I’ve been playing around with IPv6 over the last few days; my ISP doesn’t give out IPv6 addresses yet, but thanks to Hurricane Electric I now have a /48 being routed straight to me. In theory I could subnet that /48 into 65536 subnets, each containing a ridiculous number of hosts.
This is a strange feeling after growing up with 1 routable IP address to somehow share across a whole network and having hundreds of NAT port forwards. It really should make life much easier.
But… there are a few implications. Previously in many situations we have been able to rely on NAT as a reasonably effective firewall. NAT is excellent at that. Customer ADSL/Cable routers will need to now have firewalls which many don’t… and if they do have firewalls it is almost certain they wont be managed properly.
So IPv6 end to end connectivity is all very well; but now instead of managing port forwarding there is going to need to be managing of firewalls instead. By default I am sure they will be managed by UPNP; so basically may as well not be running a firewall unless UPNP gets some security added.
Lastly, I realised IPv6 means you can no longer use the excuse of decreasing the size of broadcast domains when subnetting or using VLANs… It now will be reducing the multicast domains seeing IPv6 now uses multicast to replace the broadcast functions. I’m pretty sure most usually VLANs are more about security anyway than broadcast domains.
Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 2 – Software
Following up on the Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 1 post, I promised another post talking about the software I installed on the video conferencing unit. My Flare Solutions friends reminded me a couple of days ago to finish the series.
If you haven’t read part 1 – do it now. In summary, I converted a Dell Small Form Factor PC into a Video Conferencing trolly. I mounted the PC to the sack barrow using some tiedowns.
After trialling many different options – trying hard to find a free one – we were left with a shortlist of Mirial Softphone, or Polycom PVX. While there were other free products out there, we specifically wanted a product which would allow us to do direct IP calls, so we could call into parties using real hardware conferencing units too.
We trialled both products, not scientifically. The general consensus was that Mirial perhaps had slightly better performance/quality, but the user interface of Polycom PVX was much more intuitive.
Both are great products, in the end it came down to affordability – Polycom gave us a great educational price through an NZ dealer which sealed the deal.
Our video conferencing setup hasn’t been without its problems – first it was a faulty network cable, then we didn’t have a static IP address set for the unit in Hokitika, obviously small problems which could happen with any units.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this seems to be an area that could do with some quality open source development!