This morning, I joined the eCHO livestream to chat about a feature I worked on for the Cilium 1.12 release! Discussed delegated IPAM and my experience as a first-time contributor to the Cilium project.
KubeCon this year featured a panel discussion of IPv6 adoption. One of the panelists mentioned in passing that many organizations are unprepared for the security implications IPv6. With IPv4, most addresses were hidden by NAT; with IPv6, addresses are publicly routable. Firewalls can block external traffic, but might not be configured correctly.
So I did an experiment on my home network. Would enabling IPv6 expose my devices on the public internet?
This is the second post of a two-part series on Starcraft and late-90s networking. Part 1 describes Starcraft’s many connection options.
Configuring Starcraft networking in 1998 was an adventure. There were four different connection options (plus AppleTalk on Macintosh computers), each of which required specific software and hardware to function. How did anyone figure this stuff out?
It turns out that the Starcraft CD included detailed support documentation. Today, this provides a glimpse of computing history circa 1998.
Writing about multiplayer Starcraft reminded me how strange networking was in 1998. I remember connecting a computer to a modem, which was connected to a phone line (many homes had a second phone number specifically for this purpose). The modem would dial a number and “talk” to a modem on the other end.1
Networking two computers over a phone line seems bizarre to me now. You could connect without an IP address, packet switching, routers, network address translation, or firewalls – all the things we take for granted today.
Over twenty years ago, I wrote my first networked program, a multiplayer card game. My original plan was to position two iMacs directly facing each other, six inches apart, and use the built-in infrared port to transmit data. Then my dad bought me an Ethernet cable – this proved a much better solution. For LAN networking, the program used the AppleTalk protocol, sending the entire game state (several KB!) between clients on every frame.
