Category: obscure pursuits

experiments in IPv6

I have been hearing that a new version of the TCP/IP addressing system is “imminent” since 1994. 18 years later, I have been moved to look into it, to see what it offers or requires. I found more requirements than benefits, some of which are noted below.

The argument is the old addressing scheme doesn’t have enough addresses to go around and it’s design subdivides it inefficiently. There are probably other more technical arguments but those are the reasons more often cites in favor of migrating to it: more address space, less waste. From Wikipedia:

In IPv4 an address consists of 32 bits which limits the address space to 4294967296 (232) possible unique addresses.

You’d think 4 billion addresses would be enough. Maybe so but then some people have been (mis)quoted as claiming the global market for computers was less than 10 or that no one would need a computer in their home. They could not have imagined either the network of today or the devices people use to access it.

IPv6 expands the pool a bit:

Mathematically, the new address space provides the potential for a maximum of 2128, or about 3.403×1038 unique addresses.

I self-host a couple of domains, complete with internet-connected email and web service so this may not apply to a lot of people.

The first thing I needed was access to the IPv6 internet. This doesn’t mean a new ISP so much as either having one that supports it already or using a tunnel service that encapsulates IPv6 packets in innocuous IPv4 packets, allowing them to be unpacked upon receipt. I have CenturyLink (née Qwest) and they don’t do IPv6 yet. So I went with Hurricane Electric and now have free access to services on IPv6. The folks at Hurricane have been doing this for quite some time and have probably answered your questions already. And there is an active forum community as well.

A handful of large public sites offer their content to both varieties — www.ipv6.apple.com, ipv6.google.com, ipv6.cnn.com, to name a couple. Lots of resources in the free/open source software world, as well. Microsoft requires it to be installed in some of its server products, even if you have no plans to use it.

So that’s all good. The equipment here all understands IPv6, from iMacs and MacBooks to a FreeBSD server and a Time Capsule used as a network interface to the ISP we use. So I set up the Time Capsule with the options I got from Hurricane Electric: you’ll need to use an older version of Airport Utility, as of this writing, since 6.0 doesn’t allow access to the IPv6 settings. Their setup page has the options you need for each dialog field:

In your network settings (here’s the Preference Pane in OS X Lion), turn on IPv6 and let it work it’s magic with auto discovery/autoconfig:
Apply those changes and you should be good to go.

To test it, use the Terminal/console app of your choice:

# ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:b:839:230:1bff:feaf:42c8 -->; 2001:4860:8005::69
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=88.143 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:8005::69, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=84.827 ms
^C?--- ipv6.l.google.com ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 84.827/86.485/88.143/1.658 ms

So you can now ride out on IPv6. Check out the sites listed up top and see if they work. Or try http://ipv6-test.com/ .
But what if you want to host services for an IPv6-enabled public? That’s a little trickier, with some previously undocumented gotchas.

what will the chickenhawks say about this?

What gives you the right to f*** with our lives: VII:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Staff Sgt. Ronald L. Paulsen, 53, of Vancouver, Wash., died on Oct. 17 in Tarmiya, Iraq, from injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Paulsen was assigned to the Army Reserve’s 414th Civil Affairs Battalion, Utica, N.Y.

53 years old. This isn’t some kid who couldn’t make up his mind what to do with himself. Not that I think anyone should over there dying to defend the delusions of Dear Leader, but for some kid, drunk on entitlement, to cheer for a war he won’t fight is sad. To be willing to have someone his father’s age die in his place is pathetic.

creaky

The update to 10.4.6 may not have gone as badly as I thought. There are rumors that permissions cleanup tasks make the install take longer. To my mind it was just hung. Got to a message about IPv6 and then just stopped.

So I reverted back to 10.4 and ran the massive updaters overnight. After a slow login this morning, all seems well, though for reasons I can’t make out, I got no email. I usually have 20-30 pieces in the inbox and a bunch more filtered out. Only the filtered email was delivered.

Boy howdy, does it use some memory: after a fresh reboot this AM, it still needed a Gb of swap space to buttress the 640Mb onboard.

white:~ paul$ du -hc /var/vm/
1.0G    /var/vm/
1.0G    total

Knowing what I know now, I would have waited or skipped this upgrade.

odds and ends

A choice rant about the perception/portrayal of Hispanics in America by the liberal news media.

La Queen Sucia: How Stupid are the US Media?!?!:

Eating oil: so much more than just a breakfast food. An enterprising reporter looks at the various ways fossil fuels, especially oil, are inputs in the food supply.

My Saudi Arabian Breakfast:

Take that box of McCann’s oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness — a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns, and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann’s website illustrates each step in the cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting, and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy costs.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which is in turn inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my “breakfast” leave Ireland and travel over 5,000 fuel-gorging, CO2-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.

Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps hints at a birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped “A Product of Chile,” tells all — and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

If you’ve been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you’ve noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, the chilling in refrigerators and the cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine.

For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it. The “caloric input” of fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, the “caloric output.”

What they’ve discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have “consumed” 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.)

But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy — the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half pounds of coal.

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

an outlet for obsessives

Even before the need for physical exertion arose, I had been curious about adding beat per minute info to my iTunes library to help keep a good pace when walking or riding. There are plugins etc for WinAmp but nothing that automagically sorts out the BPM and adds it to the metadata for iTunes.

iTunes-BPM:

iTunes-BPM adds a simple floating window to iTunes that allows you to set the beats-per-minute value for the currently playing song by tapping along to the music.

This seems to work well enough, though. Create a new playlist (called ‘unbeaten’) and shuffle through it, tapping along for a few seconds to set the count.

Now playing: We Were Both Wrong by Dave Edmunds from the album “Repeat When Necessary” | Get it

The Season of Optimism

That would be the summer gardening season here in the moody and capricious Pacific Northwest.

Today I:

  • removed the black permeable covering from my garden
  • turned over all the surface dirt, down to a 3-4 inch depth
  • re-arranged one of the two borders (lined with these funky concrete cylinders: formerly laid horizontally along the edge, now sunk into the ground at a 30° angle, leaning on each other)
  • started some tomato seeds (ultra-early types) and a full packet of Kong sunflowers, all in those little peat pellets that allow transplanting without exposing the roots.

I have some more seeds to get, since I have a pretty good amount of space to fill (180 sq ft or so). And the tomatoes don’t count against it, since they are moving to a new location this year.

Sunny and bright today (deceptively so. Here’s what my local weather station registers:

Temp:46 Wind:3 Barometer:29.95s Humidity:70% High:48 Low:36)

Now playing: Waka by Camper Van Beethoven from the album “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” | Get it

two purchases I wish I had waited on but couldn’t

Apple Unveils Mac mini with Intel Core Duo:

The new Mac mini with the Intel Core Duo processor delivers performance up to four times faster than its predecessor in the same innovative and incredibly compact design.

Dammit. This wasn’t expected til June. And it has an audio line-in (that mine doesn’t) in addition to being 4x faster.

Gah.

This just illustrates the rule that the best time to buy a computer is always Right Now. It may be cheaper next week, but what will be available the week after that for which you will wish you had waited?

Seriously, the iMac we just got is fine. Faster is always better, but I suspect the price of the new one would mean we didn’t get anything. But the mini . . . as underpowered as it seems sometimes (at a blazing 1.42GHz, though much of the sluggishness is due to not having enough RAM), I would welcome a two-fold increase, let alone four-fold, especially at the same price.

C’est la vie. Dammit.

something horrible (but recoverable) happened

Nothing personal or life-changing but my iBook was doing all kinds of weird stuff today. Otherwise solid apps wouldn’t run (I kept getting crash reports on EXEC BREAK, whatever that means) and the messages were all about the core libraries being flaky. Eeep!

I had resigned myself to a format and reinstall at worst, but I noticed that logging in as root didn’t manifest the same problems. If I switched to my account, the Finder wouldn’t even load: just up and down, over and over again.

So I ended up taking a backup (16 Gb worth) of my home, then moving the ~/Library/Preferences directory aside and rebuilding it.

Simply logging in starts the process. I ended up with

  • ~/Library/Preferences
  • ~/Library/Preferences.old
  • ~/Library/Preferences.good

The first and last were identical, once I set a few simple preferences that I felt wouldn’t break anything. I copied a few trustworthy items from .old to ~/Library/Preferences, then I simply copied .good once I had things reasonably solid.

Then I copied the contents of ~/Library/Preferences over the contents of .old, then copied it all back, so I could both overwrites bad files with good ones and then repopulate my prefs for apps I didn’t want to do one at a time.

So far (knock, knock) so good.