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{ Category Archives } General

Final Space Shuttle Mission

Today’s launch of the Atlantis marks the retirement of the US shuttle fleet. If you’re wondering what comes next for US space flight, I can suggest reading the articles entitled “WHY THE US CAN BEAT CHINA: THE FACTS ABOUT SPACEX COSTS” and “TAKING THE NEXT STEP | COMMERCIAL CREW DEVELOPMENT ROUND 2″ on the SpaceX [...]

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In honor of Benoît Mandlebrot

Python+matplotlib generated set:

ZaCon II and generosity

Today I attended and presented at ZaCon, a local information security conference, with a difference: ZaCon exists without funding (on purpose, don’t offer) or any frills that would make you want to attend other than a passion for infosec. The event was well organized (with impressive amateur AV and video-conference wrangling). The presentations were interesting [...]

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Localloop.co.za now locally hosted

One of the weird ironies about this blog has been that although it is focused on networking in South Africa, the web server hosting it for the last ~two years was a Linode.com virtual machine in New Jersey, USA. The server’s IPv6 connectivity was via tunnel to HE.net in New York. Now, thanks to the [...]

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Open access consumer broadband in South Africa

An open access network (OAN) is a horizontally layered business model for telecoms that has some interesting advantages. It is typically implemented by separating physical infrastructure from services. This creates a virtual market place, where end users have a choice of multiple service providers, and the service providers in turn are freed from having to [...]

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RSAWeb (sort of) responds

Shortly after my post revealing that RSAWeb (among others) provide hosting for known South African spammers, I got an email from their Technical Director, Mark Slingsby, asking how recent my lookups were1, and requesting me to name the offenders2 so that his sysadmin team can follow up. I replied with a detailed response, noting that [...]

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ISPA members provide hosting for local spammers

This morning I read this article on MyBroadband about the ISPA “hall of shame” list of South African spammers, and conducted a quick (somewhat non-scientific) investigation to see where the mail servers for the domains provided on the ISPA list are hosted. After filtering out domains without MX records, MX records without valid A records, [...]

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New year, new job

After a year and and a bit as a software developer at the Remote Sensing Research Unit of the CSIR’s Meraka Institute, I’ve now transferred to a new team (still inside Meraka), where I’ll be working on SANReN‘s design and roll out, thus moving the focus of my day job back to networks. SANReN will [...]

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Because you asked #1: Pricing transit costs in South Africa

Someone did a Google search for “how to price ip transit costs south africa”, and ended in my apache logs when they followed the search result to this site. Having never worked in the ISP industry, I’m not really qualified to answer, but here goes anyway: If you have this much bandwidth: …then do this: [...]

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ISPs posing as Internet exchanges

An Internet exchange or peering point provides layer 2 switching to enable direct and efficient interconnect for parties who wish to enter into peering or transit agreements. You get a port and an IP, then you get to use one MAC address to exchange IP packets with other customers. So, back in the nineties, Telkom [...]

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