Technical

IPv6 Ready

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2020Media has been working on IPv6 (the next generation internet numbering system) for some time but the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses (IP addresses like 212.124.194.98) is finally gathering some press attention. If you look at this blog page today, January 31st 2011, the counter on the right is showing 1 day to go until there are no more blocks of IPv4 addresses in the IANA bank. If you’re looking at this page later, here’s what it looked like on this historic day:

1 day to go

Keep Calm and Carry On

Of course, the internet is not going to stop working. ISPs and content providers have been working on upgrading their systems to work with the new IPv6 addresses for some time. To draw attention to this, June 8, 2011 is World IPv6 Day – an event organized by the Internet Society and several large content providers to test public IPv6 deployment.

2020Media is a IPv6 capable provider and will be taking part in World IPv6 Day. We also sponsor and support the IPv6Matrix project – an über-cool look at the reality of IPv6 deployment today.

There is one part of the internet lagging behind on IPv6, and that is access – its is almost impossible to purchase an off-the-shelf broadband modem at the moment that supports IPv6. We hope that 2011 will see the release of low cost, easily configurable broadband boxes that allows the average small business and home user to connect via native IPv6.

Bye Bye Ipv4 Ceremony

NRO Handover Ceremony of last IPv4 Addresses

On Thursday, 3 February 2011, the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a ceremony in Miami, Florida to formally handover the last blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).  This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

“Billions of people world wide use the Internet for everything from sending tweets to paying bills. The transition to IPv6 from IPv4 represents an opportunity for even more innovative applications without the fear of running out of essential Internet IP addresses,” said Vice President of IANA Elise Gerich.

Our depletion counter on the right of this page, now shows how the final blocks are being distributed by the individual regional registries.

2020Media's 4 star IPv6 rating
Opinion

Tomcat 7 Hosting

Apache Tomcat 7
Tomcat 7 Hosting from 2020Media

Work started on Tomcat version 7 in Jan 2009, and almost 2 years to the day, the stable release of Tomcat 7 has been announced.

2020Media is proud to announce it’s support for the new Tomcat version on both Java Premium and Java Dedicated hosting packages. The packages offer some of the most powerful and most-asked for features of any hosting services in the world – complete control over Tomcat via SSH. Live logs, Dedicated MySQL servers, and of course, our unsurpassed knowledge and expertise in Tomcat web hosting.

Tomcat 7 Features

Exciting new features in our Tomcat 7 Hosting plans include:

  • Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 specification support
  • Hugely improved memory leak prevention and detection
  • Simplified embedding. Utilizing a new API, developers only need a few lines of code to get Tomcat running within their applications.
  • Improved assistance in stability, performance, and application cleanup
  • Logging: Tomcat 7 includes two improvements to its logging system: a single line log formatter to make log files easier to read and an asynchronous file handler.
  • Servlet 3.0’s asynchronous support has been fully implemented in Tomcat 7.

Upgrading

Opinion amongst Tomcat experts is that there are no significant obstacle to upgrading applications (as opposed to re-writing applications). See http://tomcat.apache.org/migration.html for help when you start this process and also see Mark Thomas’s blog for some additional info.

We’ve heard that after upgrade applications are at least as stable and even just a touch faster.

Start Using Tomcat 7 Today

Setup a Tomcat 7 hosting account with 2020Media and you could be enjoying the benefits of the latest release today. Or Contact Us to find out more about what we offer.

Opinion

Joomla User Group January

With the release of Joomla 1.6 just announced the question on everyone’s lips was: “Should I upgrade?”. After some discussion the group decided that at this point, an upgrade should not be done to an existing site. Only if a new site was being built should Joomla 1.6 be used.

Joomla 1.5 will be fully supported for at least 1 year, so there is time for the new release to settle in, and perhaps easy upgrade tools will be developed.
Some of the developers at the meeting also said they’d not be using Joomla 1.6 just yet as it was likely to contain some bugs and they’d wait for Joomla 1.6.4 (or thereabouts) to be released.

The discussion on Joomla 1.6 moved on to Molajo, which is a package of Joomla components plus some coding changes over the standard Joomla. Molajo was set up fairly recently by some of the people who have had a lot of involvment in Joomla.  It remains to be seen whether it will develop into a true fork of Joomla, or if the features tried out and testing in Molajo will make their way back to the core. Check out Nooku framework too.

The main presentation described how to get started with creating a new Joomla template. Melvyn Phillips showed how to use an off-the-shelf CSS framework to quickly put together a grid based site. Given the complexity of Joomla, creating a new template may seem offputting to many. Melvyn showed us how to create a basic 3 column template from scratch in just 5 minutes.

2020Media was recently asked to take over hosting of a legacy Joomla 1.0 website and we completed the migration successfully this week. The customers website had been broken because their host upgraded their server to a new version of PHP without telling them. At 2020Media we never do this.

For any enquiries about Joomla 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.0, please contact us.

Opinion

2011 Look Ahead

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Predictions for 2011

What will the year 2011 bring in the hosting and domain name world? Here are some predictions for the next 12 months.

  • Joomla 1.6 will be released. Version 1.5 of the free content mangement system was released in 2006 and it looks like finally a new release is imminent.
  • Tomcat 7 will come out of beta. Tomcat 7 promises Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 implementation, plus a focus on improved security.
  • A large number of new domain name extensions will get the go ahead at ICANN, although .xxx may not.
  • Drupal 7 will be the most popular release of this already very successful content management system.
  • Junk e-mail (SPAM) will continue to blight the Inboxs of email users. WebSense reports 8 of 10 messages are Spam. Messaging between individuals via non-email methods such as Facebook will rise. Users will turn to service providers for server-side mailbox filtering.
  • New internet infrastructure advances such as DNSSEC and IPv6 will go onto business managers “must-have” list when procuring new services.

These are just a few of the changes we’ll probably see in the coming year. Virtualisation and Cloud computing will continue to influence every aspect of computing and the number of people using the internet consciously and unconsciously will continue to rise. 2011 could see the number of internet connected devices (“the Internet of things”) exceed the world population for the first time [1],[2].

Technical

Wikileaks

Julian Assange

This week has seen continued drama surrounding the website WikiLeaks and it’s head Julian Assange. Behind the scenes, a cyber war is being fought by opponents and defenders of the site.

Various providers of services to WikiLeaks, including hosting companies, dns providers, payment gateways and others have withdrawn service over the last 2 weeks. This action prompted a furious backlash against their websites by angry supporters of WikiLeaks.

Most providers who withdrew services cited breaches of their terms and conditions in one way or another – some technical, some not. Paypal said “…our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.” Others were subject to denial of service attacks. Few, if any, have stated their action was as a response to US governement pressure.

As quickly as providers have halted services, website mirrors and new domain names have sprung up around the world. Meanwhile supporters of the site have set up retaliatory attacks on providers who withdrew services. Mastercard and Visa have both seen outages on their website in the last few days. One such group , Operation Payback, even advocates a mass faxing campaign to tie up communications at companies such as Amazon, MasterCard, Moneybookers, PayPal, Visa and Tableau Software.

For web hosts, it’s time to take a good look at the terms and conditions of service. French host OVH is all over the news this week because of its decision to request a judicial review of its responsibility associated with removing WikiLeaks from its servers, and to continue hosting the site until that review is complete. A survey by WHIR of hosters makes interesting reading – hosts were split 50/50 on whether they would host WikiLeaks at all.

Monitoring website Netcraft has real-time performance graphs for all the main players at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/wikileaks

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