Advertising on WHOIS?
Crazy ideas by Network Solutions LLC
WHOIS is a simple TCP-based protocol that is widely used to provide human-readable information about domain names, registered networks, NIC handles and more. It dates from the old-ages of the Internet and is described in RFC 3912.
Usually you will use WHOIS to lookup the technical or administrative contact of a domain or network in case of technical (like DNS problems, routing trouble) or legal issues. Today I had a look at a .com domain and what I received was something like this:
$ whois ibm.com
Registrant:
International Business Machines Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US
Domain Name: IBM.COM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Promote your business to millions of viewers for only $1 a month
Learn how you can get an Enhanced Business Listing here for your domain name.
Learn more at http://www.NetworkSolutions.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin, IBM
IBM Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US
+1.9147654227 fax: +1.9147654370
Network Solutions has long been known to seek additional revenue from their NIC services by adding "creative" features, but selling ads in WHOIS (obviously available since the end of last year) just sounds crazy.
References
Compression: gzip vs bzip2 vs 7-zip
A trade-off between time and space
Today I had a look at the different options to compress files (in this case for backup purposes) on a Ubuntu system. The most common tools to compress files are gzip and bzip2. They have both been around for a long time, are available on most systems by default and are nicely integrated with other utilities like GNU tar (using its -z and -j options).
7-zip and the algorithm it uses (LZMA) is not that common on UNIX-like operating systems. It is well-known as a free alternative for WinZip on Windows systems and was started back in 1998. For Ubuntu p7zip – a port of 7-zip to POSIX – is available in universe (sudo apt-get install p7zip).
My test file was a MySQL dump with a size of 163 MB that contains mostly text. I was interested in the compressed file size and in the time it takes to compress and uncompress the file.
Here are the results:
| Compressor | Size | Ratio | Compression | Decompression |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| gzip | 89 MB | 54 % | 0m 13s | 0m 05s |
| bzip2 | 81 MB | 49 % | 1m 30s | 0m 20s |
| 7-zip | 61 MB | 37 % | 1m 48s | 0m 11s |
For the test I ran all tools with their default settings, i.e. without providing any special options.
Gzip is still a great tool and provides good compression without consuming a lot of computation power. Bzip2 is much slower and only provides slightly better compression. 7-zip consumes a bit more cycles than bzip2 but results in far smaller compressed files. Speed for decompression is even better for 7-zip than for bzip2.
So if time is important (think of on-the-fly compression) gzip is the tool of choice. If you don't care too much about processing speed and need very good compression have a look at 7-zip. The only advantage bzip2 has over 7-zip is that bzip2 is part of most default installations and is more common. Let's hope this will change in the future, especially integration with GNU tar would be great.
References