A short film about about how the Internet work, and what is an Internet Exchange, and why it is very important.

Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a functioning Internet Exchange yet!!

Thank you Nasser for the video.

The Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG) announced that 6th version of the meeting will take place in Riyadh from 10 to 14 of April 2010.

MENOG is a regional forum offering network engineers and other technical staff the opportunity to share knowledge and experiences, and identify areas for regional cooperation.

MENOG 6 will be include:

• Workshop 10-12 April
• Tutorials 13 April (morning)
• Conference 13 April (afternoon) and 14 April

If you are in the business of Internet operation, or have any interest in Internet at all, don’t miss the opportunity to attend.

Lengthy but a must see presentation.

Ericsson has successfully demonstrated data-transfer speeds of more than 500 megabits per second over copper, the communications company said Monday.

The data-transfer rates were achieved using a version of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology called “vectorized” VDSL2, Ericsson said in a statement. The technology, also called “crosstalk cancellation,” provides the high transmission rates through a twisted pair of copper cables by reducing the noise coming from other pairs in the same cable bundle. VDSL2 has traditionally offered speeds of around 100Mbps.

Mr. Latif Ladid, the president of IPv6 Forum, left a comment on a previous post on my blog with the latest update on IPv4 exhaustion, only 12% of IPv4 address are left, that is 2% in less than 3 months, the new estimate is 769 days.

This this insightful comment:

The IP address space is down to just 12% with 534 M IP addresses or 32 blocks left. see http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html One of the most obvious and easily quantifiable incentives of the move to IPv6 is the growth and the continuity of the Internet and then the run to the bank for the remaining address space as it will be needed to have a secure dual stack transition which is the most secure transition and will be unfortunately the rich man’s transition. All others will tunnel which is not secure making it the poor man’s transition. Even the transition will aggravate the digital divide between the haves and have-nots in terms of security. The IPv6 Forum knew this problem 10 years ago and pushed ISPs to move earlier to manage a secure transition, but it takes patience and passion to make this happen.

I got a DNS failure when I tried to access my website yesterday, I didn’t suspect my ISP because I am using OpenDNS as my name server, so I switched back to SAUDI NET name servers and it worked fine. So I thought it was OpenDNS problem, until I read the news about large-scale DDoS attack on Network Solutions my DNS registrar, where I also host my DNS for rayed.com.

Slashdot Article

Only 14% of IP addresses are left, which is estimated to be used in 811 days which is around 2 years!!

Does that mean the Internet as we know it will stop growing? yes exactly, if we ran out of IP addresses you can not connect your new game console, phone, notebook, etc... to the Internet.

Scientists has found many solutions to delay this problem, including “classless network”, and NAT, which allowed us to use the IP address space more efficiently.

Lately I am getting a lot of “Network Timeout” errors, is it my machine or does everybody get this error.