royans

Hybrid cars solved the problems associated with electric cars and fuel guzzling engines. By bringing both of the technologies together, Hybrid cars can function on gasoline and still save costs by switching to an electric engine when possible. A similar problem in computing industry is forcing storage manufacturers to work on a new kind of hybrid storage device called a Hybrid Drive . This device is a result of combination of the technologies behind regular disk based drive and the faster USB drives on your keychains. This combination provides it with high speed data access and cheap-per-byte pricing in the same storage device. This concept isn't new, and if you have worked with storage devices you will remember that most high end RAID devices already have an internal cache which does something similar. Infact most Operating systems, including Windows , Linux has Solaris have builtin file cache too. But most of these devices don't use non-volatile Solid state (flash) which fo

Pat yourselves on your back for fixing all those servers, - doing backup,recovery and user creation. Pat yourselves for saying no to root and yes to sudo, - for writing ACLs and scripting voodoo... Pat again for waking at 2am - just to put your cellphone on charge. ..for dealing with people - who wanted everything a day past Pat again for reading 650 mails a day. - for blocking SYNFIN floods on ur network ..for carrying those secure-ids - even while you are not at work. When you are done patting... please stop by a bar - pick your pagers and throw away.. 'cause you all need a break once in a while - atleast on the feaking System Admin Day !!

Nutch is a very interesting java based crawler and search engine based off the lucene project . The part which captivated me, however, was this component called Distributed File system which was built to support the Nutch's quest for all the pages on internet.

Google's plan for giving out wifi access to everyone in mountain view is old news. It just started rolling out. Here is a map of all the Access points in mountain view plotted on the map. Based on my initial analysis it has about 269 Access points all over Mountain View.

If you run a website, you might have heard of Google Sitemaps and DMOZ already. What you didn't know probably is that Google Sitemaps can now learn from DMOZ if your site is listed on DMOZ. The problem Google and other search engine face is that though they can crawl your site, they don't really know how to describe your site to an search engine user. Apart from looking at your description Meta tag they also look at various other sources of information including DMOZ database to find the best way to describe your site. Though in most cases databases like DMOZ can acurately describe  the website, its not always the case, and letting search bots like that of google know that using  a meta tag can be very helpful .

I have setup a new IP Address mapping tool on huntip today which allows anyone to plot multiple ip addresses on the map. Here is the the quick API for this map API Method: POST/GET Parameters: ips ( comma delimited list of IP addresses or hostnames. For example 10.10.10.1,10.10.10.2,10.10.10.3) Parametsrs: ips ( You can add a comment for each IP by using : as delimiter . For example www.hotmail.com:hotmail server,www.google.com: Google servers,202.54.15.1:VLSNL server in india) Parameters: showinput (1= default, 0=dont show input box, 2 = don't show menus either) Restrictions: Maximum of 100 IP addresses at any given time. Notes Accuracy: The version of MaxMind database I'm using gives accuracy of around 20 miles Examples 4 of Walmarts DNS servers spread over 3 locations A list of hosts captured by traceroute Another list of hosts captured by traceroute

I was looking for worldwide internet health statistics and found some interesting links. General Connectivity Reports Internet health report InternetTrafficReport UCI Internet Weather Report UCR Internet Reachability Report BGP and DNS Reports BGP Statistics - Very interesting statistics about BGP protocol usage DNS Statistics - Root dns response times CIDR Report - Some more BGP route stats. Very neat

I'm sure you have heard that there are 13 root servers in the world. This cache file (root hint) provided by internic/IANA http://www.internic.net/zones/named.root should confirm that. So how does these 13 servers brave a DDOS attack . Aparently 6 of the 13 root servers are mirrored using Anycast routing to loadbalance between multiple servers. The F Root server itself has about 37 mirrors in the world. Anycast routing is implemented using BGP by simultaneously announcing the same destination IP range from many different places on the internet. So even though an IP might be registered for a location here in US, if someone announces that a route to the same IP block in Tokyo, hosts in or around that country will try to pick the cheapest route to get to a DNS server. DDOS attacks against root dns servers have happened in the past, and will continue to happen in future. Anycast routing is probably why these "13" DNS servers are still alive today. The next question so

Haven't you heard that we have 13 root dns servers in the world ? This map on huntip.com was created based on the root file hint provided by internic/IANA http://www.iana.org/popular.htm , http://www.internic.net/zones/named.root which listed the 13 IP addresses. The part which I later found out is that 6 of these IP addresses use Anycast addressing (different from multicast, broadcast and unicast). Anycast routing is implemented using BGP by simultaneously announcing the same destination IP range from many different places on the internet. So even though an IP might be registered for a location here in US, if someone announces that a route to the same IP block in Tokyo, hosts in or around that country will try to pick the cheapest route to get to a DNS server. The F Root server itself has about 37 mirrors in the world. So, we are very well protected against the DOS attack . Some might ask why we can't have more than 13 IP addresses for root servers. For DNS to work usin

Hunt IP is a collection of systems admin tools and links to looks which can help in investigating network, dns and Email problems.