Guennadi M

Here is an interesting article on how Wikipedia blocked the whole nation of Qatar because someone spammed. Apparently the whole country is NAT’ed - appearing to the whole world as having one IP address.

…that resulted in the accidental blocking of the entire nation because Qatar’s sole telecom, Q-Tel, funnels all Internet traffic through that single address, a practice that allows the country to monitor and censor its users, said David Gerard, Wikipedia’s London-based spokesman…

Here is a try IP space conservation! It makes it easy to sensor content as well!

ADSL2, ADSL2+ - it’s here. The dial-up days are over. Fast internet ADSL 2 is here to stay. But how will Australian networks cope with such high speed now accessible to users? The internet bandwidth in Australia is probably one of the most expensive in the world - and something needs to happen to for us to catch up the rest of the world.

A few noticeable points that can be seen already:

• With some ISPs, the users on ADSL 2 plans experience slow speeds (it kind of doesn’t make sense, does it?). The one that made a lot of noise lately, is Amnet. Here is an article on Whirlpool.
• Australian transit bandwidth providers are not able to offer high enough speeds to cater for the demand. Think for yourself - it’ll only take 50 users, downloading at 20Mbps each at the same time to fill in a 1Gbps pipe. Australian ISPs still count bandwith in MBs, whereas everywhere in the world it’s mostly GBs!
• Some ISPs use hardware that is not able to support even high local traffic. They are now shaping P2P traffic - e.g., Exetel.
• Peering traffic (WAIX, PIPE etc) is no longer free. Most ISPs offered it free/un-shaped/un-counted before. Not anymore.

So, where is it all going to? What’s the point of having ADSL 2 if you can download less and often at a slower speed than before? It’ll be interesting to see what happens when more ISPs go ADSL2+. Will it be the end of the Internet in Australia?

First it was RedHat, now it’s mySQL. It’s no longer free. If you want updates, you now need to pay.

Here is a quote from Kaj Arnö’s blog (mySQL):

Keeping older versions alive for a long time is appreciated by our community and our customers alike. However, we are no longer in a position to maintain our older versions without remuneration. This means that those wishing to enjoy MySQL’s support in their usage of MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.0 need to plan for their future, as our support of these releases will be limited to those covered by a MySQL Network subscription, starting in 1 Aug 2006 (for MySQL 3.23) and 1 Oct 2006 (for MySQL 4.0).

The good news is that v. 4.1.x is still free until EOL.

Here is another link covering the story.

Keeping Fast Hit servers up to date with the latest hotfixes sometimes creates more problems. There’s been a few reports that after the latest update, people get errors connecting to their mySQL databases. The exact error message is

Error Executing Database Query.
Communication link failure: Unknown command

Digging a bit deeper into the issue we found that Connector J drivers that come with CFMX 7 have known bugs/issues relating to the use of certain MySQL syntax.

A solution is (as outlined in this CF TechNote) to download and use the latest JDBC drivers for DSN connections with mySQL databases. If you’re with Fast Hit and experiencing similar difficulties, just contact support.

One of the sites at FAST.hit got a huge amount of traffic last night. More, probably, that this site would do in 3 months. Having done some guessing work and checking the logs, we noticed that a lot of references to the user agent http://pandora.nla.gov.au/crawl.html. We followed the link, and, funny enough, found a “Notice to Webmasters”. This notice basically says: “In August and September 2006 the National Library of Australia is undertaking a comprehensive crawl and harvest of the Australian web domain using the services of the Internet Archive…”

They crawl your site and not just index your pages, but actually copy everything for “archiving purposes”.

Hello…???

• has anyone heard about privacy laws?
• Who is going to pay for all that traffic?
• Will the site owners be ever notified about this?
• How do they determine which site is Australian and which is not (based on IP/ DNS/ Domain)?

Here is a snapshot of that page:

Comments are welcome.

I am running Windows XP x64 at home and looking for a wifi USB adapter that would have drives for this it. I searched google over and over and couldn’t find anything that supports 64-bit windows. There are some old posts suggesting that this could work, but no, I didn’t have any luck so far. It’s strange that this is the case. I’d expect the new 64-bit technology to be more widely accepted and supported by now… but then again… do you remember when 32-bit windows came out?