses: :c0:ffee

For more tips on spelling in IPv6, see Pingdom

And Finally…

Lancaster University Network Services have gone for the schoolboy favourite: [2a01:8900:0:1::b00b:1e5]

Technical

Cricket Liu at the IOD

Institute of Directors2020Media staff  attended a talk by DNS guru Cricket Liu at the prestigious Institute of Directors today.

Cricket Liu is known as the co-author of the BIND DNS books and today gave a talk on a variety of IPv6 topics. You can view the webcast here for a limited time.

2011 is the year that IPv6 really matters. The Asia-Pacific region has now run out of IPv4 addresses and it’s very likely the European/Russian/MiddleEast area will run out before the end of 2011. Even if you do not need to deploy it immediately, you should begin planning for IPv6, including making sure your infrastructure and your ISP can support it.

Read more about IPv6 at our IPv6 day page and our IPv6 deployment plan

Technical

Updating Joomla 1.6

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Regular users of Joomla! will have got used to patching their installation with FTP or on the command line. You may not be aware but the new versions of Joomla!, 1.6 and beyond, have built in updating. Here’s a very quick guide to updating Joomla! 1.6  yourself.

1. Login to your Joomla! administrator area ( www.domainname.com/administrator/ )
2. Go to Extensions > Extension Manager > And click on “Update”
3. Click on “Find Updates” in the top right and Joomla will automatically find any potential updates available to you.
4. If you see that Joomla is now listed, you should check the box next to “Joomla” and click “Update”.
5. Joomla will automatically update you to the latest version.

Find Updates
Find Updates

Notes: Joomla does not check automatically – administrators need to run the check from the control panel.

The “Find Updates” button is in the top right – the menu area that’s hardly ever used in Joomla and often missed.

With Joomla 1.7 about to be released, developers are wondering how many more updates of 1.6 there will be.

2020Media will be very happy to advise and help with any software update including making complete backups for you.

More information on our Joomla hosting can be found at www.2020media.com/joomla.

Opinion

Control your own Blog

Blogger Status message
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Rather than rely on a massive service like Blogger or WordPress.com, if you host your blog independently you gain control over your site, tech support you can actually speak to you and access to a huge amount of extra features that’ll make your blog stand out from the crowd.

Blog hosting from 2020Media can be added to any existing hosting plan (sometimes at absolutely no cost), or setup as a standalone service. With hosting plans starting at just £45+vat/year (that’s £3.75/month – less than a pint!) it’s very easy to start getting the benefits of an indepedent blog. We offer free installation and setup too.

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