Blog posts tagged "geek" – Posts 1..5 of 23 posts found:

For more than a decade, I've run my own BIND-based DNS server, using FreeDNS for a free secondary DNS service. There has been quite some to do about a large-scale DDoS attack perpetrated against Spamhaus recently. One significant aspect of this attack was that the DDoS used so-called DNS amplification. This makes use of misconfigured DNS servers ("open recursors") to greatly increase the amount of traffic sent to a victim. One fellow server administrator wrote about this and it made me wonder about being an open resolver. Fortunately, my own server was properly configured and could not be used as an accessory in such an attack, but what if it had been? That's where CloudFlare comes in.

This weekend, I posted a brainteaser, promising to pay $100 to whomever solved it. Although the decoding algorithm has not yet been discovered, Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, who found my puzzle through Reddit, did manage to figure out what the second landmark was. He generously suggested that I donate the prize money to Doctors Without Borders. That is an excellent destination for the money, so I was only too happy to oblige:

For years I've had an idea in my head about a way to hide some information in a bunch of numbers. I actually got around to coding an implementation and figured I'd run a competition. The first person who figures out what the famous landmark is described by the second set of numbers below and posts the correct answer in the comments wins $100.

With some free time and a spare laptop on my hands, I figured I'd try out running a Linux desktop installation once more. Although I've used Linux on servers for more than a decade, all of my regular desktop machines have been Windows and Mac OS. Now, most people running Linux on the desktop seem to be using Ubuntu. I fully intend to give that a try later on, but for now I went with the distro I've been most familiar with for the past 12 years, which is openSUSE. Although I've been able to set things up to the point where it's viable as a proper workstation for me, I'm sorry to say the experience fluctuated between pleasant and dreadful. Here's some of the stuff I encountered and what I did to get things to a usable state.

It's not something many people will notice, as most of the difficult bits will have to be handled by the ISPs, but it's going to get more and more important for web developers and hosting providers to allow IPv6 access to their services. We've effectively run out of IPv4 addresses. As more and more people bring more and more devices online every day the common technique to share IPv4 addresses, NAT, even carrier-grade NAT which share a single IPv4 address among a large part of a provider's customer base, is not a sustainable solution. In the future, there will be people who can access the internet solely through IPv6. At first, it will be in the areas with the fastest-growing number of people online, particularly Asia. If you want those people to be able to access your website and services, make sure your servers respond to IPv6 traffic.