You read here and there that in IPv6, IPsec is mandatory; depending onwhich side of the firewall divide you're on, this either sounds great oralarming. But what does it actually mean? Recently, I got curious anddid some digging, and it turns out that it is less than it sounds.

The summary:

A conformant IPv6 implementation must be capable of IPsec, but doesnot have to use it for anything.

The IPsec RFCs spell out the mechanics of IPsec; how you go

I just rebooted and recovered one of our Linux machines that had hit apanic and then locked up in an endless cycle of ' soft lockup detectedon CPU #0 ' reports. I did all of this from home, through the magic of aserial console, a console server, and Linux's magic SysRq key support.And as far as I'm concerned, one of the best things about this is thatit took hardly any bandwidth and no Java .

(While I'm currently on DSL at

One of the important things about fighting spam, one that may not beimmediately obvious, is that there is no free lunch. Fighting spam cancost in the risk of false positives, or it can cost in people's time(sometimes you can spend money instead), but it always costs; youjust decide where you will pay the price.

(There are many ways that it can cost in people's time; for example,putting together and managing a spam filtering system. As illustratedhere,