Posts by John Sager 803 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2008
Um. IPv6 protection in my border router is a handful of nftables rules and it was a similar number of ip6tables rules before I moved to nftables. I agree it'll be snowing in hell before the cheapo router manufacturers support it all though. Some of them still use version 2 Linux kernels for god's sake!
Google and :face:b00c: both support v6 on their networks. It's the mobile networks that seem to be stuck in CGNAT, at least in the UK. One pernicious feature is ISP IP address pools rather than fixed v4 addresses that dynamic DNS only partially solves. This made sense in the era of dial-up where sessions would be relatively short, but most people now leave the router on 24/7. That would be pretty pointless on v6 but experience shows the network architects are much lower down the totem pole than the bean counters so who knows?
I have a template for generating and printing Christmas card address labels from a Libre office database. It gets used once a year and every year I have to fix something to get the print to register correctly on the label stationery. I used to have to export to PDF and print that but this time that didn't work - the scaling isn't 100%!. Then I found that printing from Libre office worked perfectly when it didn't last time for other scaling issues. I wonder what I'll find next December!
A dimmer is useful when watching TV. I have z-wave stuff installed, mostly for controlling lights while we are away but the dimmer facility on the lounge light is useful so there is a little light when the TV is on. And z-wave is local, none of this cloud crap. The controller is a RPi with only local network access.
I suspect, as Red Button is another stream on the DVB multiplex, that there is some charging mechanism for data capacity. If so that would dwarf the cost of running a server. This is where the Internet scores: the charging model is different, and small, so we get the amazing variety of stuff because the up-front cost is small until you need scale.
I'm not convinced. China's need to re-absorb Taiwan is deeply idealogical rather than motivated by economic considerations. I expect a Punic Wars solution with all of Taiwan salted and unliveable would be acceptable to Beijing, and certainly dear old Not Omicron or Nu.
What does that say about US warfighters' insight.
Too low end? It's in all the landfill routers we have. I think RISC-V are aiming higher. I'm currently using a STM32 Nucleo board for a little home-brew project. It has a ARM core but also I and D cache and a crude MPU, that was a godsend for turning off the D-Cache on my DMA buffers. This, I'm thinking, is where RISC-V wants to be, and more.
I did that at the age of two. My grandma had a switch hanging on flex over the bed, which wasn't that uncommon in older properties in those days. They put me down on her bed for a sleep and I just unscrewed the switch & stuck my finger in...
My other grandma then promptly knitted a cover for her similar switch! I've had several 240v belts since then but not in recent decades. Perhaps I've had wisdom shocked into me!
I'm currently doing a little project with a STM32 Nucleo board. Luckily Mouser had hundreds in stock but I only needed two. However it's not 'load Linux & go' - it requires some 'close to the metal' development and that's been quite fun since I haven't really done much of that for a long time.
I'm betting it'll be a cold day in hell before we get a usable 4G signal in my home due to location, let alone 5G. That was solved by running a 3G femtocell until Vodafone in their wisdom turned off the service. So I was forced to find a phone that supported Wifi calling on their network (thank you Google). So now I have the periodic problem of Voda's end of that going down like it did yesterday.
Same here. I've been running it for several years for mail and sometimes proxy when out & about on both phone & laptop. It replaces completely the kludgy port forwarding over SSH that I used to use. The only annoyance I had to solve on my laptop was split DNS so I could look up over the VPN for names on my home network. Systemd-resolved wouldn't do it the way I needed so I canned that & went back to dnsmasq.
Likewise. I have never been able to get in with the pad, so all my laptops for the last 20 years or so have had one, from HP via Toshiba to Lenovo. If Lenovo give up on it then I'll be bereft.
As for the subject of the article, I run Linux and I've rarely had trackpoint issues. The cursor very occasionally heads off to the edge somewhere & stays there but it always beomes usable again after a few secs.
iCalendar works for me. I use Davical and Postgresql on my server, which talks to Thunderbird on my desktop/laptop and Google calendar on the mobile via DAVx5. I've created a birthdays setup using vdirsyncer that updates Postgres and that also feeds a Python script to generate a printed calendar every year with birthdays and other activities on it. Now since I'm no longer working I don't have the business calendar issues, but the setup I have suits me and it also gives me a historical record.
IBM abend codes. Now, I haven't encountered IBM kit since I were a nipper (lucky me!), and I've always wondered what they had to do with evening. So believe it or not it's only now, as this on-call triggered the memory, that the Omnipotent Google Oracle tells me that abend is actually short for 'abnormal end'! I wonder what other important misapprehensions I've carried through life?
Half my stuff gets left at UTC so the log has a monotonic timebase ( I can live with leap seconds). The clocks that I look at for time of day do get adjusted, manually or automatically. I'm at a loss to understand why the clock on my car (Audi) won't use the time from the RDS signal. The Vauxhall I had decades ago could do that.
You actually got to program a real computer as part of the course? We did the one term course and then the lecturer said that elec eng are commissioning a new ICL190something so you can have a bit of time on that during the summer. I actually got my program to work but it took several turnarounds for syntax errors and then the ops gave me a nice debug printout to sort the logical errors. That is the one and only time I've used punched cards, and I don't miss them!
I owned a XR3 decades ago, and never had that problem. It was the carburettor version though before the XR3i. It was great for fast runs around the local country lanes, plus a trip via N roads (eschewed the Autoroute) down to the Midi.
I booked a small car from Nice airport for navigating the winding narrow roads in Provence but they gave me a Renault Laguna...
I'm pretty sure the Saab 9-3 I used to have had optical fibres to the light cluster controllers at the back. One obvious solution is to have the 12V bussed around to local controllers for whatever and have optical fibres for the CAN bus to control everything. That makes the wiring loom much simpler as variants for different markets and models are a local controller change or even just a different software build.
I've actually just done a small project using javascript for the first time, but with a Python back end. It's for listing voicemails & calls on Asterisk. I started off doing it all via cgi with Python but to handle buttons & events generally I opted for jQuery & moved the HTML & some logic to the HTML file. It's changed my mind a bit about javascript as before, I saw it as having a terrible syntax. Of course Python is still my go-to language for all sorts of small projects, and it has taken over from C for most things.
I can imagine, though, that I might have a somewhat less rosy view if trying to do a large website.
Swatch's Internet Time has to be up there in that list. Also, Tony Blair late of this parish had a similar idea about GMT when he was trying to do his day job. I was peripherally involved in that as a supposed NTP guru and kept asking what the USP was, and why NPL didn't have a NTP server tied to their version of UTC. Blair's grand idea died like a lot of his others (not enough I hear you shout) but NPL did eventually host a NTP server, so I suppose it had a minor effect.
I've been in a lift which broke down. Took an hour to get out. Luckily I was on my own so didn't have to spend an hour conversing with, or even consoling/calming other occupant(s).
The scary bit was a lift on another occasion that carried on going up past my floor, and the next one, and hit the buffers at the top. After some reflection I hit the button for my floor and it dutifully went down to it and stopped. I did report the episode though what action, if any, was taken I have no idea.
I bought an obsolete HP instrument, and there was some Win3.1 s/w available to drive it. However it talked to a long obsolete ISA HPIB card. I eventually made it work with a modern USB GPIB adaptor but it took 2 DLLS in tandem - a 16-bit one to emulate the 3.1 driver and then a 32-bit one to drive the GPIB adaptor. It worked, but the facility turned out to be not very useful. However it was an interesting & frustrating excursion into the vagaries of Windows drivers for a committed Linux programmer.
I've been using it for some years now on Android and Linux in a road-warrior setup, and after messing about with IPSec on Linux and Cisco, WireGuard is a lot easier to set up. Reading the mailing list it's getting lots of use by others for secure virtual networks over the top of the Internet.
as storage tech improves
I never stop laughing at that. If storage tech improves to the point where grid storage chemically is practical, then the EV battery problem is likewise solved.
A nodding equaintance with M. Carnot and other luminaries of thermodynamics would rapidly disabuse you of such notions. I read recently that Musk's battery tech is pretty close to theoretical limits for that technology. There are technologies with better specific energy density both by volume and by mass, but they are still in the lab and have been for a couple of decades.
And are we really, really sure that all this is absolutely necessary because all sorts of horrible things will happen if we don't? Far too much wailing and rending of garments in this argument for any kind of sense to prevail.
The bottom 64 bits of an IPv6 address is generally a free-for-all. Lots of servers have mostly zeos in there though a few are more creative - Facebook have 'face:b00c' as part of the address. Putting something arbitrary in there makes them a lot harder to find if they aren't in DNS, especially if it changes fairly often.
Monitoring my firewall logs I get very few hits on v6 and they are all from China
I do have a Gmail acct but I run my own mail server at home & scrape Gmail and my main mail service into it periodically . Same with calendar, I run Davical on Apache/postgresql. For access when I'm away, WireGuard VPN works fine. Granted, you need tech chops to get it all working, but it's a useful privacy boost.
Security at your router/firewall for IPv6 doesn't have to be any worse than what NAT supposedly gives you for v4. A couple of iptables/nftables rules and an ultimate 'DROP' policy in the FORWARD table will give you that. Of course the wifi router makers need to get on board with v6 which they haven't done hitherto because there is 'no demand'. Perhaps pressure from ISPs that are going to v6 will persuade them to get their act together.
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