Month: February 2011

So, the last official IPv4 IP addresses have been assigned. Time to move on, people! Nothing to see here!

Last of IPv4 addresses assigned as focus turns to IPv6

The last IPv4 addresses have been allocated, highlighting the need for companies and organizations to move to a new system amid the ever increasing number of net-connected devices. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) made the announcement at an event in Miami on Thursday.

Each of the five regional Internet registries has been allocated a single block of around 16 million addresses. While true exhaustion would be hard to gauge — a small number of IP addresses will be held for several years for the transition — the rate at which the different registrars will burn through their allocations will likely vary.

APNIC, the registrar in the Asia-Pacific region, will likely run out first in the next few months. ARIN (North America’s registrar) and RIPE NCC (controlling Europe, Middle Eastern, and Russian IP needs) are in a better position, likely being able to make it through the year on their current allocation.

In developing nations such as Africa and Latin America (AfriNIC and LACNIC respectively), the much slower uptake of connected devices could mean their allocations of IPv4 addresses last for possibly several years. Either way, officials with IANA stress it is time to start thinking about IPv6.”

So… make your plans now!

This link leads to an excellent article by eWeek contributor, P.J. Connolly!

Review: LibreOffice beats OpenOffice.org by a whisker

“The new LibreOffice open-source office suite ‘proves that forking isn’t always the kiss of death,’ says this eWEEK review. New features in the Linux-ready release — including wider document format support, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) import into Draw and Writer, enhanced presentation support, and an improved ‘save as’ feature — should give OpenOffice some robust competition.

In the open source movement, the forking of a project is often a contentious matter, and can lead to the demise or mothballing of the applications that spawn from the original software. In many ways, it’s a ‘nuclear option,’ as developers choose their allegiances and take their skills with them.

Often, the result is the loss of momentum as well as mindshare for all the spawned projects. But it’s not an inevitable one: the January release of LibreOffice 3.3 shows that sometimes forking can lead to a positive outcome.

LibreOffice 3.3 is as polished as one might expect in a project that, for all its novelty, has many years of development work behind it. Although it’s probably not going to gain widespread acceptance in the corporate world, any outfit that’s looking for a solid toolset for users who don’t require a lot of handholding, or integration with Microsoft’s Office server applications, could do much worse than to choose it.

For many users, this will have everything necessary in a desktop-productivity suite, for an unbeatable price: free, that is.”

I would encourage you to read this entire article, as it has excellent info on changes and enhancements available in LibreOffice! Good stuff!

Yesterday was the official end of the Apple Xserve server! The end of an era? Does anyone care to shed a tear? No? OK… I didn’t much notice, either!

Apple’s server biz relegated to ‘prosumer’ status with Xserve’s end

“As the company announced last November, no orders for the server hardware will be accepted beyond January 31.

While there is a community of server admins who use Mac server hardware, the discontinuation of Xserve has not been met with any wails of anguish from the IT community.

After Xserve is completely liquidated, Apple will only sell specially configured versions of its Mac Mini and Mac Pro as servers. This means the sole remaining part of Apple’s server business is OS X Snow Leopard Server, which is itself, not that different from client versions of Snow Leopard.

What’s left of the Mac server business is almost a ‘prosumer’ category, that is, where consumer hardware can be tinkered with to create something that could work in professional settings, as long as they’re not too demanding. Naturally, companies dealing with alternative Mac server products are popping up today to remind the world that there are options for the Mac Minis that Apple called it’s ‘most popular line of servers’ back in November.”

A trend seems to be starting to “scale back” on “cloud” file storage sites, due to rising popularity and usage.

Mozy’s move could bring storm to unlimited cloud storage

“Computerworld – Facing customers with an appetite for cloud storage that has increased 50% over the past year, the world’s largest consumer online storage provider said on Monday that it will no longer offer unlimited storage and will increase fees for the limited online storage it’s now selling.

While Mozy may be among the first to change its pricing model for consumers, one industry analyst said most other providers will soon be forced to follow suit.

“Others are already doing things like bandwidth throttling to help control the volume of data being stored and limiting the types of files you can backup, but as far as raising prices we haven’t seen that yet by others,” said Gartner analyst Adam Couture.

Mozy, which is owned by EMC, opened its MozyHome consumer storage service in 2006. Since then, it has charged $4.95 per month for unlimited online backup.

While the new price and capacity points take affect immediately for new customers, existing customers will have until March 1 before they’ll be required to change over to the new plans.

Today, however, Mozy services more than 1 million users, and while the majority of its customers don’t abuse the service, about 10% are considered “power users” who store everything and are eating up enormous amounts of capacity.”