Microsoft has started giving away SharePoint Designer (formerly FrontPage) for free. It makes sense, seeing as how Windows SharePoint Services can be downloaded and installed for free as well.
You can download SharePoint Designer 2007 here.
General IT
Since this is available to everyone, I felt that I should share. The following is a link to IBM’s voucher for free admittance to the expo floor of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, running from April 20th until April 24th.
Free Expo Pass – Be IBM’s Guest
You have to sign up before April 17th to redeem the freebie.
A new security flaw in Vista’s kernel was discovered this week. This is the kind of thing that has made Vista very unpopular. However, while there are significant issues with the current version of Windows, the rest of the computing-world isn’t off the hook, either. A security issue involving OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu has been discovered which leaves a huge number of users open to attack. The full story is a much better read than I could give in a summary. It’s interesting, to say the least, that when security-issues of equal magnitude don’t get the same amount of press because of the stigma attached to one vendor over another.
Finally got myself one of those “job” type of things at this place. I’m currently supporting an internal Windows Server 2008 Active Directory network, along with a series of servers hosting everything from games to development environments. I’m working full-time and I’ve been promised that I can still take classes, creatively juggling my hours here and there for the mid-day sessions.
I’ll be working primarily with Windows Server 2008 on the internal network, along with Exchange 2007 and mostly XP/Vista clients. I’ll also be doing some extensive work with virtualization, using VMware’s ESX server to host Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Windows Server 2008 virtual machines for an online game environment. We’ll be looking at lots of things in the upcoming year, such as getting new network equipment (Cisco) and upgrading our own internal IT servers, as well as playing with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for various (nefarious) purposes. There’s going to be a lot of fun right off the bat, lots of work to do for an upcoming project, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Yay, I finally have a job! Crap, I have to go to work again. . .
I hadn’t heard about this until today, but I still find it hilarious beyond all belief: Dell Guy Is Now A Waiter
For those of you who remember, he was the obnoxious idiot that did those “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!’ commercials a few years back. He was arrested for buying pot and Dell dropped him from their ads. Sadly, he didn’t do any jailtime, but he’s fallen quite a bit from his prior status as an actor.
I need to stop reading about hardware for my lab while I have no money. . . dammit.
CCNP Lab Series – Master Links
And for you CCNA-nuts out there, we’ve got labs for you to obsess over, too: CCNA Lab Main Post Summary
At this time, I’d like to thank Mr. Wendell Odom, CCIE #1624, for putting together fantastic posts over at the Cisco Subnet, thereby draining my soul!!!
Hell no, we’re not going to push for the IPv6 crunch yet. As I said, we did a terrible job of managing the IPv4 address space, and now we’re pushing to do the same with the IPv6 because it’s “inconceivably huge”. Have a look at this article.
I spent the better part of this morning reading a couple of chapters in Routing TCP/IP Volume I (Second Edition), and I have to say, I’m learning to hate IPv6. I know, I know, it’s the wave of the future and we’ll all be transitioning to it within the next ten years, or so. Still, I can’t stand some of the early nonsense they’re pushing. In one breath, it’s explained that IPv4 was once, with it’s 4.3 billion-count address space, considered practically infinate. In the next, we go through an explanation of why the “host” and “subnet” portions of an IPv6 address are fixed at 16 and 64 bits, respectively, because “the 340 trillion trillion trillion address space is so vast, and using fixed bit-lenghts makes the addresses easier to calculate, that it’s worth the wasted address-allocation”. Isn’t this exactly the same issue we began running into with IPv4 and, oh I don’t know, the 127.0.0.0 range? Isn’t this why VLSM was conceived in the first place? Sure, the IPv6 address pool seems infinite now, but let’s not forget that the true dream of IPv6 will be realized when every device on the planet has its own unique, global unicast address. Add to that the fact that you can assign multiple addresses to a single interface on a device, and one device can have multiple interfaces, we might just begin to run out of addresses all too soon.
It’s not that I inherently want to torpedo the efforts that the industry is making towards getting IPv6 out into the wild. There are plenty of cool features, like automatic address configuration, which happens on an interface without the aid of DHCP, ARP, or anything else. (Creeeeeeepy.) But going into a new standard and making all the same old mistakes of the past, using the exact same justifications we did back then, is downright foolish. I can’t justify saying, “oh, there are plenty of addresses now, we can go ahead and waste the allocations”, when this was the very same reason we’re running into issues with ISPs having to provide 6 and 7-tiered NAT implementations in countries like India and China.
I’ll be studying up much more on IPv6 as time goes on. As painful as some of these issues are for me, I also realize that as time goes on, it will become increasingly important not only to understand how IPv6 works, but also how it works in conjuction with IPv4. This, of course, also brings up the fact that there are still many aspects of the new implementation of the Internet Protocol that haven’t been figured out yet. One of these is the conversion from 32-bit addresses to the new 128-bit ones. Some proposed standards simply attached the decimal-dotted IPv4 addresses to the end of the IPv6 address, forming a weird little hybrid. Another, which seems much more reasonable, simply appends leading zeros to the 32-bit address, and converts the last four octets into hexidecimal equivalents of the original IPv4 address. (Yes, folks. It’s just that simple.)
6to4 Notation:
192.168.10.101 = 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:C0A8:0A65
(or ::C0A8:0A65)
IPv6 Dot Notation:
192.168.10.101 = 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:192.168.10.101
(or ::192.168.10.101)
There’s a long way to go before IPv6 becomes the de facto standard for the internet and private networks. There’s a lot to learn about it, and naturally, handling these addresses via DNS and dynamic routing protocols will be much easier than the shorthand, manual management of the things. Still. . . I hates it, my precioussss. . . we hatesssss it!!!
For those of you who don’t know how to do decimal-to-hex conversions in your head (gasp!), there is a very useful conversion tool available here.
