Putting on a lot of miles this week

Friday was a fairly standard fall weekend for my family: work all day, arrive home after work, pack up the Suburban and then drive to the beach. Sunday (yesterday) it was the reverse and now I'm back in Raleigh only to leave again tonight for the same destination. It's a one-day overnight trip and I'll be back Tuesday night.

The only bright spot is after all this driving I'm NOT going back this weekend!! I think I'll need a break!!

The Suburban also hit the 70,000 mile mark on the trip back. My estimates are the big guy needs to last at least 250,000 miles more.

The greatest product ever?

This is an alarm clock. That cooks bacon. Yes, that's right, wake every morning to the wonderful aroma of cooked bacon. How? Simply place frozen bacon in the tray before bed and ten minutes before the alarm sounds two tiny heat lamps cook the bacon. When the alarm sounds the room is full of one of the greatest aromas known and optimally cooked bacon is awaiting you as you greet the day.

Genius? I think so. Seen at Coolest Gadgets dot com. I'm sure Think Geek will be carrying this in no time.

Mayor Nagin? Mayor Ray Nagin?

Is that you?

It's a home rin!

Typo found in Ciscoworks: "NS0033 : Error occured while processing. This may be because of Could not connect to JRM".

Sorry. Errors "occur" but have "occurred".

Some of the special characters in the error window did not copy so I'll forgive the grammatical "lost in translation" that occurs in the last collection of words that you can't read as a coherent sentence.

Humorous perhaps only to me.

I'm a PC (commercial series)

I have to admit, the "I'm a PC" ads from Microsoft are much better than the previous attempt at product enlightenment a-la the failed and horrible "Microsoft Mohave Experiment". The ads are improving, that much I do have to admit.

Roku delivers a disturbing movie

Saturday I had it pretty easy. All I had to do was mow the grass, dust, light and crank up the gas log fireplace for 90 minutes to prime it for the winter season and take the mower into the shop for a once-over.

But what to do for the 90 minutes while the gas longs were burning on high while Kelly was out shopping? Watch a documentary on the Roku, of course.

I have many, many movies in my "Watch Instantly" queue just waiting for a moment like this. Paying close attention to running length I selected "Snuff: A Documentary About Killing On Camera" and now a big part of me wishes I had not.



I'm going to do something a little different. Instead of writing up the rest of the review in my blog I'm going to link to a separate text file that you can click and read. This movie was downright disturbing so for most readers I'd simply say leave well enough alone and do not read the rest of the review (spoilers, not to mention descriptions of disturbing content) or watch the movie. Just like the fictionalized account of a Snuff film in the major release 8mm, there are things you cannot "unsee", and this documentary, albeit a very well-made film, is one of them.

Travelocity Viral Marketing In Durham?

For everyone that does not work at the American Tobacco Historic District this is a concrete garden gnome sitting on the Highway 147 bridge (on the South side) at the Blackwell Street overpass at Blackwell and Jackie Robinson, or so close to the new Durham Bulls Stadium you could spit and hit home plate. Well, not really, but it is right across the street. South East corner of the bridge. Across Blackwell from the American Tobacco Trail terminus. If you need more directions than that, well, I'm sorry, you're going to have to miss it.

Peace, ya'll.

Greg

Goatee. A self-portrait

Sarah Palin..

Is it just me or is her voice starting to rub your nerves the wrong way too? *SHIVER*

I didn't get nearly anything accomplished this weekend

Oh well. My current version of M0n0wall appears to not support IPv6 6to4. That stinks. There's also a major bug in this version that makes the page which you use to update the firmware *UNRENDERABLE* to your browser! Real good! It's not a big deal, really, I can just take out the flash drive and install from a freshly formatted flash drive (or reformat the existing drive). Not a big deal, just annoying.

But I wonder, why not just go to something that supports IPv6 out of the box? I just may do that. The only device that I have lying around that would support such a thing is my Time Capsule that I currently have configured as a standard, layer 2 access point. Obviously I'd have to reconfigure that device (no big deal) but I am concerned having the device I depend on for my backups exposed on the WAN port to the Internet at large.

I could, however, use my 2.4 Ghz Airport Express as the gateway, but it's quite a stretch to call the device "high powered" in terms of processing capabilities. I might give it a shot but this brings up a potential problem that the single Ethernet port would then be occupied by the Internet link thus everything that connects to the Internet would have to traverse a 2.4 802.11g link. Not ideal. Not ideal at all.

So, what's a techie to do?

What to do this weekend?

• Work. Sucks, but I have to work tomorrow.
  
• IPv6-inante my M0n0wall router. Easy.
  
• Figure out if I need to dump the old backups of Kelly's laptop off the Time Capsule
  
  • To that point figure out how to dump old, no longer needed backups off Time Capsule
  
  
• Take a good look at the riding mower, see if it's time to put the old girl down
  
• Assemble all stuff to sell on Craigslist, get stuff listed and sold.
  
• Figure out why Tyler's in Durham is out of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA
  
• Conserve gas
  
  • ride scooter where I need to go
    
  
  

That's all I can think of, and it sounds like enough at this point so I'll stop.

McCain's Lost Footage

Lost footage of McCain as a POW has been found. On 9/11. Pardon me, I have to go to the restroom and vomit. I don't know if I can call this 'profiteering' from 9/11, but whatever you call it, it's sickening.

Cool.. .cool... COOL!!!!!!!

I'm starting to get some e-mails about IPv6. Questions and what-not. Here are some of the answers.

Q: I don't get why some IPv6 addresses are long than others.
A: Great question. All IPv6 addresses are quite long, 128 bits long in fact. A "long-hand" IPv6 address could read as follows: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. IPv6 can also display "short-hand" addresses in which case the same address could collapse all "0"s to a single zero. As such the example address could read as follows: 2001:0db8:85a3:0:0:8a2e:0370:7334. Furthermore any time two more fields of all zeros back up to one another you can toss out the zeros and remove the ":" between them. The example address would now read: 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334. What if you have more the two "::" back to back? You can toss them out too. So 2002::/16 could be written out 2002:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000/16 where 16 bits are reserved for the network field and the remaining 112 bits are left for the user to configure. The smallest of all addresses is the IPv6 loopback: ::1/128 (written long-hand 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001/128).

Q: You said that 64 bits were left to address hosts, isn't that a long address for a single host?
A: Why yes it is. What nearly all IPv6 networks do is use that 64 bit field to map your hex mac address to your machine address in IPv6. Yup, once you get the hang of it you can strip out the mac address visually from any IPv6 address. It's really quite cool.

Q: What's the deal with "Fe80" address? I have one on my computer but I can't ping any IPv6 hosts.
A: Ah! Your machine will assign itself an address in this range if there is no DHCP server offering an IPv6 address on your local subnet. Think of it as akin to 169.254.x.x address in IPv4. You can't route with them, but they are there for zero-configuration purposes, that kind of thing. But look closely at those last 64 bits of your self-assigned IPv6 address. They map (almost) to your mac address, right? My work Linux box: HWaddr 00:B0:D0:C1:48:DB and my self-assigned IPv6 address is fe80::2b0:d0ff:fec1:48db/64. True, there are a couple differences but once you get the hang of the substitutions you'll be able to decipher your MAC address fairly easily.

Q: I have only an IPv4 host, is there any way I can talk to IPv6 hosts?
A: No, not yours. I'm sorry, but your host has to be running IPv6 in order to talk to other IPv6 devices. The easiest way to jump aboard and join the IPv6 party is to configure your home Linux/BSD router as a 6to4 router or simply purchase any device that does 6to4 out of the box (Apple Airport gateways come to mind).

Keep the questions coming, people!

Tanner left a great question regarding IPv6 address yesterday

Tanner said: "How do you get IPv6 addresses? Would this work, say, as sort of a VPN where both your laptop and home network have IPv6 addresses and you could connect to them while the laptop is elsewhere?"

That's a great question. You can do IPv6 two different ways both of which will provide you IPv6 address space. We'll call the two ways "hard" and "easy". We'll cover the VPN thing second.

The Hard Way

The hard way is you go to your ISP and beg/plead/ask/pay for a block of IPv6 addresses much like you would if you wanted a set of IPv4 addresses. ISPs aren't fully on the IPv6 bandwagon yet so expect to get a lot of "why do you want to do that" and "I'm not sure we support that" kind of questions and comments. It's rather frustrating and I don't recommend going this route.

The Easy Way

If your ISP grants you a routable IPv4 address (i.e. not in the 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x ranges) you already have an IPv6 range at your disposal using 6to4 addressing (and a large block of addresses at that). With 6to4 addressing any routable IPv4 address you are granted addresses in the humongous 2002::/16 IPv6 address space. How is it automatic? Your IPv4 routable address is automatically translated into hexadecimal. Why? For one reason IPv4 uses dot-decimal notation while IPv6 uses hexadecimal addressing.

Let's look a bit further. All IPv6 6to4 address, as previously stated, are contained within the 2002::/16 range. Following the network designation of 2002 the first 32 bits are your routable IPv4 address translated into hex. For instance if your firewall was issued the address of 192.0.2.42 by your ISP your IPv6 address range would be 2002:c000:022a::/48. After that you have another 16 bit network field to do as you please and a 64 bit host field all at your disposal.

So does this mean you can have a full network of hosts addressable on the Internet using IPv6 6to4 behind a NAT firewall with a single IPv4 address. Yes! Yes it does. It's really quite fun. If you are on a remote network and your computer has been issued an IPv6 address, either statically configured by the network administrator or, far more likely, issued by the DHCP server, you will be able to communicate with however many IPv6 devices you have on your remote network, even though the remote devices are exist behind a single IPv4 NAT'ed address. Cool huh?

Finally there is one important caveat: if the IPv4 addresses on your home firewall changes so does all your IPv6 6to4 addresses. As I write this I am not aware of a service such as dyndns on the IPv4 side that will update domain names using IPv6 6to4. Hint hint there, industrious TriLUGers!

My jouney with IPv6

IPv6 is cool. Very cool. Way cooler than IPv4. There are some shortcomings but none that serious past that VERY LONG ADDRESS which, I admit, is there for a reason. Last week I had intended on configuring a 6to4 network at the condo with the end goal to have my behind-the-NAT-firewall devices addressable on the IPv6 Internet even though they remain uncontactable behind the NAT device on the IPv4 Internet. It worked and took all of three minutes to configure. Apple, in this case, makes things far too easy.

At the condo I use an Apple Airport Extreme as my Internet router. It works well and I have no complaints. The Airport Extreme, like all the other Apple routers, do 6to4 addressing automatically, and that's a nice touch. Just what is 6to4? As the name implies it converts IPv4 addresses (sort-of) into IPv6 addresses.

What it really does is it takes any routable IPv4 address and creates a network in the IPv6 space of 2002::/16. This is a special space and there are routers on the Internet that listen for routes destined for networks within this range. The 6to4 gateway routers takes packets destined for your IPv4 network and snaps the IPv6 packets into the IPv4 packets. Your home router then receives the IPv4 snap packet which it disassembles and routes to the device with the destination matching the address in the packet. Very simple and elegant. Transmissions from your machine and network work the same way, only in reverse. It is a fantastically elegant way to make IPv6 hosts addressable to IPv4 networks.

What about address overlap? There isn't any. And this is where you head will explode when you try to wrap your mind around the size of the IPv6 address space. One single routed IPv4 address will translate into an IPv6 network with prefix length of 48 bits, a network length of 16 bits (just in case you want to run a couple million hosts behind your single IPv4 address) and 64 bits just for the device address (which turns out to be the hexadecimal equivalent of your NIC MAC address.) Nice. Easy. Elegant. For the record, for each IPv4 address we're talking about an address space of 65,536 networks, each with up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 hosts. Yeah, IPv6 has a large address space and remember, ALL THE IPv4 ADDRESSES all fit inside the 2002::/16 network range each capable of that many networks and hosts. Sweet.

I've got my network working but what to do with it now? I suppose I can run services to the IPv6 Internet. What will NOT work is IPv4 ONLY devices being able to contact my IPv6 hosts. For that the end host would have to run IPv6 either under and assigned network range or via 6to4.

So go forth all! Join the geekery and let's get those 6to4 networks turned up! Even if you still block incoming IPv6 packets directly to your end host at least you can allow your devices to communicate with other IPv6 devices on the Internet.

Goodbye, vacation!

Tomorrow I leave the Waves/Rodanthe/Salvo area and return to work. Drat. I love my job, I really do, but I love the beach more. But without the job I can't afford the beach. I feel a bit like an addict in this way. There's something I want that I get on occasion (week at the beach) but I have to work the other 40+ weeks a year for these all-too-short weeks in view of the salt water.

But enough bitching. A lot of strange things happened this week. Of them several things I could not have anticipated occurred including:

1. coming out of "retirement" after 20 years any playing bouncer for a night
2. breaking up a fight
3. getting punched
4. applying the perfect rear naked choke to said puncher
5. configuring a Cisco router (don't I get enough of this at my "real job"?)
6. replacing two cable modems
7. riding out a tropical storm

I'm sure I'll think up some more, but quite a bit happened over what was a very lazy week. I can only imagine what would have happened had I not been so lazy and slept so late each day!

Oh, and it was HOT this week. HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT. Too darn not, as a matter of fact. This was one reason why I was so lazy - it was just too darn hot to stay outside for any measure of time (especially on the beach - you'd blister your skin out there in under one hour (not really, but it felt that way)). Next year when we plan our later summer/fall week at the beach we'll probably come down in October.

Goodbye, vacation. You were a good vacation and I hope that every member of my readership enjoys a vacation this year as satisfying as mine.

In a world..

In a world where my vacation could be totally underwater..

Chater Sucks Chapter MMXXVII

I'd post a picture of speedtest.net results but the test is unable to complete! This level of disservice to the customer is simply unacceptable. Problem is there is no other option on the island! Embarq DSL is even worse in terms of usability, constant outages and glacial speeds, at best.

Why someone doesn't provide high-speed over WiMax out here is simply beyond me. If I had any idea of what I was doing and had the money to get such a system started I would.

scenes from the outer banks

That's Ron. He stores RVs at his shop on the Outer Banks and moves them for his customers. That's The Thing. It's a local fixture around these parts.

tee hee

16 bytes from 2001:200::8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085, icmp_seq=1 hlim=48 time=253.793 ms
16 bytes from 2001:200::8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085, icmp_seq=2 hlim=48 time=277.317 ms
16 bytes from 2001:200::8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085, icmp_seq=3 hlim=48 time=295.074 ms
16 bytes from 2001:200::8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085, icmp_seq=4 hlim=48 time=323.969 ms

IT'S ALIVE!!!! Now to make it do something cool.

traceroute6 to www.kame.net (2001:200::8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085) from 2002:4b88:e92a::216:cbff:febc:6a62, 30 hops max, 12 byte packets
1 2002:4b88:e92a::21e:52ff:fef1:6d12 1.654 ms 1.413 ms 0.804 ms
2 * * *
3 ip-0-2-0-4.r00.asbnva01.us.b6.gin.ntt.net 25.558 ms 25.771 ms 24.544 ms
4 * fa-4-4.r05.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 30 ms *
5 ae-2.r20.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 26.786 ms 27.76 ms 27.099 ms
6 as-0.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net 95.355 ms 93.753 ms 93.608 ms
7 as-1.r20.osakjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net 220.567 ms 210.83 ms as-2.r20.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net 204.828 ms
8 ae-4.r20.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net 228.829 ms 221.894 ms xe-3-2.a15.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net 212.877 ms
9 xe-3-2.a15.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net 216.372 ms 227.244 ms ge-8-2.a15.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net 220.724 ms
10 ge-8-2.a15.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net 239.492 ms ve44.foundry6.otemachi.wide.ad.jp 219.813 ms 222.453 ms
11 ve44.foundry6.otemachi.wide.ad.jp 224.736 ms ve42.foundry4.nezu.wide.ad.jp 220.675 ms ve44.foundry6.otemachi.wide.ad.jp 238.421 ms
12 ve42.foundry4.nezu.wide.ad.jp 239.508 ms ve45.nec2.yagami.wide.ad.jp 223.663 ms ve42.foundry4.nezu.wide.ad.jp 232.607 ms
13 lo0.alaxala1.k2.wide.ad.jp 228.092 ms 219.479 ms 223.396 ms
14 orange.kame.net 223.166 ms lo0.alaxala1.k2.wide.ad.jp 232.555 ms 227.18 ms

Tragic

The market for amphibious cars and trucks is tragically underserved.

the nice guys

I'd like to see the look on the faces of the nice guys knock on the door and try to convert you to their religion when they knock on the house belonging to the gents above.

And this guy's house: