1) Nice – it was really refreshing to see something different!

2) Hmmm… Howcome Engineer Darling has blond hair and wears a skirt? That’s not for real, at least not in our data centre (editor’s comment: there are many other things in this film too that are not to be taken for real…)

3) It seemed professionally produced, but I felt discomfort watching it because it combined humour with murder.

Now, I know we took a small risk in putting this production online, because we were fairly certain not everyone has seen the original version of The Silence of the Lambs, having been released 20 years ago and all. On the other hand, the original remains one of only three films ever to have won the top five Academy Awards, so we figured there should be enough people out there able to pick up the references, and to enjoy the resulting dark comedy. Especially as the title of our remake is really a bit of a giveaway…

Below, please find both the original scene and our remake. The original is a bit shorter, but if you fast forward to 1:33 or thereabout in our remake, you should find our version of the famous “Rube” monologue.

Discomforting or not? You’ll be the judge.

In an article published by Financial Times today, the governments of Germany, the United Kingdom and France we’re calling for 30% CO2 emissions cut by 2020 in the European Union, instead of an earlier target of 20%. Apparently, the economic slowdown of 2008 – 2009 has done a great job in reducing the CO2 emissions, providing room for the higher cut target without impacting the investments required to get the job done. Whoever said nothing good comes out of a recession!

Since we’re talking about the three largest European economies here, the increased target for cuts is likely to impact all sectors of the industry here in the European Union, including information and communications technology. In fact, one of main the main reasons for the sudden change of heart was that Europe is now afraid it will be left behind of Asians as far as green technologies are concerned. The Chinese have invested some $40 billion into green technologies last year whereas Europeans were lagging some $10 billion behind.

Having introduced our first virtualization-ready software appliance already in late 2006 – co-incidentally about the same time as Al Gore came out with the blockbuster Inconvenient Truth – I always thought virtualizing applications and network services made perfect sense from both the ecological and the business perspective. After all, not only would this improve the energy efficiency and ecological footprint of Data Centres through more efficient use of CPU resources, but also reduce the emissions associated with logistics of traditional hardware-based appliances because software appliances can be electronically distributed without consuming too much kerosene in the process. Honestly said, it took a while before my little theory started to gain traction.

But since 2009 or so, we have seen an increasing number of green computing initiatives where enterprises and other organizations are migrating network services – including DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI) – into virtualized computing environments. And in most cases, this really isn’t done so much to save the Mother Earth but rather to save the Green Stuff known as money. Then again, with the exception of perhaps the most callous tree-huggers, I think most of us are really happy if enterprises and public entities can save money while becoming more energy efficient, without having to be thrown back to medieval times. Even if the whole climate change phenomenom was not caused by man, there really are no good reasons for wasting resources, them being scarce and all.

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Enough on the serious stuff.

To experiment with viral marketing and all things cool about web 2.0, we decided to contract a Finnish start-up called IR Visual Works to produce a Youtube video incorpating a well-know movie scene and DDI. The video is a remake of one of the best known scenes in The Silence of the Lambs – an academy award winner – and has been adjusted to the world of network admins and DDI.

To view the remake, just click the YouTube icon below.

Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you;
but particularly, don’t tell them where they know
the fish.

Mark Twain

I’m happy to tell you that one of the most prominent Internet Registries in the Western world just recently selected a DDI solution that included Nixu NameSurfer Suite. Unfortunately, I cannot name names because I’m under an NDA… Then again, Nixu Software has not been in the habit of announcing the DDI deals we have made. To a large extent, this is because we want to protect our customers privacy. The other reason for this policy is that being a growing and a profitable privately held company, it really is no news that Nixu Software has closed yet another DDI software appliance deal with xyz. Or perhaps we’re just rubbish at marketing!

Anyhow, as far as I’ve heard, the primary reason as to why this Internet Registry selected a Nixu-based solution as opposed to other hardware-based DDI solutions, was that ours was simply better than anything else. This was especially the case as far our IPv6 support was concerned. In fact, I was so thrilled to hear this, that I immediately asked my sales engineering team to prepare an IPv6 DDI Guide for all of you wishing to introduce IPv6 support to your DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI) environment. It’s now ready; it’s free; and you can have a look at it by clicking here.

Good stuff!

To find out where our IPv6 support stands vis-a-vis competitors such as Infoblox and Bluecat, I also asked my team to perform online searches on various threads and mail archives to find out what the community was thinking. Here’s one of the most enlightening threads I received: “What do you mean by DHCPv6?” asked the tech support…

The opportunity this offers to globally recognized brands is huge. Once the required logic has been incorporated into generally used web-browsers, the only thing a customer has to do is to type in the brand name in his/her browser. Canon and nothing else. With proper traffic analysis and good proxies, this allows the customer to be automatically forwarded to a localized website, without having to give any thought as to what the appropriate top-level domain used in connection with the brand name should be.

By running its own gTLD, an enterprise with a global brand no longer has to worry about the domain squatters that have reserved brand.xx(x) domain in some of the 200+ TLDs available to them, holding your brand at ransom. After all, as the customer only needs to type in the brand name, what user could be bothered with trying out addresses like canon.tv, a squatted Canon domain under Tuvalu ccTLD.

From the security perspetive, if a security concious enterprise has its own gTLD, it no longer has to worry about when and how it will be able to sign all its domains. If you are a global bank with its own gTLD and wish to utilize DNSSEC, you only need to provide the public key of “.globalbank” gTLD zone to the root (to be signed in 07/2010), after which the chain of trust to your own gTLD is complete. No need to worry about exchanging keys with various ccTLDs and gTLDs, reducing the administrative burden associated with DNSSEC.

Having worked with TLDs since the late 90s, we have seen this day coming for a long time. And so, on March 18 2010, we announced Nixu Registry Server, a productized Domain Name Registry Solution (DNRS) an entity needs when running their own gTLD and/or ccTLD. Nixu Registry Server is already being run in production by certain ccTLDs, so from the technology perspective there is nothing that prevents an organization from applying for its own gTLD. We are in the position to deliver an end-to-end solution for DNRS & DNS with look & feel customized to reflect your brand identity.

Better yet, we will also be happy to assume the responsibility for writing up the technical plan required by ICANN during the gTLD application process, to make sure that your investment in the application process yields a handsome return. Just contact our sales, and we’ll get you all set as far as the technology side of applying for -and running – a generic top-level domain is concerned!

For me, I guess this must have been sometime towards the end of the dotcom boom when I first started working closely with DNS. During those days, only the sky was the limit: the gurus I spoke with had ants in their pants and were telling me these new standards would be implemented very soon. Here’s a little illustration of what the last 10 years must have felt like for them:

In restrospect, it’s of course quite obvious why nothing really happened. By 2000 or so, practically all service providers and nearly all major enterprises had made major investments in IPv4 infrastructure. Therefore, it was more logical for them to enhance what they already had, rather than writing everything off and starting the IPv6 deployment from scratch. Not that the outcome would have necessarily been much better, either, as during those days the emerging standards were still rather immature. Heck, even IPv4 was a new thing back then in the big scheme of things.

Only 10 short years later, it finally looks like the grand vision painted a decade ago is about to unfold. During January 2010, ICANN made two announcements paving the way for both DNSSEC and IPv6 adoptation:

• DNSSEC Deployment at Root Zone
• Under 10% of IPv4 Space Remains

As far as DNSSEC is concerned, there have already been some work to nail down the Best Practices. European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) recently published a new guide on DNSSEC Best Practices – or a “Good Practices Guide for Deploying DNSSEC” as they called it. I believe this is one of the first guides from an organization that is not promoting their own DNSSEC solution, so it’s definitely a good read for anyone looking for impartial advice in this area.

On the IPv6 front, things are not moving quite as quickly, perhaps because both versions of IP are likely to co-exist for a long time. Yet it’s beginning to seem we are gradually getting there. Since introducing IPv6 support in Nixu NameSurfer Suite back in the early 00s, most of our customers investigating IPv6 and dual-stack networks have been focusing on DNS, routing and firewalls. But during the second half of 2009 also the RFCs for DHCPv6 were agreed upon. And although the unbiased Best Practices in this area are still being discussed and shaped, I’m fairly certain that the introduction of DHCPv6-compliant server products will speed up the pace of adoption quite significantly. Anyone who has attempted to manage IPv6 addresses manually will surely understand what I’m talking about!

From the network manager’s perspective, the perils with IPv6 and DNSSEC adoptation are largely related to the management routines that will become significantly more complex than what they currently are. With DNSSEC, a single resource record turns into five resource records that have to be edited / managed on regular basis. With IPv6, the syntax of addresses becomes so complex that manual DNS editing is simply not feasible anymore, especially in larger network environments. And this, my dear reader, is where Nixu Software steps in!

If you would like to learn more, please visit our website or contact our sales. We offer free 30-day trials at our website so if you’d like to test DNSSEC or IPv6 running Nixu DDI Products as VMs, it costs you only time.

Mahatma Gandhi

Our team at Nixu Software has been working hard over the last 10 months. So hard, in fact, that I haven’t found the time to post blogs. While this sort of behaviour can often be attributed to inertia, we have had our hands so full with assignments from organizations virtualizing their DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management systems that time for public relations has been scarce at best. Yet given that our work has translated into great traction both in terms of sales growth and sustained profitability, I’m pretty sure this prioritization was spot on, as it has allowed us to recruite more people freeing up my time for blogging!

Talking about inertia, there seems to be some whenever paradigms shifts occur. Today, I had a discussion with Gartner analyst regarding the DDI market (DDI = DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management) because I honestly thought we should have been included in their most recent DDI market analysis. After all, although Gartner’s DDI study states that any vendor worth mentioning in it should have annual sales of at least USD 5M, Nixu turned over roughly USD 12M in 2009, yet we still didn’t make it to the study. And better yet, there were a few competitors listed whose annual revenues are less than USD 5M.

Go and figure.

Anyhow, as it turned out, the analyst I spoke with said he had not seen any traction from enterprises as far as virtualizing their DDI services was concerned. From my perspective that sounded a bit odd, because we have seen a large number of rather notable governmental agencies, enterprises and service providers all over the world looking to virtualize these core network services among others. I’m talking about DDI deployments consisting of anywhere from 50 to 350+ DDI servers with centralized management systems, so one would assume they don’t go undetected. Yet on the analyst radar, server virtualization was for labs. Hardware-based appliances were the real deal and quite possibly the pinnacle of networking:

- On the 6th day, IT manager found the hardware appliance. On the 7th day he rested.

- Lucky for us, IT manager had to return to office on Monday.

Here’s a little quizz for those of you who think that DDI virtualization is for labs. Are enterprises experimenting with virtualization because:

a) It’s a fun diversion from the harsh realities of our world?

b) Opposite sex thinks tweaking virtual servers is cool?

c) Their managers think that one of these days their company will save a bundle by making the test environment a reality and consolidating most of their dedicated servers to virtualized computing environment?

Of course everything is relative and sometimes answers a) and b) might be correct. But for the most part, we have found that our enterprise customers think option c) is the winner.

Lastly, to really understand what virtualization is all about, please click the picture below. You’ll find dollars and numbers in motion. If you would like these virtual dollars to float your way, you’d better contact our sales now.

In my next blog entry, I’ll be talking about two other emerging technologies suffering from inertia, IPv6 and DNSSEC. Stay tuned for more.

During times like this, I think it’s pretty healthy for companies to start looking around for weak signals on where the world is heading after the smoke has cleared, to see if their strategy still aligns with the world we live in once the next upturn starts. After all, economic downturns and downright recessions are capitalism’s way of cleaning up the table, to pave the way for new technologies and companies that make this world a better place for us all to live in. When the next upturn comes – and trust me, it will come - we all want to make sure that we have positioned ourselves right bearing the new situation in mind.

There’s actually a great little book that relates to this, Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, M.D. It’s a story about two little mice, Sniff and Scurry, and about two little people, Hem and Haw. While the two little mice are always quick to sense the upcoming change and act upon it immediately, Hem and Haw are more concerned about preserving the status quo and enjoying their comfortable lifestyle, until they realize that someone moved their cheese. As far as Nixu Software is concerned, we’ve always tried to act like Sniff and Scurry, the two agile mice, rather than as Hem and Haw.

Of course, being a mouse doesn’t come without downsides. There will always be cats around. Some of these cats are copycats tempted by the quality and the quantity of the cheese Sniff and Scurry found from the Maze. Some are there only for the thrill of chasing down the mice, with little genuine regard for the cheese itself. And the cats come in all colours: some of them are black, some white, and some blue. Luckily, as long as Sniff and Scurry have found their quality cheese in time, they have gained a rat-like size that helps them in keeping the cats at bay. Especially if the cat is just a kitten that doesn’t walk his talk.

Now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with virtualization-ready DNS, DHCP and IPAM software appliances. Please allow me to explain.

Today, I noticed that Bluecat Networks had become rather tempted by the cheese Nixu Software has found and wants to join the party. As such, we’re significantly ahead of the competition in this space and so I’m more than happy to welcome anyone to compete with us. Especially as Copycat… sorry… Bluecat Networks doesn’t even have a virtual appliance they could offer to the market. This is a direct quote from their press release published this week: ”BlueCat Networks will be making its virtual appliances available to select customers for Early Adopter testing.” Will be making… Select customers… Early Adopter testing… I guess Copycat thinks selling paperware as opposed to software is a great strategy!

But not having products is not why I decided to write this blog. Rather, this entry stems from the comedy of the visual elements they are now using at Bluecat Networks’ website. Below, please see a screenshot of Nixu Software’s website that has been online for a lot more than a year now:

Here is Bluecat’s new homepage they published this week:

Notice any similarities?

No products and visual clues ripped off from others… Well, at least they were able to write the press release.

As it turned out, they were more or less spot on: server virtualization did indeed gain some serious momentum over the last 12 months, and we saw a flurry of end-user organizations migrating their DNS, DHCP and IPAM servers to virtual computing environments. And so, although the news headlines have been all about doom and gloom over the last few months, the market for Nixu Software’s virtualization-ready DNS, DHCP and IPAM software appliances has remained as strong as ever. In fact, we’re now projecting solid three-figure growth (as in hundreds of percent) for H1 2009 vs. H1 2008, regardless of the economic turmoil that surrounds us.

Now, if you are even close to being as critical as I am, and have been reading money.cnn.com as of late,  you might be wondering if yours truly is a) delusional, b) full of it xxit, c) something of a simpleton, or d) all of the above. Rest assured, I am none. Rather, I think our recent success is explained by two factors: server virtualization and Mordacs. Please check out the link and allow me to explain.

This comic strip on Mordac depicts a classic example of what happens when organizations end up running plain BIND and DHCPD servers in their network. Mordac compiles the source code on the OS of his choice… Then he does a bit of fine-tuning… A few little configs here and there… And a few short weeks later, voilá – you now have at least somewhat operational DNS and DHCP services in your network.

Now that Mordac has taken care of his job, he goes on holiday. He has deserved it, mind you, because of all the hard work he put into building you a network. And although Mordac already had used up all his annual leave, his boss has no other choice but to allow him to venture off to Russia, because Mordac happens to be holding the entire organization a hostage. If Mordac left, his boss would have to write off the entire business infrastructure as no one else really knows how all that stuff works. Mordac has put it all together, you see. And while this of course is all good news for Mordac’s perceived job security, it’s not so good news for his employer, being at the other end of the stick and all.

And so, while Mordac is still submarining away somewhere off the Siberian coastline, his boss starts asking the difficult questions. He knows they’ll have to cut down the overheads in the near term, so he has started thinking about consolidating their network services and applications to a virtual computing environment. This would reduce the server management overheads, as well as create savings on the utilities and data centre costs. He has also been thinking about finding a supported, commercial DNS and IPAM solution that would allow his team to simplify network management, to streamline operations. This would allow him to transfer Mordac into more productive development projects where he got some real work done, rather than hiding away in the broom closet with the DNS servers, as he usually does. After all, Mordac’s boss is currently paying a consultant $200 per hour to do this work, so assigning Mordac to these tasks would save the organization almost $30,000 per month.

Surfing the Internet, Mordac’s boss lands at Nixu Software’s homepage. These guys are selling software appliances for DNS, DHCP and IPAM that even the boss himself can install in 10 minutes. Better yet, these Nixu Products are available as software appliances that can be run as VMs on his Citrix and VMware platforms at only $495 per server per year, without the cost of hardware and hw maintenance associated with hardware appliances. And this $495 per server per year, by the way, is almost exactly the same amount that Mordac costs his company each day…

My prediction for 2009? More of the same.

To learn more about Nixu Products, please visit www.nixusoftware.com.

As many of you know, Citrix has put a massive development effort into the latest XenServer 5, to create an enterprise / carrier grade virtualization platform offering the level of performance and availability required in business critical production environments. Having visited the Citrix Summit in Orlando this October and seen XenServer 5.0 in action, I couldn’t help but to be immensely impressed with what they had done. All the right qualities and features were there: performance, availability and user-friendly management utilities all in a competitively priced, affordable package.

As I have said here before, Nixu Software’s strategy is based on the assumption that to show return on virtualization investment, organizations must virtualize as many (network) services and applications as possible. To put this into a context, I think iPod serves as a great analogy: while iPod is certainly a great MP3 player, it would be of very little value to its owners if they didn’t have any music files in the player. In much the same way, no matter how great a virtualization platform you were running, it would be of very little value if you did not run any services or applications in it.

Of course, another thing that made iPod a huge hit for Apple was the fact that they were smart enough to launch iTunes along with iPod. Had it been difficult to download MP3 files to iPods, it would have been only the hardcore Apple fanatics and early-adopters who could have been bothered to do it. But with an online service such as iTunes, quality content was readily available to anyone and could easily be exported to, and run in, iPod.

Following this same analogy, we decided to certify Nixu Products as Citrix Ready. The idea here is to make it as easy and cost-efficient as possible for end-users running Citrix XenServer to migrate their existing DNS, DHCP and IPAM to virtual machine environment. To verify the viability of this proposition, Citrix agreed to test Nixu Products in-house to make sure that our products really are as good as we claim. And they were.

To find out Citrix’s exact position on Nixu Products, please click here to read Craig Ellrod’s excellent blog entry at Citrix Community on his impressions on the goods we deliver. Should this make you interested in giving them a go yourself, all you have to do is to register an evaluation at our website, download an ISO installation media, and boot up a new virtual machine in your XenServer. There are a few simple steps you will have to take to switch the resulting vm to paravirtualized mode – please find the instructions below.

Paravirtualizing Nixu Products in Citrix XenServer

1. Obtain Nixu SNS, Nixu DHCP Server, or Nixu NameSurfer Suite ISO image installation media and license key from www.nixusoftware.com.

2. Burn the ISO image on CD (or use virtual CD-drive)

3. Install Citrix XenEnterprise 4.1.0 or newer

4. Create a new VM using “Other Install Media” option; at the minimum, allocate 256MBs of RAM, 6-8GBs of disk space, and 1 CPU.

5. Create the VM and boot it from the ISO image. For basic installation, select “single” in the hard drive setup.

6. Log in and configure ip address, netmask and gateway for the Nixu Product. When installing Nixu NameSurfer Suite, execute installation script after this; please note that Nixu SNS and Nixu DHCP Server will execute installation script automatically.

7. Install XenTools and the accompanying kernel:

# cd /media

# mount cdrom

# cd cdrom/Linux

# ./install.sh

Kernel for Nixu products running CentOS 4 platform is:

vmlinuz-2.6.9-67.0.4.EL.xs4.1.0.19xenU

8. Shut down the VM.

9. Change the VM to PV guest as follows (the instructions have been extracted from:

http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/anilma/2008/07/02/Installing+Ubuntu+on+XenServer)

From the control domain console of your XenServer:

9a) Determine the UUID of the Nixu Product VM (e.g. Nixu SNS) by using the xe CLI:

# xe vm-list | more

<click-drag to highlight. Right click to copy, paste uuid.>

If you are logged into the control domain, pressing the <tab> key will perform auto-completion of UUIDs in subsequent XE commands, so you don’t need to keep typing it in every time!

9b) Clear the HVM Boot mode from the VM:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> HVM-boot-policy=

9c) Switch the VM to using to the pygrub bootloader which starts the guest in PV mode by examining its filesystem for kernel:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> PV-bootloader=pygrub

9d) configure the kernel boot arguments to display the login console on the correct TTY, so that it shows up in the XenCenter console:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> PV-args=”console=tty0 xencons=tty”

9e) Next, you need to flag the root disk of the VM as bootable so that pygrub knows where to look for the PV kernel:

# xe vm-disk-list uuid=<uuid>

9f) Look for the UUID of the VBD for the disk. VBD stands for “Virtual Block Device” and represents how to map the virtual disk into the virtual machine:

# xe vbd-param-set uuid=<vbd uuid> bootable=true

This will set the root disk VBD to be bootable.

9g) Start the VM and check that Virtualization in General tab is “Optimized” and everything works:

# xe vm-start uuid=<vm uuid>

Anyhow, assuming you share my fascination towards detective stories and DNS, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the story on Kaminsky Vulnerability published in the latest issue of Wired Magazine. It’s almost like reading a detective short story – but unlike most short stories, this one is based on reality.  To read the article online, please click here.

As an interesting sidenote, Andreas Gustafsson appearing in this story is actually the same guy who was the mastermind behind the proprietary primary DNS server we still use in Nixu NameSurfer today. After having developed the ‘ns process’ used in our proprietary DNS server, Andreas moved on to Nominum to develop BIND 9. But this of course is a different story altogether, with no detectives involved!