The Design and Implementation of laffer1

This last week, Amazon's cloud services (AWS) went down in Virginia.  This is commonly known as US-EAST.  Many websites and cloud based services put all their eggs in one basket and got burned.  The whole point of cloud computing is to pay for distributed services.  In the US, this means US-EAST and US-WEST which is in California.  

If their website went down, it's because they were cheap or idiots.  There is no other explanation and it's not Amazon's fault.  

A company we consult for went down for the last few days due to this outage.  DEV and staging servers went out as a result.  It stopped all productivity because they didn't pay for a redundant mirror.  Don't be cheap people. 

I've been working on getting reverse DNS setup for my ipv6 block.  I have a ipv6 tunnel setup on stargazer that lets me access IPV6 based websites. The process was a little annoying to setup, but it's worth it.

For those of you who don't know what IPV6 is, let me explain.  Whenever you get on the Internet, you are assigned a unique address (called an IP ADDRESS).  Geeks call these IPV4 addresses.  We ran out of them.  Many years ago, we saw this coming and came up with a longer address type called IPV6.  It gives us a lot more IP addresses (32 hex numbers long).  

To make things more complicated, there were hacks to get around the IPV4 problem.  One of them is called NAT.  Most of you use it everyday and don't even know it.  If you have a router at home (for wifi maybe) and it's connected to a cable modem or DSL modem, it's probably using NAT.  What this does is take one real IP address and link it to a bunch of internal ones that aren't used on the internet.  This supposedly makes you more secure as well, similar to a firewall but it's really not.

Why should you care about this?  

Most of your old computers can't do IPV6.  Your blu-ray player, game consoles, cell phones, or other things connected to the Internet might not work with IPV6.  It's been very slow to get people to switch but when it happens it's going to be as bad or worse as the TV transition.  All those routers and modems you got from the cable/dsl providers might not work and you have to get new ones.  You'll have to make changes to your computer setup to use them.  You might not get to see everything on the Internet from this point on.  Some websites in asia are ipv6 only and it will happen here next.  

Until you can get IPV6 at home, you can use a service called a tunnelbroker to see the whole internet again.  The one I like is called sixxs.net.  It's COMPLETELY FREE.  You run a program on your pc or mac and you can see the whole internet again.