Internet Archive

The US House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

"What ever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the web? Back in the late 90s, all the hype was about VRML - Virtual Reality Markup Language - which would turn the web into an immersive environment that you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here to tell you that the reports of the 3D web's death are greatly exaggerated. As evidence, we present three 3D browsers that will use that graphics card for something other than gaming: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer."

Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%. Apache's lead over Microsoft, which stood at 48.2% in March, has been narrowed to 31.5%, a shift of 16.7% in just three months.

"In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_cband on an Apache2 web server. mod_cband is an Apache 2 module which provides bandwidth quota and throttling. It solves the problem of limiting users' and virtualhosts' bandwidth usage. The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."

Plans for an area of the internet dedicated to pornography were killed last night in a vote by overseeing organisation ICANN. In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain.

"In this article I will describe how to monitor your server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected."

Apache has overtaken Microsoft as the leading developer of secure web servers. Apache now runs on 44.0% of secure web sites, compared to 43.8% for Microsoft. As the original developers of the SSL protocol, Netscape started out with a lead in the SSL server market. But they were soon overtaken by Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which within a few years held a steady 40-50% of the SSL server market.

"One area of Web design that is going to become more important in the coming years is high DPI. For those of us working on WebKit, this will also become an issue for WebKit applications and for Dashboard widgets." Why? "On a screen with 1920x1200 resolution the Web site is going to be tiny, taking up less than 50% of the screen's width and half the screen's height. In terms of absolute size, the text will be much smaller and harder to read."

Analytics firm comScore Networks announced Monday the results of its February measurement of instant messenger usage around the world, with Europe surpassing the United States in IM users for the first time. MSN Messenger was also ranked as the most used client, garnering 61 percent of the worldwide market. According to the survey, 82 million people in Europe use instant messaging software, amounting to 49 percent of the online population. In the United States only 69 million of people use IM, or 37 percent of the online population. Latin America had the highest IM penetration covering 64 percent of Web users.

"Linux system administrators should learn traditional DNS. Front-ends and quick templates to setup domain records have a place in managing sites. When confronted with DNS configurations already in existence, nothing can substitute for knowing and using the fundamentals. The vast majority of users on the Internet have no clue about DNS. They may have seen the term when they set up their ISP connection, but they do not realize its connection to their lives. Simply put, DNS servers allow you to use friendly names in your browser, email or other Internet applications to perform tasks which require IP addresses."

"A second test version of the next generation of the open source file and print sharing software Samba has been released to the public, with numerous bugfixes and feature improvements included. The Samba suite is an implementation of Microsoft's SMB/CIFS protocol that allows other operating systems to emulate or interoperate with Windows for the purposes of sharing files or printing. The upgraded Samba software can be downloaded here."

"This tutorial shows you how to configure BIND9 DNS server to serve an internal network and an external network at the same time with different set of information. To accomplish that goal, a new feature of BIND9 called view is used. As a tutorial it'll walk you through the whole set up, but initial knowledge of BIND and DNS is required, there are plenty of documents that cover that information on the Internet."

"This tutorial explains how I was able to setup a web server in order to support Java Server Pages and Servlets using virtually hosted websites. I have spent a lot of time gathering several resources in order to get this to work. Many portions of these resources have been deprecated and required a few workarounds. It is my intention that this tutorial will help anyone that has attempted to install such a system without success."

"SCTP is a reliable, general-purpose transport layer protocol for use on IP networks. While the protocol was originally designed for telephony signaling, SCTP provided an added bonus - it solved some of the limitations of TCP while borrowing beneficial features of UDP. SCTP provides features for high availability, increased reliability, and improved security for socket initiation. This article discusses the key features of SCTP in the Linux 2.6 kernel and takes a look at the server and client source code that shows the protocol's ability to deliver multi-streaming."