Technology

The Brads nailed it ...

I watched a video yesterday about using video games as a means to help solve world problems. It sounds outrageous at first, until you really think about the problem. But first, how about watching the video :

Ok, now that you have some background, let's think about this for a bit. Technology is amazing, and has brought us many advancements. Gaming is one of those advancements. We have the capability of creating entire universes, purely for our own amusement. People spend hours each day exploring these worlds. Players are typically working toward completing goals set forth by the game designers. When a player completes a goal, they are rewarded. Sometimes rewards are new items, monetary in nature, or perhaps clues to other goals. Each goal is within the reach of the player, though some goals may require more work to attain.

Miss McGonigal argues that the devotion that players show to games can be harnessed and used to help solve real-world problems. Players feel empowered by games, finding within them a way to control what happens to them. Games teach players that they can accomplish the goals set before them, bringing with it an excitement to continue.

I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion about this topic with a group of college students. Opinions ranged from a general distaste of gaming, seeing it as a waste of time, to an embrace of the ideas presented in the video. For myself, I believe that many of the ideas Miss McGonigal presents have a lot of merit. Some of the students argued that such realistic games would be complicated and uninteresting. However, I would argue that such realistic games have already proven to be big hits.

Take, for example, The Sims. The Sims was a huge hit, with players spending hours in the game adjusting various aspects of their character's lives. I found the entire phenomenon to be absolutely fascinating. I honestly don't know what the draw of the game was. Regardless, it did extremely well, proving that such a game could succeed.

Imagine taking a real-world problem and creating a game to represent that problem. At the very least, such a game can foster conversation about the problem. It can also lead to unique ideas about how to solve the problem, even though those playing the game may not be well-versed on the topic.

It's definitely an avenue worth tackling, especially as future generations spend more time online. If we can find a way to harness the energy and excitement that gaming generates, we may be able to find solutions to many of the worlds most perplexing problems.

I have a few servers with hardware RAID directly on the motherboard. They're not the best boards in the world, but they process my data and serve up the information I want. Recently, I noticed that one of the servers was running on the /dev/sdb* devices, which was extremely odd. Digging some more, it seemed that /dev/sda* existed and seemed to be ok, but wasn't being used.

After some searching, I was able to determine that the server, when built, actually booted up on /dev/mapper/via_* devices, which were actually the hardware RAID. At some point these devices disappeared. To make matters worse, it seems that kernel updates weren't being applied correctly. My guess is that either the grub update was failing, or it updated a boot loader somewhere that wasn't actually being used to boot. As a result, an older kernel was loading, with no way to get to the newer kernel.

I spent some time tonight digging around with Google, posting messages on the CentOS forums, and digging around on the system itself. With guidance from a user via the forums, I discovered that my system should be using dmraid, which is a program that discovers and runs RAID devices such as the one I have. Digging around a bit more with dmraid and I found this :

[user@dev ~]$ sudo /sbin/dmraid -ay -v
Password:
INFO: via: version 2; format handler specified for version 0+1 only
INFO: via: version 2; format handler specified for version 0+1 only
RAID set "via_bfjibfadia" was not activated
[user@dev ~]$

Apparently my RAID is running version 2 and dmraid only supports versions 0 and 1. Since this was initially working, I'm at a loss as to why my RAID is suddenly not supported. I suppose I can rebuild the machine, again, and check, but the machine is about 60+ miles from me and I'd rather not have to migrate data anyway.

So how does one go about fixing such a problem? Is my RAID truly not supported? Why did it work when I built the system? What changed? If you know what I'm doing wrong, I'd love to hear from you... This one has me stumped. But fear not, when I have an answer, I'll post a full writeup!

Slashdot posted a news item late last evening about some rather stunning photos from the International Space Station. On June 12th, the Sarychev Peak volcano erupted. At the same time, the ISS happened to be right overhead. What resulted was some incredible imagery, provided to the public by NASA. Check out the images below:

You can find more images and information here. Isn't nature awesome?

Nanog 46 is wrapping up today and it has been an incredible experience. This particular Nanog seemed to have an underlying IPv6 current to it, but, if you believe the reports, IPv6 is going to have to become the standard in the next couple of years. We'll be running dual-stack configurations for some time to come, but IPv6 rollout is necessary.

To date, I haven't had a lot to do with IPv6. A few years ago I set up one of the many IPv6 shims, just to check out connectivity, but never really went anywhere with it. It was nothing more than a tech demo at the time, with no real content out there to bother with. Content exists today, however, and will continue to grow as time moves on.

IPv6 connectivity is still spotty and problematic for some, though, and there doesn't seem to be a definitive, workable solution. For instance, if your IPv6 connectivity is not properly configured, you may lose access to some sites as you receive DNS responses pointing you at IPv6 content, but that you cannot reach. This results in either a major delay in falling back to IPv4 connectivity, or complete breakage. So one of the primary problems right now is whether or not to send AAAA record responses to DNS requests when the IPv6 connectivity status of the receiver is unknown. Google, from what I understand, is using a whitelist system. When a provider has sufficient IPv6 connectivity, Google adds them to their whitelist and the provider is then able to receive AAAA records.

Those problems aside, I think rolling out IPv6 will be pretty straightforward. My general take on this is to run dual-stack to start, and probably for the forseeable future, and getting the network to hand out IPv6 addresses. Once that's in place, then we can start offering AAAA records for services. I'm still unsure at this point how to handle DNS responses to users with possibly poor v6 connectivity.

Another area of great interest this time around is DNSSEC. I'm still quite skeptical about DNSSEC as a technology, partly due to ignorance, partly due to seeing problems with what I do understand. Rest assured, once I have a better handle on this, I'll finish up my How DNS Works series.

I'm all for securing the DNS infrastructure and doing something to ensure that DNS cannot be poisoned the same way it can today. DNSSEC aims to add security to DNS such that you can trust the responses you receive. However, I have major concerns with what I've seen of DNSSEC so far. One of the bigger problems I see is that each and every domain (zone) needs to be signed. Sure, this makes sense, but my concern is the cost involved to do so. SSL Certificates are not cheap and are a recurring cost. Smaller providers may run into major issues with funding such security. As a result, they will be unable to sign their domains and participate in the secure infrastructure.

Another issue I find extremely problematic is the fallback to TCP. Cryptographic signatures are big, and they tend to be bigger, the larger the key you use. As a result, DNS responses are exceeding the size of UDP and falling back to TCP. One reason DNS works so well today is that the DNS server doesn't have to worry about retransmissions, state of connections, etc. There is no handshake required, and the UDP packets just fly. It's up to the client to retransmit if necessary. When you move to TCP, the nature of the protocol means that both the client and server need to keep state information and perform any necessary retransmissions. This takes up socket space on the server, takes time, and uses up many more CPU cycles. Based on a lightning talk during today's session, when the .ORG domain was signed, they saw a 100-fold increase in TCP connections, moving from less than 1 query per second to almost 100. This concerns me greatly as the majority of the Internet has not enabled DNSSEC at this point. I can see this climbing even more, eventually overwhelming the system and bringing DNS to its knees.

I also believe that moving in this direction will allow the "bad guys" to DoS attack servers in much easier ways as they can easily trigger TCP transactions, perform various TCP-based attacks, and generally muck up the system further.

So what's the alternative? Well, there is DNSCurve, though I know even less about that as it's very much a fringe technology at this point. In fact, the first workable patch against djbdns was only released in the past few weeks. It's going to take some time to absorb what's out there, but based on the current move to DNSSEC, my general feeling is that no matter how much better DNSCurve may or may not be, it doesn't have much of a chance. Even so, there's a lot more to learn in this arena.

I also participated in a Security BOF. BOFs are, essentially, less structured talks on a given subject. There is a bit more audience participation and the audience tends to be a bit smaller. The Security BOF was excellent as there were conversations about abuse, spam, and methods of dealing with each. The spam problem is, of course, widespread and it's comforting to know that you're not the only one without a definitive answer. Of course, the flip side of that is that it's somewhat discouraging to know that even the big guys such as Google are still facing major problems with spam. The conversation as a whole, though, was quite enlightening and I learned a lot.

One of the more exciting parts of Nanog for me, though, was to meet some of the Internet greats. I've talked to some of these folks via email and on various mailing lists, but to meet them in person is a rare honor. I was able to meet and speak with both Randy Bush and Paul Vixie, both giants in their fields. I was able to rub elbows with folks from Google, Yahoo, and more. I've exchanged PGP keys with several people throughout the conference, serving as a geek's autograph. I have met some incredible people and I look forward to talking with them in the future.

If you're a network operator, or your interests lie in that direction, I strongly encourage you to make a trip to at least one NANOG in your lifetime. I'm hooked at this point and I'm looking forward to being able to attend more meetings in the future.