Hurricane Electric Newsletter

January, 2010

In This Issue

Become an IPv6 Sage
Free IPv6 iPhone App
Helpful Hints
Meet the HE Staff
New Colocation Floor
IPv6 is Here
FAQ - SSL Certificates
Technical Brief
Trivia Question - Win an HE T-shirt!

Do YOU have what it takes to be an IPv6 Sage?

sage - noun
1. a profoundly wise person; a person famed for wisdom.
2. someone venerated for the possession of wisdom, judgment and experience.
[From www.dictionary.com]

Hurricane Electric is offering a free online IPv6 certification course. Those completing the course will demonstrate the skills needed to configure servers for use with IPv6 (including web, email and DNS) and an expert understanding of the technology involved.

Go to ipv6.he.net/certification and start on your path to becoming an IPv6 Sage!

The IPv4 Exhaustion Countdown Continues! Monitor it with a Free Hurricane Electric App

Show your friends proof of the end of IPv4! Download the new HE.net IPv4 Countdown iPhone App, iGoogle Gadget, Web page Widget or Windows Vista Gadget - all available for free download from ipv6.he.net/statistics.

"CIOs and network administrators cannot continue to postpone the transition to IPv6," says Martin Levy, Hurricane Electric's Director of IPv6 Strategy. "We hope that this iPhone App and the other tools we have developed will be a fun way to bring attention to a serious issue facing the networking community."

Hurricane Electric Helpful Hints For Our Colocation Customers

Label Your Machine - Every machine should have a label on both the front and the back. You should make the labels large and clear enough so they can be read from at least eighteen inches away in moderate light. Each machine should be labeled with a name easy to distinguish from the others (typical problem: "server001010" vs. "server010010").

Did You Know?
We can label your machines for you. Just send us the text and the location and description of the server.

Meet HE Support Staff Member Mike Edwards

Anyone who has called the HE technical support line over the years is likely to have spoken with Mike Edwards at one time or another. Besides offering expert advice on email and web hosting, Mike is an avid movie buff with a special interest in foreign and independent films. When not providing stellar support for HE customers, Mike volunteers as a film projectionist at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, studies French and the violin and is making plans to hike England's Coast to Coast trail.

Hurricane Electric Trivia Question

Sample code modified
from an entry in Wikipedia

Hurricane Electric Celebrates Fifteen Years of Business with the Opening of a New Colocation Floor

  The much anticipated opening of Suite 1200, Hurricane Electric's new colocation floor, has arrived with over three hundred cabinets available for immediate occupancy. The new colocation floor boasts extra deep 36-inch cabinets, spacious aisles and custom configured airflow management. "We've taken fifteen years of experience in the Internet datacenter business and applied it in the design of this new colocation floor," says Mike Leber, president of Hurricane Electric. Contact your HE sales representative today to find out how your business can take advantage of this IPv6-enabled, state-of-the-art facility.

  IPv6 is Here - Are you ready?

  What is IPv6? IPv6 is the new Internet Protocol (IP) designed to augment IPv4, the current system of assigning unique IP addresses on the Internet. The primary reason for its development is the fast approaching date on which the world's supply of IPv4 addresses will be exhausted, currently expected to occur in 2011. The incredible explosion in the number of web, email and other servers and users on the Internet in the past fifteen years far outpaced what was anticipated in the early 1980s when the IPv4 protocol was developed. Because IPv6 uses 128 bits of data for its addresses instead of the 32 bits used for IPv4, it can provide many more addresses. It is said one could assign an IPv6 address to every grain of sand in the oceans and still have addresses left over. Additionally, the design of IPv6 greatly improves the security and efficiency of routing IP packets across the Internet.

Who needs to be knowledgeable about IPv6?
For most Internet users, those who are consumers of information found on web sites, typical users of email, etc., the gradual change to IPv6 over the next few years should be fairly transparent. But...

If you are a system administrator or network engineer you need to understand how to deploy and administer IPv6 on your existing equipment or determine what hardware and software you need to upgrade or replace to support IPv6.

If you are a manager of network engineers you need to ensure your staff acquires the knowledge and operational experience with IPv6 needed to support your organization and customers.

Hurricane Electric and IPv6
Hurricane Electric is leading the Internet industry in the integration and deployment of IPv6 with close to ten years of experience, a global reach and more BGP adjacencies (an industry-accepted method of measuring IPv6 deployment) than any other Internet provider. Since 2007, Hurricane Electric core routers and its backbone have supported both IPv4 and IPv6 in native mode. All Hurricane Electric network servers, including DNS, SMTP and NTP are IPv6-compliant. Throughout the US, Europe and Asia, each point-of-presence (POP) within the HE network is IPv6-enabled. The result of this planning, development and deployment is that IPv6 is available today to all Hurricane Electric colocation, transit and dedicated server customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: My shopping cart software says I need an SSL Certificate. What is an SSL Certificate and how do I obtain one?

A: SSL certificates are used by web site operators to assure visitors that information transferred between their web browser and the web site they are visiting is encrypted and that the web site's identity has been confirmed as authentic. Anyone wanting to run shopping cart software on a web site should obtain an SSL certificate.

You can purchase an SSL certificate for a web site from any major domain name registrar such as godaddy.com, register.com or networksolutions.com. There is an initial fee when obtaining an SSL certificate was well as a yearly renewal fee charged by the registrar. These prices range from under $20 to over $100, depending on the registrar used.

Hurricane Electric Technical Brief

What to do when the default SMTP port 25 is blocked by an ISP

The Problem
Port 25 is the default TCP/IP port used when sending email. This port number is pre-configured in email software (Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.) and most users never see or notice the setting. However, in the past few years many ISPs have begun blocking port 25 access to email servers outside the ISP's network to combat junk email sent by 'zombied' PCs. Each of these virus-infected computers send out thousands of junk email messages a day. While blocking port 25 does not affect most customers, it does prevent access for anyone who uses an email server outside the ISP's network. Unfortunately, the ISPs compound the problem by rarely informing their customers they have blocked port 25.

The Solution
TCP/IP port 587 is an industry-accepted port number for authenticated email sending. While historically authentication has inferred the use of a user login and password, a much easier method has become commonplace: the use of POP-Before-SMTP. With this method, the server takes note of the IP address from which a user has successfully logged into a POP (or IMAP) account and then, for a predetermined length of time (often 30 minutes), will accept incoming email via SMTP on port 587 from that same IP address. Since most if not all email programs check for incoming email prior to sending email, the timeout rarely becomes an issue.

Potential Complications
While every email program released in the past few years allows users to change the outgoing (SMTP) port number from the default setting of 25, each program has a different way of doing it. In most programs there is a tab or button within the server settings panel labeled "More Settings" or "Advanced" or another similar description. However, earlier versions of Eudora have no such setting; instead, the user appends a ":587" to the outgoing server name, somewhat in the manner of setting an alternative HTTP port within a URL. A logical approach if one is familiar with working with TCP/IP ports, but otherwise difficult for the common user.