Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: Oh well

we might need a new battery soon. I looked and my unit still had a green light

That light is meaningless unless you have a particularly advanced UPS.. I've had UPSen that showed everything as hunky-dory when powered but, as soon as the power fails, the battery lasts about 30 seconds.

From memory (and I could be wrong), the standard UPS battery tests just test the resistance of the battery and, if it's within range, shows a green light. There are lots of circumstances where the battery could have the correct-ish resistance yet have no power reserve.

Re: About the only one that hasn't figured out IPv6 are enterprise & SMB

65-85% of residential users and wireless users are using IPv6 natively already

And then you woke up from the dream and had to face reality..

(In the UK, pretty much all residental ISPs use NAT. NAT and more NAT. Because there's lots of people who understand it and, in general, not many residential people need to run servers..)

Re: Personally

Get a free IPv6 address? You have got to be f- joking

Unless you happen to use a proper ISP. All it took to get Zen to turn it on for me was a quick email to their tech support department..

Re: Personally

When I can afford a weekend to devote to this, I'll try again.

Make sure you have polenty of gin available. It's perfect for washing away the frustration of trying to implement IPv6..

Re: "IPv6 was designed to run alongside IPv4 from the beginning. "

So you got AFAIK, three different ways to have addresses assigned and have to ensure they are configured correctly

Indeed. So, my ISP enables IPv6 for me (at my request), which means that my router now has an IPv6 address. My firewall, that sits behind the router, also gets an IPv6 address.

Unfortunately, one that my router doesn't seem to understand, despite the fact that it's in (theoretically) the same prefix. So my devices inside the firewall can get their IPv6 addresses from the firewall and can see the firewall and all the IPv6-enabled devices inside. But nothing past the external interface of the firewall. The external interface of the firewall can see the internal interface of the router, but not the outside interface and nothing at all outside. So even manually looking up the IPv6 address of an external site and trying to ping6 it gets me a total failure to ping (IPv4 ping can reach it fine).

My firewall rules are OK (anything IPv6 can see anything outside on IPv6 - I'll get it working first then worry about protecting things). My router isn't running any firewall.

Can I work out how to fix it? No. Lots of theoretical stuff on "this is how it should work" that is totally unhelpful. And, after day of trying to make it work, several bottles of gin are starting to look mighty attractive, even though my head is already hurting trying to work my way through the broken IPv6 model..

In the end I gave up and turned off IPv6. Nothing I had needed it anyway..

Re: Compatibility

drop-in replacement which handles both, instead of an abstracted parallel universe where we struggle to find out what our address (or block) is, or to understand if our firewall is actually protecting us

DING! DING! DI<bang!>

Opps. Broke my dinger by dinging it too enthusiastically..

Re: Compatibility

IPv6 was designed to run alongside IPv4 from the beginning. They work independently

And thus invalidate any network security that you had in place..

Re: Compatibility

cretins who designed IP6 had given some thought to making it backward compatible

It's quite clear from the various notes about the IPv6 design process that the people involved wanted to design a 'pure' new address methodology and so discarded anything 'old and broken'. And, in the process, managed to ensure that migration was not only difficult but, potentially, dangerous in terms of network security.

Re: "Nobody uses it..."

I use it!

Congratulations.

Now, image that you are a really big organisation that's invested a lot of money in the whole IPv4 pit - routers, firewalls, access control measures, all of which are potentially bypassable by a bad IPv6 implementation..

In short, IPv6 is a mess. It's a total camel[1], designed by people who really, really didn't consider about how it would get implemented in the real world.

And, when those implementation issues became obvious, made it more complicated still.

A pox on it. We need IPv7 - just add another octet at the start of IPv6..

[1] A camel being a horse designed by a committee. And not a cute itty-bitty-kitty-committee either..

single static IP and Zen offer one for free

And were cheaper than IDNet for my (initally 8, now 16) block of addresses too.

I like Zen. Even if the IPv6 advice they gave me didn't work - I suspect that wasn't the fault of the advice, more the carbon-based lifeform trying to implement it. And, to be fair, my home setup is a *tad* non-standard..)

migrated three customer sin

So what address do Lust, Gluttony and Pride live at?[1] And where to the other 4 sins get their broadband?

[1] What is the address of Parliament anyway? "The Big Old Victorian Building that's falling apart, by the Thames, Central London" probably won't get the post delivered..

Mere mention of the letters BT

I had a fairly good relationship with my local BT engineer in the days when my line would fail repeatedly once the line box in the road filled with water..

Which only got fixed once I moved to an ISP that actually paid BT to fix the core issue.

Re: Yep, all over the radio.

uSwitch apparently, which is just a "pick the cheapest" website.

And almost certainly gets dosh from suppliers that it recommends. So dorkdork probably paid them the best..

Not cheap but the odd time I do need to call them, it is a fine experience

Indeed. Even when it was the call to say "I notice that on your website the price for my service has dropped, how about you apply that to my line?".

To which the answer was "sure.. <clickety-click> All done now.". No upselling, no passing off to someone else and no waffling.

I'm still waiting for my exchange to be FTTP-enabled though. My 70/20 FTTP line seems *so* restricting these days :-)

(Runs for cover from the incoming curses/hardware)

Re: This:

unearthed any evidence he lied

No - in those days I believe they called it "being economical with the truth".

Re: "There is no legal reason for him to appear."

golden age of honest politicians was. Back before the Romans invaded, one assumes

I suspect you'd need to go further back to before we came down from the trees..

Re: "There is no legal reason for him to appear."

however all political parties have failed in that respect

And, in general, have done since the invention of political parties. There are some instructive lessons to be taken from Ancient Athens in that regard.. (they didn't call them political parties but they essentially were - bodies of citizens who campaigned and voted with others of like mind - usually on the basis of birth class or philosophical concordances).

Re: Can they summons Zuck?

they cannot summons the Zuckerborg

Not even by sacrificing a data protection person and chanting "all your data are belong to us" three times in quick succession?

(Mind you, that would probably summon Microsoft and Google too. The UnHoly Trinity, all in the same place..)

Re: Can they summons Zuck?

Haven't they learned a lesson that WE the People don't want

Remember - in the Big Money[1] world, there is no We the People. There is only We the Rich and Them the proles. And in Facebooks worldview, we are only datasources to be mined.

[1] Money has no political affiliation - you get oligarchs of every nation and political stripe. Whatever makes them more money. (Wanders off humming Peter Gabriel's song "Big")

Re: Still waiting....

he is doing his civic duty and relaying what he has been hired to

I didn't know he worked for the IRA? No - not the Irish one..

Re: Still waiting....

What's your obsession with Russia Michael?

He's still sore about Operation Barbarossa - you know, the one where Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back before Stalin could stab him in the back. And they had such an nice agreement to divide Eastern Europe between themselves too!

Re: Good Ol' Government Mentality

obviously more intelligent Muppet

The dog gets called a duppet when he does something wrong.. (portmanteau of 'dog' and 'muppet' as in sprired by the song "Am I a muppet or a man"..)

Just a small snippet of my wildly exciting home life. In other news, the 8-month old kitten has now discovered how the cat door works. It only took her 2 months of watching the other cats..

This post bought to you courtesy of high-strength codeine painkillers. People who say "the warmth will help your joints" should, IMHO just go away. Falabh 'sa boc an airde

Re: Unisys screwed up

Gotta cache 'em all

"One (token) Ring the capture them and in the darkness cache them"?

Sounds suprisingly... painful.

Re: Unisys screwed up

that's obviously something only a seasoned pro hacker could manage

... and pretty much the only circumstance where I could even be considered "a seasoned pro hacker"..

Re: MInor Correction

They actually have significantly higher protections on privacy of communications

Yeah - only the FSB, the GRU, Putin and his oligarch friends (oh - and anyone in the Duma or Russian Govenment that knows someone in the aforementioned list) gets to read everything.

Hardly inspiring. Especially when put against the various laws against 'deviance' (ie - anything other than a traditional Russian lifestyle or being successful in esposing politics that Putin doesn't like).

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear right?

Protest and spread your propaganda all you like, but comparing the Russian Government and the UK Government is a joke. A joke akin to trying to create equivalence between a rabid Siberian tiger and a slightly annoyed housecat kitten.

Re: Dig

awesomeness of putting an AOL CD in the microwave

It stinks like hell though - and I'm sure that the vapourised plastics are probably really, reaaly bad for you.

(Doesn't work for modern CD-R's quite as well - they use a dye layer now rather than a metallised film)

Re: Dig

Trying to remove AOL was almost impossible

One company I worked for we had a real charmer for a marketing director (took pride in the fact that he could make his secretary cry, refused to answer his own emails and generally treated anyone lower-grade than him with utter contempt - especially IT..).

We had a *very* strict 'thou shalt not install non-work software on thy PC rule' - breahing of which was a disciplinary offence and could lead to dismissal.

Said director had finally been given a laptop so he 'could work from home'. After a week, he stormed into the Desktop support cube and threw the laptop at us saying "it doesn't work". Eventually, we managed to get out of him that the corporate dialup (which was flaky on a good day) no longer worked.

Delving into the reasons why, it soon became obvious that he'd install AOL. And his home person finance software. And had an 'interesting' collection of images (this was the late 90's so nothing too amazing but they still drove a chieftan tank through the corporate guidelines).

The presence of the AOL dialler meant that there was no way whatsoever to get the corporate dialler to work. Even uninstalling it failed so we informed said director that he needed to save his information off the laptop as we were going to have to rebuild it.

Once we had the laptop back, we nuked it from orbit.. Corporate dialup now worked again.

Two days later, he was back in our cube screaming that he was going to get us all sacked because we'd deleted all his finance data - turns out that the home finance programme saved all its data in the programme directory (as was common in the late 90s) and that he hadn't bothered to back that up so all his data was gone. He went off to HR while I went to have a chat with the local site director (a really nice guy who had had this marketing director foisted on him by headquarters but nevertheless outranked him).

Site director apparently tore very large lumps out of Marketing director and told him to amend his ways or he would get relocated to the smallest, most rural backwoods US location that could be found and left there to rot (company policy was that directors *never* got sacked - even if the site they worked at got closed then they just got found an essentially-meaningless job elsewhere).

He never spoke to us again - any interaction was via his secretary (who also benefitted from his enforced change in attitude).

Re: Sendmail hacking to the rescue

Did I mention I hand wrote our sendmail.cf file?

I take it that now far enough in the past for you to have recovered from the sanity loss?

(I've written a few in my time. Mostly by copying ones from other people and amending them..)

Re: With hindsight

qmail was written to address security issues that weren't seen as a problem when sendmail was written

Indeed. My home[1] use of sendmail was *extremely* short (as in a matter of days) I then switched over to this new, secure and lightweight qmail (and later added on ezmlm rather than listserv for mail list handling)

From the article - remember this 1996 when servers were feeble – the server would probably reboot

I've *never* had one of my linux boxes reboor itself because of swap exhaustion. Probably because I use the above-mentioned qmail (and postfix on FreeBSD boxes) rather than sendmail. Both of which handle queuing a hell of a lot better than sendmail does (not difficult!)

[1] I foolishly later took a job herding Sun boxen - all of which used sendmail. So I got to experience the joys later. Including on making it play nicely with Exchange 5.5 - which advertised that it supported ESMTP. At which point the Solaris sendmail tried doing batch SMTP delivery - which Exchange couldn't handle and so silently discarded the emails. Fixed by telling sendmail to ignore ESMTP announcments for the internal set of IP addresses that the various Exchange boxes used. Those were the good old days of packet-switched frame relay networks..

Re: Warfighter

cats on their glorified helicopter carriers

Every ship needs a cat (mice, dontchaknow) and it needs to be the first into the lifeboats if the ship goes down..

Re: "What in the name of any specified deity is a "warfighter"?"

but not quite as aggressive as "warrior"

There's a subtle difference between "warrior" and "soldier" - warriors fight as individuals with no overall control whereas soldiers fight as a directed and organised group (or are supposed to - the Americans are fond of calling their soldiers warriors - which says all you need to know about the US military).

Re: The only question is....

we can congratulate the Russians for successfully negotiating and maneuvering out of a WW3 scenario while dealing with lunatics

Putin is going to be annoyed with you for calling him a lunatic..

(No glory on any side in this fight. The Russians are arming and enabling a weak puppet[1] in hock to his backers and generals who uses chemical weapons on his own population and the US/UK/France are holding a live-trial of their weapons system in the hope that more people will buy them.)

[1] Much like the US did in their anti-communist cold war days. Nothing really new under the sun.

Re: classic capitalism

bungled so badly as to trigger the Mutiny and finally the Government had to come clean and nationalise

And, entirely coincidentally, the cash that used to find its way into the pockets of the frinds of the East India Company now found its way into the pockets of friends of the Government..

Or in modern-day parlance, they pulled a Halliburton/Iraq.

Re: Now with added functions

No wonder my life seems so empty and worthless

Well - since you are posting on El Reg forums why should you be any different from the rest of us?

Life. I knew someone who had one once. But he wouldn't sell it to me..

Re: Worse than a mum

you could hibernate Windows XP on their laptops for a quick shutdown/start

My current Win7 work laptop bluescreens if you try that. Or loses the group policies relating to the corporate wifi.

Or just sits and sulks until you turn it off.

I think it needs some quiet time alone with a build USB stick.

Re: Dad & I ...

Slack on an 386 yonkers ago... having to prod and poke all over the place to get TCP/IP working

It wasn't *that* hard. It can't have been because I managed to do it..

(My first PC was a 386sx25. Came with DOS 5 and I migrated it to OS/2 eventually. Once I'd bought my *MASSIVE* 330mb ESDI drive (and the interface card for it) at a computer fair I was able to dual-boot between OS/2 and linux (slackware 0.99pl15).

And, after trawling through the Demon internet FTP site, I managed to grab details on how to implement PPP dial-on-demand and set up sendmail.

Those were the days - when I could stay up to 3am working on setting things up and still manage to get up for work at 7am. If I tried that now I'd probably end up hospitalised..