A new era for the Internet Domain Name Space!

Over the last few months ICANN held the dialogues about provisioning new gTLD’s (generic Top-Level Domains) in any language or script. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) finally voted overwhelmingly this week to allow a new array of Internet domain suffixes.

Who is ICANN? What did they do?

ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

Right now, there are a limited number – 22, to be precise – of what’s called “generic Top-level Domains.” The most familiar ones are “.com”, “.org”, “.edu”, “.info”, and “.net.”

Under the new rule, people will be able to apply to ICANN to register most any word, in any language, as their domain suffix.

You ask whether you can set up your own domain? That depends. Are you rich? Are you an established corporation or government? If the answer to any of the above is “no,” then probably not.

ICANN will be charging at least $185,000 per domain application (more in the case of buyers who want one all to themselves). So it seems pretty clear that this will largely be for corporations, and maybe some governments.

It also will cost money to set up and maintain the domain, so something like .google or .ibm will a lot more likely to happen than, say, .cokesucks.

ICANN will accept initial applications between Jan. 12 and April 12 of next year, says we should start seeing new domains in July 2012.

What does it mean for us?

For retailers and others, the advantage is branding. Having your own domain could lend a sense of legitimacy on the web. Because of the difficulty of getting an application through ICANN’s process, a personalized domain ending will be an authenticity watermark of sorts.

For the common Web user, the answer is a little hazier.

The negative impacts of this fiasco on ordinary consumers and Internet users will ultimately become all too clear, as the resulting effects of massively increased cybersquatting, spammers, and phishing.

Applicant Guidebook
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/dag-en.htm

IPv4.1: A worthy alternative for IPv6?

Our engineers of yesteryear low-balled the popularity and the growth of the Internet when they schematized Internet Protocol (IPv4) Addresses. Today, that leaves us counting diminutive IPv4 addresses with IANA completing the assignment of last few blocks from the available pool.

IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) soon realized that even more than a 4 billion IPv4 addresses were not enough; they were able to delay the exhaustion with short-term solutions like NAT (Network Address Translation) and CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) techniques.

IETF also came up with a permanent(?) solution in the form of IPv6, a successor to IPv4.

On January 31 of 2011, IANA allocated the last two /8 address blocks to the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) of Asia-Pacific (APNIC), thus marking the end of available IPv4 addresses.

Migrating to IPv6

The global migration to IPv6 has been slow coming with many organizations around the world just beginning to look at IPv6. And they’re finding it often to be messy confronting the mediocre application support, security issues, and really long addresses that are hard to crunch.

This again got the IETF thinking about an alternative to the new protocol. Realizing that the primary goal of IPv6 was to provide an increased address space, was an entirely new protocol really necessary? Still in its infancy, work is underway on a new IETF draft which ditches IPv6 altogether in favor of a simple extension to its predecessor: IPv4.1.

The initiative is being spearheaded by Joe Kisanyu (Often punned as ‘Joke is on you’), who explains his team’s motivation quite simply:

  “We’ve been going back and forth about how to implement IPv6 for years now, and frankly we just haven’t been getting anywhere. So my team and I sat down and said, let’s start from scratch and see if we can’t do better this time around. After a few days, there was this epiphany: We can just add an octet to a regular IPv4 address!“

This revelation quickly led to the development of IPv4.1, which is nearly identical in operation to IPv4 but features a slightly longer 40-bit address. The header specification below, adapted from the original, RFC 791, should look familiar.

(Proposed) IPv4.1 Header Format

   0                   1                   2                   3
   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |Version|  IHL  |Type of Service|          Total Length         |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |         Identification        |Flags|      Fragment Offset    |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |  Time to Live |    Protocol   |         Header Checksum       |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                               Source Address                                  |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                             Destination Address                               |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                    Options                    |    Padding    |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

The solution here is pretty clever: an IPv4.1 has five octets instead of four.

Example: 208.66.40.236.89. Similarly, subnet masks can now range from 0 to 40 bits in length, e.g. 208.66.40.236.89/39 for a point-to-point link. And backward-compatibility is built in! Legacy IPv4 addresses are expressed with the first octet set to zero, e.g. 0.192.168.0.1.  DNS records for IPv4.1 addresses are to be designated as “B” records (successive to IPv4 “A” records).

Is the extension really worth it?

IPv4.1 seems to be such an ideal solution it is embarrassing that it hadn’t been considered earlier. And for those who question whether 2⁴⁰ (2 to the Power 40) address will be sufficient, Joe says, “While we’re sure 40 bits is more than enough address space for the foreseeable future, we can always add another octet or two down the road and upgrade to IPv4.2.”

The short story of PING

If you use the ping utility, and if you must know,

Ping is a little thousand-line hack written by Michael J. Muuss which practically everyone among the technical hoi polloi utilizes.

Michael John Muuss, Died on 20 November 2000 in a car accident, was knowledgeable about his subject and will be missed. He was always confounded at the popularity of his PING program, which he wrote in a surprisingly short time (overnight), and always said he would have spent more time on it had he known how popular it would become.

Mike Muuss coded up the PING program on an evening of December 1983, inspired by another engineer David L Mills. Dr Mills’ remarks during a meeting in Norway about his work on ‘Fuzzball LSI-11′ systems to measure path latency using timed ICMP Echo packets, instigated Mike to create ping.

Once when Mike encountered an awry campus network, he recalled Dr.Mills’ comments and quickly coded the first PING program (including kernel support for it on BSD UNIX). But the faulty network hardware was found and fixed before he could launch his first “ping” packet.

Berkeley Foundation eagerly took back his kernel modifications and the PING source code, and it’s been a standard part of Berkeley UNIX ever since. As it was free, it has been ported to many systems since then.

In 1993, ten years after he wrote PING, the USENIX association presented Mike Muuss with Lifetime Achievement Award.

According to Mike Muuss, PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it’s a sonar analogy. However, he also said that he heard second-hand that David Mills offered this expansion of the name, so perhaps they’re both right.

Want to see the source code? Download it from my 4shared folder here: PING.shar

Protocol Numbers

Decimal	Keyword	Protocol
0	HOPOPT	IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Option
1	ICMP	Internet Control Message
2	IGMP	Internet Group Management
3	GGP	Gateway-to-Gateway
4	IPv4	IPv4 encapsulation
5	ST	Stream
6	TCP	Transmission Control
7	CBT	CBT
8	EGP	Exterior Gateway Protocol
9	IGP	any private interior gateway
10	BBN-RCC-MON	BBN RCC Monitoring
11	NVP-II	Network Voice Protocol
12	PUP	PUP
13	ARGUS	ARGUS
14	EMCON	EMCON
15	XNET	Cross Net Debugger
16	CHAOS	Chaos
17	UDP	User Datagram
18	MUX	Multiplexing
19	DCN-MEAS	DCN Measurement Subsystems
20	HMP	Host Monitoring
21	PRM	Packet Radio Measurement
22	XNS-IDP	XEROX NS IDP
23	TRUNK-1	Trunk-1
24	TRUNK-2	Trunk-2
25	LEAF-1	Leaf-1
26	LEAF-2	Leaf-2
27	RDP	Reliable Data Protocol
28	IRTP	Internet Reliable Transaction
29	ISO-TP4	ISO Transport Protocol Class 4
30	NETBLT	Bulk Data Transfer Protocol
31	MFE-NSP	MFE Network Services Protocol
32	MERIT-INP	MERIT Internodal Protocol
33	DCCP	Datagram Congestion Control Protocol
34	3PC	Third Party Connect Protocol
35	IDPR	Inter-Domain Policy Routing Protocol
36	XTP	XTP
37	DDP	Datagram Delivery Protocol
38	IDPR-CMTP	IDPR Control Message Transport Proto
39	TP++	TP++ Transport Protocol
40	IL	IL Transport Protocol
41	IPv6	IPv6 encapsulation
42	SDRP	Source Demand Routing Protocol
43	IPv6-Route	Routing Header for IPv6
44	IPv6-Frag	Fragment Header for IPv6
45	IDRP	Inter-Domain Routing Protocol
46	RSVP	Reservation Protocol
47	GRE	General Routing Encapsulation
48	DSR	Dynamic Source Routing Protocol
49	BNA	BNA
50	ESP	Encap Security Payload
51	AH	Authentication Header
52	I-NLSP	Integrated Net Layer Security  TUBA
53	SWIPE	IP with Encryption
54	NARP	NBMA Address Resolution Protocol
55	MOBILE	IP Mobility
56	TLSP	Transport Layer Security Protocol
57	SKIP	SKIP
58	IPv6-ICMP	ICMP for IPv6
59	IPv6-NoNxt	No Next Header for IPv6
60	IPv6-Opts	Destination Options for IPv6
61		any host internal protocol
62	CFTP	CFTP
63		any local network
64	SAT-EXPAK	SATNET and Backroom EXPAK
65	KRYPTOLAN	Kryptolan
66	RVD	MIT Remote Virtual Disk Protocol
67	IPPC	Internet Pluribus Packet Core
68		any distributed file system
69	SAT-MON	SATNET Monitoring
70	VISA	VISA Protocol
71	IPCV	Internet Packet Core Utility
72	CPNX	Computer Protocol Network Executive
73	CPHB	Computer Protocol Heart Beat
74	WSN	Wang Span Network
75	PVP	Packet Video Protocol
76	BR-SAT-MON	Backroom SATNET Monitoring
77	SUN-ND	SUN ND PROTOCOL-Temporary
78	WB-MON	WIDEBAND Monitoring
79	WB-EXPAK	WIDEBAND EXPAK
80	ISO-IP	ISO Internet Protocol
81	VMTP	VMTP
82	SECURE-VMTP	SECURE-VMTP
83	VINES	VINES
84	TTP	TTP
85	NSFNET-IGP	NSFNET-IGP
86	DGP	Dissimilar Gateway Protocol
87	TCF	TCF
88	EIGRP	EIGRP
89	OSPFIGP	OSPFIGP
90	Sprite-RPC	Sprite RPC Protocol
91	LARP	Locus Address Resolution Protocol
92	MTP	Multicast Transport Protocol
93	AX.25	AX.25 Frames
94	IPIP	IP-within-IP Encapsulation Protocol
95	MICP	Mobile Internetworking Control Pro.
96	SCC-SP	Semaphore Communications Sec. Pro.
97	ETHERIP	Ethernet-within-IP Encapsulation
98	ENCAP	Encapsulation Header
99		any private encryption scheme
100	GMTP	GMTP
101	IFMP	Ipsilon Flow Management Protocol
102	PNNI	PNNI over IP
103	PIM	Protocol Independent Multicast
104	ARIS	ARIS
105	SCPS	SCPS
106	QNX	QNX
107	A/N	Active Networks
108	IPComp	IP Payload Compression Protocol
109	SNP	Sitara Networks Protocol
110	Compaq-Peer	Compaq Peer Protocol
111	IPX-in-IP	IPX in IP
112	VRRP	Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol
113	PGM	PGM Reliable Transport Protocol
114		any 0-hop protocol
115	L2TP	Layer Two Tunneling Protocol
116	DDX	D-II Data Exchange (DDX)
117	IATP	Interactive Agent Transfer Protocol
118	STP	Schedule Transfer Protocol
119	SRP	SpectraLink Radio Protocol
120	UTI	UTI
121	SMP	Simple Message Protocol
122	SM	SM
123	PTP	Performance Transparency Protocol
124	ISIS over IPv4
125	FIRE
126	CRTP	Combat Radio Transport Protocol
127	CRUDP	Combat Radio User Datagram
128	SSCOPMCE
129	IPLT
130	SPS	Secure Packet Shield
131	PIPE	Private IP Encapsulation within IP
132	SCTP	Stream Control Transmission Protocol
133	FC	Fibre Channel
134	RSVP-E2E-IGNORE
135	Mobility Header
136	UDPLite
137	MPLS-in-IP
138	manet	MANET Protocols
139	HIP	Host Identity Protocol
140	Shim6	Shim6 Protocol
141	WESP	Wrapped Encapsulating Security Payload
142	ROHC	Robust Header Compression
253		Use for experimentation and testing
254		Use for experimentation and testing
255	Reserved

Wireless Problem on Ubuntu 10.10

Wireless connectivity problem after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10. – Simple Fix

If you look at /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state,  you’ll notice WirelessEnabled=false. Change the value to true:
gedit /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state and reboot.

If that didn’t work,issue command “rfkill unblock all“.

If this doesn’t do it then it’s a problem with your wl drivers.(rule out any hardware problems before this). Go to System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers and find/activate the appropriate driver for use.