for keeping track of my digital experiments

I had first heard about the Warehouse subversion browser a couple of months back. At the time it was still closed source and cost $30 per server license. Recently though, it went open source and is now freely available. For those of you with about 1-2 hours of time and know how to setup and run subversion on a Linux/Unix box (with WebDAV) it really isn’t that hard to get up and running.

I installed this on one of my home Debian Etch (4) servers and it took me about 30 minutes once I understood the entire process.

1. Install some necessary dependencies for building (I prolly left out a few) – make, rake, unzip, zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, libc6, gcc, cpp, g++
2. Install Ruby
   • download the latest tarball (source code in tar.gz) here – http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ – wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
     
   • run – tar xzvf ruby*.tar.gz – to open up the archive
   • cd into the directory – cd ruby*
   • configure, make and then install –> 1) ./configure 2) make 3) make install (as root)
3. Install Swig
   • download one of the latest tarballs – wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/swig/swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
   • unarchive the archive – tar xzvf swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
   • get into the directory – cd swig-1.3.31
   • configure, make, then install –> 1) ./configure 2) make 3) make install (as root)
4. Install Subversion and the Swig-Ruby bindings
   • download one of the latest subversion archives – wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.5.tar.gz
   • unarchive that sucker – tar xzvf subversion*.tar.gz
   • get into the directory that was just created – cd subversion*
   • configure for installation (and if you are missing anything be sure to install it!) – ./configure –enable-shared –enable-static –enable-debug –with-ssl –with-swig
   • make and install –> 1) make 2) make install
   • now install the swig-ruby bindings –> 1) make swig-rb 2) make install-swig-rb
5. Install various dependencies for later: apache2 with WebDAV support, ruby gems, MySQL server/client, PHPMyAdmin might be handy as well
6. Download the Warehouse source code – http://github.com/entp/warehouse/tree/master
7. Untar into where you want Warehouse to start from: tar xvzf, mv, and whatnot.
8. Setup a 3 MySQL databases (warehouse_test, warehouse_production, warehouse_dev) that can be accessed by 1 user for testing, production and development.
9. Now run the warehouse bootstrapping program and setup procedures. (No registration key needed now that it is open source, so leave that field blank.) – http://www.warehouseapp.com/installing/installing-and-registering-warehouse
10. In the Warehouse settings, be sure to setup warehouse so that it updates your WebDAV permissions and passwords.
    • Shell command to run when permissions are updated. This will auto-generate the necessary permission file for WebDAV: rake warehouse:build_config CONFIG=[warehouse directory]/config/access.conf
    • Shell command to run when someone’s password is updated. This will auto-generate the necessary password file for WebDAV: rake warehouse:build_htpasswd CONFIG=[warehouse directory]/config/htpasswd.conf

I was curious to know how much IPv4 address space Facebook actually has. I assumed that they run a large server cluster on their own, but you can’t be too sure.

So I ran a whois on Facebook’s frontend IPv4 address for www.facebook.com:

OrgName:    Thefacebook.com
OrgID:      THEFA-3
Address:    156 University Ave, 3rd floor
City:       Palo Alto
StateProv:  CA
PostalCode: 94301
Country:    US

NetRange:   69.63.176.0 – 69.63.191.255
CIDR:       69.63.176.0/20
NetName:    TFBNET2
NetHandle:  NET-69-63-176-0-1
Parent:     NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Assignment
NameServer: DNS1.SCTM.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS2.SCTM.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS04.SF2P.TFBNW.NET
NameServer: DNS05.SF2P.TFBNW.NET
[...]
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-11-23 19:10

I then ran a scan of their entire IPv4 address block, 4096 IPv4 address in total, and only 421 are used. Even if you subtract 16 IPv4 address for the necessary broadcast addresses, then that’s still a pretty low usage percentage (421/4080 is about 10%).

I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised, most companies are like this. They grab up quite a few blocks and then blame other people for the lack of IPv4 addresses.  Although IANA did reserve quite a few addresses for internal networks (about 18 million) and multicast addresses (about 16 million which don’t even route properly most of the time). That still leaves 4, 260, 967, 296 addresses though (2^32 – 34 million). Enough for much of the developed world. Well whatever happens, I just hope the transition over to IPv6 makes public Internet Protocol addresses available to more people in the digital industries. Heck 2^128 addresses is more than enough for everyone to have quite a few of their own IPv6 addresses. The only problem with that though is the routability issues caused by dividing up the public Internet into so many pieces.

The interesting thing that I found out from running a scan of Facebook’s IPv4 block is that they created a group debt tracker application called MoochSpot.

Simply shocking! This is a college mind you.