Datacentre
May/100
This week, the owners of the datacentre where 2020Media colocates it servers officially opened their third building on the Docklands site. In a colourful ceremony involving Japanese saké barrels and glitz and glamour, we were reminded how Telehouse pioneered datacentres in the UK, and how they have maintained their status as the key networking hub of the UK. This is important to 2020Media, as we aim to provide the very fastest connection speeds for our servers and broadband customers.
The evening was rounded off with a speech by Mike Harris about technology pioneers who came out of the blue to disrupt the incumbent processes of the day (Twitter is the most recent). It was also great to hear Tim Berners-Lee described as the inventor of the internet yet again.
Results of HTML/Text email survey
May/100
Newsletter Format Preference
In our April newsletter (sign up on the right) we ran a survey asking if our customers preferred to get their newsletters in HTML or plain-text format. The results have been checked and counted by our resident bean-counters and it was a close result. If we’d had a third option we’d probably be feeling like the Lib-Dems.
56% preferred HTML newsletters
44% preferred plain-text newsletters
Internet Policy – you decide
May/100
How you can become involved and help ICANN to shape the future of the Internet
ICANN, the governing body of the internet is holding two web meetings on 20th May 2010 that are aimed at you. The sessions will be held on Thursday 20 May at 12.00 GMT and 19.00 GMT, and will use a webinar format – all you’ll need is a web browser and internet connection to listen or participate.
If you are wondering whether a role in Internet policy development could benefit your or your organization’s long-term goals, it’s well worth joining.
In order to participate, we suggest you read the announcement here: WEBINAR: Policy Development at ICANN and sign up to join in.
Blackberry Firewall List
Apr/100
It may help to be aware that Blackberry/RIM publish a list of the IP addresses that they use for connections to internet server providers.
The list can be found here.
2020Media’s email services are fully supported on Blackberry mobile devices and we encourage anyone using one to configure their 2020Media email for use remotely.
The best way is to use IMAP for connection as it is the fastest.
Flood and Fire in Paddington affects Broadband
Apr/100
Burne House (courtesy of Google streetview)
A central London network node belonging to BT disastrously flooded and caught fire yesterday.
The incident at Burne House in north Paddington affected landlines, broadband and mobile services across the west of London. Over 400 local exchanges are connected from this site, so connectivity was also affected across the south east and further afield.
“The flood water has been removed from the exchange building overnight and power supply has begun to be restored,” BT said this morning.
“We are now beginning to restore communications services to customers and this work will continue throughout the day.”
The impact of the great torrent/inferno was even felt on the continent. There have been reports that roaming for Vodafone, O2 and 3 customers in Austria is currently down, with operators pointing the finger at Paddington.
Read more at TheRegister
Excluding directories in AJP ProxyPass
Feb/100
Configuring Apache with Tomcat
You might have ProxyPass configured to pass all requests to Tomcat. However its better to serve some content directly from Apache for speed – images for instance. If you arrange your site into a well planned folder structure you can exclude certain folders in proxy_ajp.conf.
You might have this:
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8080/
Just add this line BEFORE the catch-all above:
ProxyPass /images ! ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8080/
The file is parsed in order, so the exclude must come first.
Watch out for more Tomcat tips and tricks in the future. Information on our market leading Tomcat hosting can be found here
UK Internet Governance Forum
Feb/100
Internet Governance Forum
2020Media attended the recent UK internet governance forum, held at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills on 3rd February.
The meeting brought together reports from the international Sharm El Sheikh meeting, and discussed the future of the IGF. Chaired by a cross-party group of MPs, the meeting attracted representatives, from amongst others, Nominet, Childnet, LINX, Internet Safety groups and regional goverment.
Although 2020Media is a small part of the internet in the UK, we believe participation in events like the UK Internet Governance Forum is important. At the moment, we are lucky enough that we as ordinary users and businesses can have a say in the governance and direction of internet strategy so it’s essential that we exercise that right.
One of the sections focussed on GreenIT, which we promote through EcoServ, a division offering highly efficient dedicated servers and virtualisation technology.
2020Media IPv6 rollout plans
Jan/100
2020Media has begun its roll out of IPv6 address space.
Our IPv6 range, 2a00:19e8::/32 is now active and our technical staff have received RIPE training.
A /32 by the way equates to a mind-boggling number of internet IP addresses – 18,446,744,073,709,552,000! Customers can expect to receive /64 addresses (2ˆ64 ip numbers).
For an overview of our plans, see: www.2020media.com/ipv6
the RIPE IPv6 Training Course
New internet addresses – IPv6
Jan/100
The imminent end of the Internet as we know it approaches – our IPv4 addresses are running out fast. Less than 10% of the original 4 billion remain. Internet service providers will have to ration their stocks of existing address blocks and growth will become more difficult.
The solution? IPv6 addresses are plentiful and easy to obtain. The problem is that the transition is already years behind of schedule.
Having completed internal testing and analysis, we’re delighted to announce that 2020Media will be rolling out IPv6 in 2010 to both hosting and broadband customers.
Problems still exist though: For instance, at the time of writing, there are NO consumer broadband modems that support IPv6. And of the top 500 websites (tracked by Alexa), only 1 supports Ipv6.
So even if you can get connected via IPv6, chances are you won’t be able to see any websites!
2020Media is participating in an ISOC project to map and present data on the takeup of IPv6 by the worlds leading websites and companies. More information on our plans.
What is a QR Code?
Dec/093
Google recently sent out 100,000 stickers to selected US businesses for use on their storefront windows. The stickers have the Google Maps logo and a QR (Quick Reference) code that can be scanned by smart phone cameras and display Google listings for the business on the phone screen.
Point your QR Code reader at this
A camera is often included in mobile phones, portable gaming devices and PDAs, so rather than laboriously copy down the details, these 2D bar codes provide a quick way to transfer simple information.
You can generate your own bar codes at the QR-Code Generator website. To read them, you’ll need an application linked to your camera. Try search your ‘phone’s application store, or take a look on google for QR Code reader
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