Angry Man Without Pants

Well, maybe not, but the resemblance is uncanny. And look what he’s writing with, dude!

Yes, I’m still alive. No, I’m not posting anything today. I’ve been busy with work, home and writing. I hope to have two short stories finished by 30th October, a novelette finished by 30th November, and another short story finished before Christmas. I’ll post here when I have the time, energy and inclination.

I mentioned in an earlier post that with IPv6, you could “…give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out“. You might have thought I was kidding, or at least exaggerating for dramatic effect.

I wasn’t.

Let’s do the math.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, which means we have a total address pool of 2¹²⁸, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Yes, that’s 340 undecillion addresses. I know that’s a weird sounding number, but I’m not making it up. By comparison, our current addressing scheme, IPv4, uses 32 bit addresses, which gives us a pool of 2³², or 4,294,967,296 addresses. (I’ll bet that may be one of the first times a number just north of 4 billion has looked small…)

Those of you who are quicker of mind might be thinking – Gee, we’re running out of addresses. Does that mean there are almost 4 billion people using the Internet already? That’s half the planet!

Actually, no. There aren’t anywhere near 4 billion people on line. Due to various historical quirks and design decisions, 605,422,592 IPv4 addresses cannot be allocated for general use. Yes, 15% of the total IPv4 address space is unusable. Also, because network and broadcast addresses must be reserved for every subnet allocated (and there are a whole lot of subnets on the Internet), about 2% of the remaining addresses are also unusable. That leaves about 3.6 billion usable addresses. Remember, however, that every single piece of Internet equipment out there consumes at least one address — every router, every web server, every mail server. You get the idea. Also remember that many people use the Internet both at home and at work, from two different IP addresses. In actual fact, world wide there are only 1,668,870,408 people using the Internet (as of June 30 2009).

Kinda sucks, eh? We’re just about to exhaust a 4.2 billion IP address pool, and we’ve only got a paltry 1.6 billion people on line. That means that, on average, each person on line is consuming 2.1 IP addresses. This means that, if we’re lucky, by the time we actually run out of version 4 IP addresses we’ll have about 2 billion people on line. That’s 50% efficiency folks.

That sucks.

That also means that we’re not likely to be any more efficient with IPv6, so lets adjust our numbers for that reality. Dividing 2¹²⁸ by 2 gives us 2¹²⁷, or about 170 undecillion addresses.

Now, how long until the sun burns out and becomes a cold dark cinder? I looked around on line, and the general consensus is that ol’ Sol has about 5 billion years left before it runs out of hydrogen and expands to a red giant, burning the Earth to a crispy cinder. However, this site goes into a little more detail. The bottom line being that the sun won’t actually achieve anything approaching both cold and dark until about 50 billion years have elapsed. I did say cold dark cinder in my original post, so I’m holding myself to that.

So, if you’ve got 50 billion years to give out 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 addresses, how many can you give out each day? Well, 50 billion years would be 18,250,000,000,000 days. That’s 18.25 trillion. So lets divide 170 undecillion by 18.25 trillion and see what we get.

We get a big number. We get 9,322,804,573,176,396,259,270,537. We could give out just over 9 septillion addresses each day for the next 50 billion years. So, as long as we can agree that a gazillion is somewhere south of 9 septillion, my original statement stands.

Postscript: I have IPv6 service via Hurricane Electric’s tunnel broker service. Current IPv6 allocation policy means I get a whole /64 subnet allocated to me. That’s 2⁶⁴ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses. (18.4 quintillion addresses just for me seems a bit excessive, but that’s committees for ya. Maybe some day I’ll actually have a need for each individual cell in my body to have it’s own IP address. Who knows what the future may bring.)

How does this effect my earlier calculations? Are we giving away IPv6 addresses too quickly? I did the math and, surprisingly, we’re probably OK with this policy, as we can afford to give out 505,390 /64 subnets every day for the next 50 billion years.

I think I can live with that.

Today was officially a Good Day^TM. We finally got the boat out on the water, in a lovely light breeze, put the sails up and sailed. (The wind was too light to resolve my mast rake issue mentioned in the previous post, so the jury is still out on that one.) As you can see in the pictures, it was a lovely blue-sky day, about 20°C. Perfect weather for our first shakedown cruise. All told we were out on the water for just over three hours.

Click the previews for larger images.

Waiting at the dock

Note that our hull number is 393

Leigh says I look nautical, but I think I simply look clueless.

Playing lookout

Main and jib sail while underway

Ain't she pretty?

It is only fitting that my wife and I spent Talk Like a Pirate Day working on our Sirius 21 sailboat. I bought all new clevis pins for the standing rigging since the old ones were worn and scored in a rather scary way. In fact, getting the standing rigging up to snuff has not been easy. The previous owner had used incorrectly sized clevis pins to secure a number of the shrouds. Also, and this is the scary bit, the forestay quick-adjust was being held together by a 3/16ths diameter machine screw wedged lengthwise where the clevis pin should go! When I first discovered this, my testicles immediately retreated to somewhere just below my ribcage. A machine screw!

For those of you not in the know, the forestay quick-adjust is that is that bit at the front of the boat where the wire coming from the very top of the mast attaches to the prow. It is only the most freakin’ important fitting on the entire boat! When underway this little fitting takes all the strain generated by both the main and jib sails. If the forestay breaks, your mast immediately comes crashing down, plain and simple, because on a bermuda rigged boat of this size there is only one forestay holding the mast up. (Bigger boats have multiple forestays, and cutters of just about any size usually have two or three of them). Except for the forestay and backstay just about anything else on your boat can break and you’ll at least have a minute or two to try and fix it before you’re screwed. Not true with these babies, and someone had stuck a plain old mild steel machine screw in there – shear strength unknown.

So I took it out and replaced it with a proper sized clevis pin for the hole (1/4″) only to discover the the swage fitting on the forestay only has a 3/16ths hole. Probably why the machine screw was in there in the first place. Thus ensued a long search for a thinner clevis pin of the appropriate length to fit inside the quick-adjust. I finally ended up cutting a longer one down to length with a hacksaw. Which highlights another problem – that swage fitting should be 1/4″. The fitting at the masthead is 1/4″, so it would be stupid to use something smaller at the other end. Two other problems with the forestay are 1) it’s too long, and 2) the original owner’s manual for the boat does not mention a quick-adjust.

Here’s what I think happened: Sometime in the past, either the old forestay broke (eep!) or someone decided they wanted to PRHC race this boat (which is what the quick-adjust is for), so they removed the old forestay turnbuckle and swaged on a fitting for the quick-adjust. They either didn’t know better or didn’t have the right parts to hand, and attached a 3/16ths fitting where they should have used a 1/4″ one. Also, they didn’t shorten the forestay enough to compensate for the extra length added by the quick-adjust. The owner’s manual says that for optimum handling the mast should be raked about 6″ to the rear. Even with the quick-adjust cranked all the way forward my mast is still raked 18″ to the rear. Yikes! Unless I’m mistaken, she’s gonna show some killer weather helm in any kind of breeze.

We’ll be taking her out for a test sail tomorrow, now that the machine screw has been replaced by a proper piece of 316 stainless, and we’ll see how she goes. I could be brewing a tempest in a teapot. Or maybe I’m right. Time will tell.

On a lighter note, and in keeping with the nautical theme, I thought the pirate keyboard (below) was rather funny.

R Mateys!

To wrap up, a picture of my money pit beautiful baby finally ready to go, mast raised and sails bent on. Yarrhhh, mateys!

Ain't she beautiful?

A friend sent this mp3 file to me. Listen to it. It is so absolutely hilarious that I think I broke something.

Sadly, it’s a fake, inasmuch that it was never a live messsage on any school voice mail system anywhere in the world. Ever.

Nevertheless, I have a whole passel of friends in the teaching profession whom I know would absolutely love to use it.

Enjoy it while it lasts folks, ’cause the ole Interwebs is gonna implode in just over 700 days. I’m talking about the IP address crunch. Kind of like peak oil, we’re burning though the last 10% of the available Internet addresses at a rate that puts us firmly on track to run out in mid-to-late 2011. If you take perverse pleasure from such a thing, you can watch the addresses running out before your very eyes, rather like sand though an hourglass. If that doesn’t turn your crank, Wikipedia offers a helpful executive summary of our digital plight.

“Oh NOs!”, say all the bloggers and gamers and porn site magnates.  “The sky is falling!  What will we do?”

Well, tadpoles, IP version 6 is supposed to be the answer — a new addressing scheme to replace the aged and venerable IP version 4.  (Don’t ask what happened to version 5.  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.)  IPv6 encompasses an address space that is so super-large that we could give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out.

“Well great!” say all the facebookers and twitter addicts.  “Lets move over to that.”

Only one problem, I say (as does Dan Bernstien). When the bright boys and girls at the IETF sat down and designed IPv6, they designed it to be a replacement for IPv4 rather than an extension to it. In a nutshell, this means that there is no easy way to get IPv6 to talk to IPv4.

So, imagine it. The day finally comes in 2011 when they run out of version 4 IP’s. The next poor sod to request an address from the IANA will get, by default, a version 6 IP, and then he will discover that he can only talk to the rest of the Internet if he uses special, clunky and slow, translation services for his connection. Think Network Address Translation times ten, with horns and a pitchfork. His connectivity will suck, and it will only get worse as more and more sites are forced to adopt IPv6 and use these same translation services to reach the majority of IPv4-only sites on the Internet. Then, on top of that, imagine all the disruption that will be caused by other sites upgrading voluntarily to IPv6 and encountering all the bugs in various vendor’s implementation of the IPv6 network stack that will only come to light under sustained real-world use. Finally, imagine all the screw-ups that will happen as the Sympaticos and Verizons of the world start deploying a network stack that most of their staff have no experience with.

Changing the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 will be rather like trying to change the tablecloth on a table that seats 500 million diners who are all eating boiling hot soup. Even if nobody gets permanently burned or maimed, it’s still gonna be a f**king mess.

But I’ll probably make a killing as an IPv6 transition consultant.

I want my…
I want my…
I want my Eff Tee Tee…

<insert drum solo>

Now look at them yoyos (that’s the way you do it)
Got fiberoptics from their ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Let me tell you them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe run a server in your basement closet
Maybe go to work with a click of your thumb

We got to use ole DSL modems
A couple megs for a f**kin huge fee
We got to NAT all of our connections
We got to use that older IP

That little asian with the server and the markup
All comfy sittin in his lair
That little asian he got gigabit access
That little asian he got speed to spare

We got to pay for static addressin’
A tiny subnet for a f**kin huge fee
We got no speed for file sharin’
We got a shrinkin’ pool of IPs

Lookatthat, lookatthat
I should’ve moved to Scandinavia
I should’ve moved to Asia
Where they got fiber, stickin it in every home
Man, can I have some?
And who’s there? What’s that? Video conference?
Runnin it at 30 frames in HD!
Oh, that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

We got to pay for cable that’s crawlin’
Telco’s chargin’ us f**kin’ huge fees
We got a trickle that’s called our upstream
Got no bandwidth symmetry

Listen here
Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Get fiberoptics from your ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fibre to the home and version 6 IP

That ain’t crawlin’

It’s — what — 2009 and here I am finally setting up my own blog, when blogging is perhaps becoming somewhat passe and being replaced by twittering.

So call me a luddite.  Go ahead.

Actually, call me stubborn.  I have always felt it would be inappropriate for me to use a hosted blog site, (such as livejournal, facebook, etc) when I run my own IT company and own my own servers. If I was going to blog, it would be hosted on my own iron and fed with my own wires, dammit!  But that’s a lot of work.  So it never got done.

Until now.

Say hello to WordPress – installed, configured, up and running in just over 2 days, on my own server.  It’s easy to install, has oodles of plugins and themes, and even allows twittering should the irrational urge ever overcome me.

Anyway, ’nuff said.  I exist.  Cogito Blog.