I, for one, welcome our new database-selling overlords.

In all honesty, I'm glad this regulatory dance is over. We've all been having a little itch in our brains about this. Even if any of us have had real work to do, we've been at least a little distracted by by this whole acquisition uncertainty.

Well, we're finally part of Oracle now, and I think that's pretty cool. Larry E. wants to butt heads with IBM and HP directly, and quite honestly, we at Sun have been doing that on-and-off for at least my not-quite-14-years here. Now that this uncertainty has been removed, we can at least narrow the uncertainty to any internal-to-Oracle decisions, which given certain statements both in the past and yesterday seem pretty encouraging, at least from my engineering perspective.

Jonathan said we should light a candle for Sun. As a prank gift for my 40th birthday, I got a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English. I think instead I will pour that 40 for Sun.

Wanna help your Girl Scouts? Not unless you have Windows. :-P

My wife is the "cookie mom" for our twin girls who are in Daisy Scouts. She was very surprised when she logged in to the regional Girl Scouts cookie site (URL withheld in case any rabid fanboys do something stupid), and discovered that apparently, she needs to use Windows and Internet Explorer.

Their user documentation says: "We do not provide Mac support," and "Use any (non-Mac) computer at home or at work or at the local library." Does this mean they support OpenSolaris, Linux, or *BSD? Naaah, didn't think so.

We're a no-Windows household. We have three Macs, one work-issued OpenSolaris laptop, and a homebuilt OpenSolaris server. Especially in this age of people understanding vendor lock-in as a Bad Idea (TM), I'm shocked and appalled.

I'm going to forward this to a few Mac sites, and maybe slashdot. I'm sure nothing's going to change, but at least this should be discussed a bit, no?

IKEv2 project page updated

The IKEv2 project page on opensolaris.org now has links to both an early-revision design document, and a webrev pointer.

OpenSolaris works out of the box with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Glenn Brunette asked me if OpenSolaris could access the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or not. I told him it had better, or else there was a bug. He then did some scripting work, got some BGP help from Sowmini, and consulted Sebastien on some tunneling details. It's now up, running, and in a nice package, ready to use.

IKEv2 project now on OpenSolaris

The IKEv2 project page is now available here on OpenSolaris. There's mailing-list information and a brief hello. We are working on design-level issues right now and some larval code, so c'mon over as we start to fire this up.

End-to-end Research Group is ending

Let me quote BBN's Craig Partridge on the Internet Research Task Force's end2end-interest mailing list:

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

After 26 years, the End-to-End Research Group has decided to cease existence
as of January 1st, 2010.  While there is certainly still end-to-end research
to be done, the group had ceased to effectively serve as a forum for those
discussions.

The E2E group had a great run, serving as a place where many researchers
could bring their ideas for initial, informal, airing.  The meetings could be
bruising.  (At one meeting, a member tried to encourage a speaker by saying
"We're all friends here" only to pause and say, "No, I'm sorry, actually we
eat our young, but proceed anyway").  But the meetings usually also brought
insights.

Ideas that were tested in E2E meetings include slow start and improved
round-trip time estimation, Random Early Drop, Integrated and Differentiated
Services, Weighted Fair Queuing, PAWS, and Transaction TCP.

When I learned about the group (and their enlightening e-mail list), my networking professor described it as covering, "End to end, and everything in between..." Now you half-dozen readers know the exact origin of my previous (was "this") blog's name.

Luckily, the mailing alias will still be around. Still, the cliche, "End of an era," really applies here. It's yet another sign of the Internet's maturity, and that the really new places for research are probably somewhere not a lot of people are examining.

Anyone else have something to say about the End-to-End Research Group going away?

FiOS vs. Comcast?

Hello you half-dozen readers! The simple question is stated above.

The full question is a bit more complicated. I currently am a mostly-satisfied Comcast business-class customer in a place with no other options. I will be moving to a place where I can choose between Verizon FiOS and Comcast business-class. My initial forays suggest I can keep my 6Mbit/1Mbit with /29 prefix of static IPs, or pay $20-30/month more and push it up to 20Mbit/5Mbit. Having 5Mbit out is very tempting, but apart from making my family download pictures from www.kebe.com faster, I'm not sure it's worth it.

Comcast won't bundle consumer TV and Phone with business-class Internet, will FiOS? And I have some technical issues with my /29 static IP block with Comcast. Will I have these the same with FiOS? Will I even be able to get a /29 with FiOS?

Any clues are, as always, welcome!