Database firm reports rising demand for IPv6

An article from www.networkworld.com.

Pervasive Software, a Texas maker of embeddable database software, says it is seeing a rise in demand for IPv6 support from its Japanese customers.

Pervasive plans to provide full IPv6 functionality in Release 11 of its PSQL software, which is due out this summer.
IPv6 is the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power.

The Internet infrastructure is migrating to IPv6 because it is running out of IPv4 address space. The Regional Internet Registries said in April that only 8% of IPv4 address remain unallocated. The remaining IPv4 addresses are expected to run out by 2012.

Pervasive says the demand for IPv6 is coming from the Japanese government market, which has new guidelines requiring agencies to purchase hardware and software systems that support IPv6.

"Most of our customers that sell to the central government or local governments as well have been trying wherever possible to use hardware and software that supports IPv6," says Martin Sims, Pervasive PSQL product manager. "I don't think many places have gone so far as using IPv6, but it is very much considered when people purchase hardware and software. Our Japanese customers have been very much asking us to come up with a version of our database product that supports IPv6."

Pervasive said that the Japanese government mandate for IPv6 has done more to encourage IPv6 deployment than similar efforts by Asian carriers.

"When the government comes out with these guidelines, vendors don't want that checkbox to be unchecked," Sims says. "One of our largest customers sells systems for libraries. Even though this is a central government guideline, it is filtering down to the local libraries."

The dynamic in the Japanese market is of interest because the U.S. federal government is instituting a similar change to its Federal Acquisition Regulation requiring all IT acquisitions to support IPv6. The FAR change goes into effect in July.

The U.S. government already met a mandate to demonstrate IPv6 capability on its backbone networks as of June 2008. But federal agencies have made little progress since then in terms of deploying IPv6.

Pervasive executives say they have not yet received requests for IPv6 support from its U.S. customers, many of whom are independent software vendors that support the U.S. federal market.

"The Westerners…keep asking us: Why are you doing this? Why are you investing money to add IPv6 into the product? Why can't you do this other preferred feature?" says Gilbert Van Cutsem, general manager of the database division at Pervasive Software. "But we have to do this because of the Japanese government mandating this. And a fairly big chunk of our revenues are coming out of Japan. But the good news is that while we're doing this for Japan, Japan is a little bit ahead of the curve for the rest of the world. The issue will hit all of us, but that might not be until 2012."

Pervasive says its PSQL software will have full IPv6 functionality for its legacy Btrieve interface this summer and that its SQL relational interface will support IPv6 by year-end.

Van Cutsem says Pervasive has been working on IPv6 development for six months.

"I wouldn't call it trivial," Van Cutsem says, pointing out that PSQL supports three operating systems. "The idea was that we always have a single code base for these three platforms so that all of these products are totally identical and totally compatible. Fixing IPv6 is one thing, but fixing it in such a way that you can deploy it on three platforms in exactly the same way with exactly the same behavior makes it non-trivial."

Pervasive says it is ready for the upcoming FAR change requiring IPv6.

"We wouldn't be afraid of the U.S. government's requirement," Van Cutsem says. "Thanks to our Japanese customers, we will not have to scramble to support it."

GE Intelligent Offers Flexible, High Bandwidth Gigabit Ethernet Switch

The General Electric Company - is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in the State of New York. In 2009, Forbes ranked GE as the world's largest company. The company has 304,000 employees around the world.

Voip-Solutions - Ethernet as a technology completely dominates the enterprise environment and is rapidly entrenching itself in the residential market as a result of the widespread uptake of broadband services. To design the challenging application in telecommunication, industrial and military systems, GE Intelligent Platforms has introduced the NETernity CP921RC-30x 6U CompactPCI (News - Alert) 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch to satisfy large-scale, wholesale needs for high-speed Ethernet technology across the world. It is a fully managed Layer 2/3+ switch with support for ‘future-proof’ IPv6 switching and routing.

As part of GE Intelligent’s extensive Ethernet services portfolio, this vital new functionality is included in the form of Failover Groups, a feature that is part of GE’s OpenWare switch management environment.

FOG responds to o the need for very high availability networks. It is designed to support redundancy at different levels – redundant links across backplanes from nodes to switches, redundant switches, and redundant links to external networks. This gives fast, application-independent, failover capabilities, suitable for a wide range of network configurations, from the simple to the very complex.
This unique cost-effective unique combination of innovative hardware and software technologies delivers leading edge functionality, flexibility and availability to meet the increasing demand for international bandwidth in the global Ethernet services market.

Richard Spiesman, product manager at GE Intelligent Platforms (News - Alert) stated that as network traffic and dependency on the network increases, there is also an increased need for Ethernet switches that are high performance, high bandwidth and that offer the functionality necessary to deliver outstanding network uptime. He continued that this new addition to company’s extensive NETernity family of switches rises to the challenge and provides a sustainable competitive advantage for customers.
The CP921RC-30x is optionally available with two front panel 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports capable of supporting SFP+ and SFP transceivers (which can be copper or fiber) respectively for greater configuration flexibility. The OpenWare software environment, designed specifically for the NETernity range of switches, provides a substantially improved user experience for application development and support.

ISC got a new Website!

The Internet Systems Consortium or commonly know as ISC has got its new look! ISC is very well-known from its very reliable free Open Source products like the DNS Server BIND and the ISC DHCP Server.

Its new website is super cool now and very well-organized than before thus making it easy for you to navigate and download the latest versions of their products. You can choose from their Current Release versions, Beta Release or Development Release versions and Maintenance Releases.

FreeBSD 101: Creating a Bridge using FreeBSD

The reason why I came across with this application is that I want to sniff and examine packets lurking around the network. I could not use my switch since I only have an unmanageable switch so I cannot configure it to do port mirroring. I tried to look for hubs but could not find either. But I do have a machine that has multiple Network Interface Cards in it so I look for ways to configure these ports to broadcast frames/packets that it received from one port to all of the other ports so I can sniff any of the packets that enter in any of the ports.

I have done this before with the help of a friend but I cannot remember the exact details on how to do it. I'm not that type of guy who takes down notes for every new procedures/configurations I have done. So I spent some time googling around and finally found this link. I am going to summarize the procedures by posting a simple shell script that will create a bridge interface in FreeBSD.

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: createbridge.sh

# load the kernel loadable module
/sbin/kldload /boot/kernel/if_bridge.ko

# create a bridge interface
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 create

# add the network interfaces you want as member of the bridge
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 addm em0 addm em1 addm em2

# bring these interfaces up
/sbin/ifconfig em0 up
/sbin/ifconfig em1 up
/sbin/ifconfig em2 up

# then you can assign an ip address to your bridge interface if you want
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 inet 192.168.1.1/24

Save this script at /usr/local/etc/rc.d so that it will get executed during boot-up process. Then make the script executable and execute it:

# chmod 755 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/createbridge.sh
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/createbridge.sh

Just as there are many ways to kill a cat, there are also other ways to create a bridge interface in FreeBSD. One of which is to do it using rc.conf. But I think you still need to add "device if_bridge" into your kernel configuration /usr/src/sys/{arch}/conf/GENERIC so that it will be dynamically loaded by the kernel everytime you create a bridge interface.

The Physical Layer

The Physical layer in the OSI model is responsible for binary transmission. This involves electronic circuits, wires, connector, voltages and data rates or speed of transmission. One of the most commonly used device that belongs to this layer is the NIC (Network Interface Card). There are different NICs for different types of networking protocol. There are also different NICs for different types of networking media or wires. For laptops that do not have a built-in network interface card, a special device called PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) is used.

There are three things that you need to consider in selecting a NIC. Two of which is already mentioned, the type of Protocol your want to use in your network, the type of Media, and lastly the type of System Bus your computer have. It is called Bus because it is a collection of wires on the motherboard which carries data and timing signals from one part of a computer to another.

Types of Protocols you need to consider:

• Ethernet
• Token Ring
• FDDI

 

Types of Media:

• Twisted-pair
• Coaxial
• Wireless
• Fiber-optic

Type of System Bus:

• PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect
• ISA - Industry Standard Architecture

CCNA Exam tip:

This would possibly come out in the CCNA Exam. Situations that require NIC installation:

• Installation of a NIC on a PC that does not already have one
• Replacement of a malfunction or damaged NIC
• Upgrade from a 10Mbps NIC to a 10/100/1000Mbps NIC
• Change to a different type of NIC, such as wireless
• Installation of secondary, or backup, NIC for network security reasons

Another very common Physical Layer device is the Modem (Modulator - Demodulator). This device provides the computer with connectivity to a telephone line. It converts the data in digital format to analog format and vice versa.

CCNA Exam tip:

This would possibly come out in the CCNA Exam. The ping command is the command used to test network connectivity. It is a basic program that can verity whether the specified IP address exist in the network and is reachable. In checking IPv6 address, you may use the ping6 command. Going deeper inside the ping command, this command will send an ICMP/ICMPv6 ECHO_REQUEST packets to elicit an ICMP/ICMPv6 ECHO_REPLY from a network host/computer.

The basic ping command synopsys:
ping <ip address> - where <ip address> is the address of the host/computer that you want to test connectivity with.

ping 127.0.0.1 - this is an internal loopback test. If your TCP/IP network configuration configuration is working well, then you will get a reply from 127.0.0.1. If you want to try IPv6, its loopback address is ::1 which is a shortcut for 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001.

The OSI Model

In the beginning, when man discovered computer networks and its importance... there was chaos. Different brilliant people created their own brilliant ways of sending data electronically from one computer to another computer. As an end result, computers made from one vendor could not directly communicate with computers made from a different vendor for they do not follow the same communication protocols. A protocol is a set of rules or an agreement that determines the format and transmission of data.

With this the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) passed a standard to different vendors a set of standards that ensure greater compatibility and interoperability of various computer network devices.

This new standard is called the Open System Interconnection Model (or OSI Model or commonly known as the 7 OSI Layers).

The 7 OSI Layers:

1. Physical


2. Data Link


3. Network


4. Transport


5. Session


6. Presentation


7. Application

The benefits of the OSI Model are:

• It reduces complexity of the entire computer network design by slicing it into 7 different areas. You can then set your focus to one area instead of the whole computer network system.


• It standardizes interfaces. You can now clearly determine which type of interface you are going to adopt for your network so that all computers can commuication with each other without problems.


• It facilitates modular engineering for you can now focus your design to one particular layer at a time.


• While one particular vendor focuses only its development or enhancements to a particular layer, others can also enhance other layers. Thus accelerates the evolution of computer networks.


• Lastly, since it reduces the complexity of the design, it also simplifies the teaching and learning of computer networking.

FreeBSD 101 - Ports

This is probably one of the advantage of FreeBSD among other unix like operating systems. Installing or adding software packages is made easy through FreeBSD port collection. You can install a new software package in FreeBSD by going to the ports directory /usr/ports. If for example you want to install perl version 5.8, you go to /usr/ports/lang/perl5.8. Then type the following commands:

# make 
  ...
# make install
  ...

Or you type it in one line:

# make ; make install 

If you happen to install FreeBSD without the port collection, you can install it using portsnap. Follow these easy steps:

# mkdir /usr/ports
# pkg_add -r portsnap
# portsnap fetch
# portsnap extract

Your first step is to create first your ports directory if it does not exist yet, then you install portsnap, next is you download the ports collection and lastly, you install a new ports collection.

There are other ways to install FreeBSD port collection, first you can use sysinstall which is simpler to do than portsnap(oppsss!) or you can use cvsup method.