Working man's tale

Working man's tale

: cananian; June 15th, 2007

Today I finish my first week of my new job at One Laptop Per Child. It's true, you can get paid for writing free software (and saving the world) -- who'd have thunk?

At the moment, I'm working on IPv6 networking and Linux kernel support for autoconfiguration.

Helpful Wikipedia articles to explain some of the above: OLPC, IPv6.

Tags: jobs, olpc

7 comments — :

( 7 comments — Leave a comment )

free_fonts

2007-06-18 12:03 pm (UTC)

One minor problem is that it's difficult for a human mind to easily commit an IPv6 address to memory. Whereas an IPv4 address is written such as 127.0.0.1, an IPv6 address uses looks like this: 2001:fecd:ba23:cd1f:dcb1:1010:9234:4088 :-)

cananian

2007-06-18 01:38 pm (UTC)

That's true, but when was the last time your mother entered an IPv4 address? DNS is the solution to this. Most mere mortals don't even know what an IPv4 address is, and they won't care if the IPv6 address is longer. Network techs may grumble, but the autoconfiguration of IPv6 should itself save them enough angst to make the whole deal a wash (if not an improvement).

gregbo

2007-11-03 09:16 pm (UTC)

There was actually a thread on the IETF discussion list awhile back in which a lot of use of IPv4 dotted quad addresses was given as examples of the pain of renumbering. One reason DNS isn't used in these cases is because connectivity to the resources at these addresses needs to work regardless of whether DNS is available. Another reason is because filtering must be done on the addresses because it takes too long to do DNS lookups.

BTW, ipv6.org doesn't resolve to v4 or v6 addresses, but www.ipv6.org does.

Greetings from Bavaria

pcullen

2007-06-22 03:42 pm (UTC)

Hi There

We are a small software company based in Bavaria, Germany, and make access control software for WiFi networks, based in Linux. My gut feel tells me that our software might be useful for the School Server, and I am trying to find someone to confirm this with.

Could you help me out by pointing me in the right direction ?

Best regards

Paul Cullen

P.S. here is a link to an article I published recently, describing what we are up to.

http://www.garderos.com/publications/WiFi_Connection_Sharing.pdf