Tuesday 21 July 2009
By gregoire on Tuesday 21 July 2009, 01:04
Wow... In my everlasting quest to learn new ServerSignature strings when
surfing on the web, I used to Telnet_80 some random hostnames I'm used to
paying visits to.
Nothing fancy here, really.
Then I became curious about which servers were the most used.
Continue reading...
Monday 27 April 2009
By gregoire on Monday 27 April 2009, 00:54
Once a year, when peeking at the user agents landing on it, you notice
something like this: 
It used to be all Linux, Macintosh with Firefox, Opera and Safari... :'(
Xtra Speshul str33T kredZ to the ZyBorg robot which makes its way to the browsers list, any luck
finding porn in here ? :p
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Wednesday 22 April 2009
By gregoire on Wednesday 22 April 2009, 02:27
Been a while since this video was released, but I came across it while
looking up my bookmarks.
I found it very inspiring back then, and still do. The slides that go with the
presentation can be found here:
Guy Kawasaki's art of innovation
Some well spent 55mins if you ask me :)
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Saturday 21 March 2009
By gregoire on Saturday 21 March 2009, 04:40
Since Web2.0 has been the new namedropping combo that made raising millions
for selling available brain time a walk in the park, I've been trying to look
out for what was not visible and practically making it possible. Beyond the
obvious names that make their way to the headlines and get to be mentioned in
the press as inspiring, mindblowing, groundbreaking (you name whatever
superlative best suits you), I came to realize that there are some silent
players that would rather spend time achieving, breaking new barriers in a
quite yet very silent way.
The interesting thing about genius minds is that they don't do press releases.
They let their achievements speak instead of their ego. For that they deserve
street credit. Presumably way more than techie trolls between grease monkeys at
the coffe maker in your average Web2.0 systems/dev/network engineering
teams.
I've very often dreamed I was responsible for strategic acquisitions in an
infinite cash giant company. Who hasn't. Starting from there, I wondered which
where the companies I would like to purchase, that were silent but massive
symbols of what makes web2.0 possible. For technically illiterate people,
Web2.0 is just AJAX. It now goes far away beyond that. Web sites are no more.
There are web applications, web platforms. A software interconnect mapping
web's applications together through APIs, some sort of social and logical layer
mapped over the internet.
As any concept of this magnitude, it all relies on technical bits and pieces.
Here's my own private shopping list of companies and products which I think
brought major products and concepts that truly symbolizes the essence of
web2.0.
I must reckon that when I compare the very little profesional achievements I've
had so far to what some of the brands and products listed below actually
deliver, it surely makes me comfortable to see that the complex technical stuff
is taken care of. All I'm saying here to the CTOs around the world is that you
never spend enough time to try and see the hidden part of the iceberg if you
don't deliberately try to raise above your daily technical issues. Please read
the below, you might not agree with my side of the story, but at least it could
be refreshing.
Oh and before I start, I just want to make it clear that I have no shares
in any of the below listed Companies. Neither do I absolutely want to work for
any of the below companies. I just found it could be interesting to share my
view on a few selected names that I think lead the whole Internet 2.0 industry,
directly or indirectly. Enjoy!
Continue reading...
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Thursday 19 March 2009
By gregoire on Thursday 19 March 2009, 00:21
Since I'm a marketing guy now, I might as well sink into metaphysical
consideration when it comes to the field of expertise that I'm working on
daily. Let's try this, I'll go over the different ways of Delivering Content
over the Internet and then wander on each one and deliver some random thoughts
on my current and past experience. The good thing here is that I've been
working pretty much on every side of the story: ISPs, Carriers, Internet
eXchanges and even massive Content Networks. I guess I learned a lot from every
of those experiences, from end user Access Technologies constraints to ISPs'
national backbones, through central/decentralized content platforms finally to
CDN provider.
Sit back, get popcorn ready, treat yourself a beer, this might take a few
articles :)
Continue reading...
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Monday 15 September 2008
By gregoire on Monday 15 September 2008, 00:35
CDN is -teh- new trend in the internet industry. That is a fact. Here we go,
Media meet Internet, Internet meet Media. What you never thought possible
happened: the nerdy sysops met the broadcast men in black. Two worlds that
everyone deeply thought would never collide. CDN ( Content Delivery
Networking ) is todays latest toy for IT deciders and newly born
startups, just as MPLS VPNs were a decade ago. When billion dollar CSI:Miami
actor David Caruso founds a streaming media company, the
uneducated masses start investigating on what CDN is...
Continue reading...
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Sunday 14 September 2008
By gregoire on Sunday 14 September 2008, 17:49
I don't work in internet architecture anymore. Call it growing old, call it
going the easy way, on the whole, I was ready for a change, I was offered
change, I signed for it. Still, I will under no circumstance give up digging on
network tech news in the industry to keep up with sharpening my vision of the
technological ecosystem. Although I'm done (for the moment) with being a grease
monkey, I need that technical background to do whatever I'm doing right
now.
Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, I'd like to share with the very
few out there following my nerdy posts some of the frustrations I've been
accumulating over my past Internet Engineering years.
This oughta be fun
Continue reading...
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Monday 12 May 2008
By gregoire on Monday 12 May 2008, 20:55
I came across this link on a mailing list: Internet
Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
For once, this legal text is clear, and does take into account technical
realities. It also succeeds to this one: Internet
Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 . After several bad surprises in Europe,
and having to admit that EU hasn't yet realized Net Neutrality is a key element
in Internet's Future, it is really pleasant to read that at least one country
has a decent vision of how things should still be done. Congrats, Mr. CONYERS
and Ms. ZOE LOFGREN for such a brief and detailed Bill !
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By gregoire on Monday 12 May 2008, 11:56
Monday 14 April 2008
By gregoire on Monday 14 April 2008, 15:49
I've spent 2007 designing and implementing a content network for a company
that dealt massive outbound bandwidth. I won't insist on the exact volumes, nor
on the company's name, but the volumes I talk about were more than the smaller
ISPs in France.
Back in end 2006, when we thought copious amounts of bandwidth was
THE leverage for getting cheaper transit per meg costs, we
soon noticed that it would get harder and harder to peer with such
volumes.
In our very naive mind, we would have thought that us, content
providers where the ones to make plain internet
access interesting.
We obviously were wrong...
Continue reading...
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Thursday 3 April 2008
By gregoire on Thursday 3 April 2008, 11:37
For those interested in foundry's RX/MLX/XMR releases, a new version has
been released, ironware 3.8
I heard loads of people complaining about Foundry's level of features being way
below Cisco's, which was initially true. What I noticed is that development on
Ironware is pretty damn fast.
Continue reading...
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Monday 31 March 2008
By gregoire on Monday 31 March 2008, 16:15
This is pretty new to me, but I've given my 1st engineering school course
last Friday, at ESIGETEL, a
French IT & Network engineering school, which I am proud to be a former
student.
Anyways, the prezo can be found in here, careful
though: it is in french. I'll certainly translate it
sometimes.
This has been a truly interesting both human and professional experience, I'll
certainly do it over with great pleasure if the opportunity comes up
again.
enjoy!
[ edit 2008-04-15 ]
For those who are more into video presentations, I've had a shot at this course
in the form of a video interview with my man Jean-Michel (Oleane, Witbe, does
this remind you anything ? well, he's the man behind all that...):
here is is, again, provided you can read french...
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Sunday 30 March 2008
By gregoire on Sunday 30 March 2008, 16:39
I recently read an article mentioning Google was actually manufacturing
switches of its own, for 10G Server Distribution in their datacenters. I found
the article on Nyquist Capital , which actually based their assumption on
tracing the massive purchase of SFP+ components in the optics market. From what
we can learn, Google has around 450.000 servers in its "Google Grid", spreaded
over the many datacenters they own and rent.
Continue reading...
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Monday 3 March 2008
By gregoire on Monday 3 March 2008, 11:31
The events
On 24th Feb, 2008, the whole world became unable to reach YouTube
(AS36561). What happened, is that Pakistan Telecom
(AS17557), who had decided to blacklist YouTube, started
announcing one of their prefixes, but in a more specific way (i.e. announcing a
/24 within a /20). This would have ended-up armlessly if PCCW
(AS3491), on of their upstreams, hadn't re-announced this
prefix to all of their peers (PCCW is a pretty big carrier, with quite a few
transit customers...). This /24 range contained YouTube's DNS, so that Pakistan
Telecom have been blackholing YouTube for about one hour.
Continue reading...
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Wednesday 20 February 2008
By gregoire on Wednesday 20 February 2008, 12:08
I was recently browsing wikipedia, looking for some info to illustrate accurately what people
had been calling IPv5 (yes, it did exist and still does), when I came accross
an article about IPv9.
Continue reading...
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Tuesday 5 February 2008
By gregoire on Tuesday 5 February 2008, 10:06
I'm a big NANOG reader -
plus right now, I'm working on a project in Middle East and of course have
witnessed many of the recent traffic changes towards those destinations.
The info has been relayed on many sites already, detailing four
Mediterranean undersea fiber cable cuts, centered around the Persian
Gulf.
Continue reading...
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Thursday 31 January 2008
By gregoire on Thursday 31 January 2008, 02:44
It had been a while since CISCO hadn't come with any new switching platform.
They had been living on 65xx/76xx for ages, without any significant changes nor
anything new against their traditional ethernet switching competitors: Foundry being currently
considered as the new switching reference, and Force10 as the most
aggressive competitor, with their very dense E-Series
Continue reading...
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By gregoire on Thursday 31 January 2008, 01:43
I suck at scripting... man I really do. I was today looking for means to get
all of the aut-num reccords
(aut-num definition here) for a given country. in other terms I wanted to find a listing
of all networks within a given country, for instance to evaluate the amount of
potential networks to peer with.
Continue reading...
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Monday 31 December 2007
By gregoire on Monday 31 December 2007, 10:10
I will be posting here and there in this blog, trying to not let it die,
which I can't really promise as I'm being quite busy at the moment.
Stay tuned, things might happen that'd be worth reading, and oh, by the way
welcome to Diaries of an Internet Soldier of Fortune.