Thursday, December 31st, 2009
I’ve been doing some last g33king for this year when I was trying to use Vyatta as an IPv6/IPv4 gateway & firewall with DHCP relay functionality. I’ve never used Vyatta before, so I quickly went through those basic guides and did some googling.
After a day of experimenting, I finally managed to get it up and running. I even compiled ISC DHCP server 4.1 (which supports DHCPv6 relay) after installing tons of packages from Debian’s repositories.
When I had everything working, I decided to restart my Vyatta to see if it will still work. And that’s when I fell back into good old “I hate Linux!” mood. There was no configuration! It was like booting into my system after doing a fresh install.
I opened my dear friend – google.com straight away and what do I see? Commit doesn’t pernamently save your configuration and you have to use command “save” to make your changes pernament. 
Well, I guess I’ll read Quick Start guides more carefully next time to prevent thing like this from happening.
Oh, and I almost forgot…
Happy new year!
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
I’ve been seeing a lot of headlines about Internet Explorer 9 lately and now I have a chance to throw my two cents in. Last month Microsoft revealed its plans around IE9, the next version of THE browser in terms of market share.
It is supposed to have:
- support for HTML5 and CSS3
- faster JavaScript engine
- GPU rendering (Direct2D on Vista, Windows 7)
HTML5, CSS3, faster JavaScript
At first, all those 3 things seem like “hey, why do we need them?”. I agree that web, even without those advanced features works for now and many don’t see any reason why we should invent something new. Well, I partially agree, but we must keep in mind that many of us – users and web developers don’t see the true benefits of new standards and improved JavaScript performance.
And why is that so?
Because web developers can’t use it. Internet Explorer, the most used browser in the world doesn’t support CSS3, majority of HTML5 and is damn slow at JavaScript compared to others. As such, any attempt of using new standards or creating nice GUI’s or fancy stuff with JavaScript causes that more than 50% of users have an impaired user experience.
Version 9 promises to fix those issues and help web move forward – to the future. Will Microsoft keep their promise? I surely hope so!
GPU rendering
I always liked the idea of moving heavy computational tasks and rendering to the GPU, but after Microsoft announced this to be in IE9, I thought “wooow, don’t you have many other things to fix first?”, however, after seeing that they will improve other areas I thought of it as a good idea. I sincerely hope that Microsoft will successfully implement this and as it currently looks, it might beat the competition (Mozilla is planning this for 3.7 and Opera’s last info about this was two years ago).
Well, Microsoft… I wish you luck and I hope you keep your promise.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
A few weeks ago I got my hands on a new Linksys WRT320N router (it looks extremelly nice, I should say) which replaced my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54. I played with the original firmware for a few minutes and then, of course, flashed it with the latest DD-WRT build for my router (based on 2.6 kernel). It all worked great but I just couldn’t properly configure IPv6 for my network. On my Buffalo I used a specialized crushedhat’s build and it worked like a charm, but here, no scripts I found on internet worked and after a few hours of searching and experimenting I finally found the solution. Since there are no working solutions around I considered it logical to share mine.
I’m using Hurricane Electric Tunnel Broker and text enclosed in square brackets and capitalized should be replaced by your own data from your “Tunnel Details”.
1. Turn on IPv6 and radvd under Administration -> Management and paste this inside “Radvd config” box:
interface br0 {
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix [ROUTED 64]
{
AdvOnLink on;
AdvAutonomous on;
};
};2. Go to Administration -> Commands, paste the following code into the box and click “Save startup”:
insmod ipv6
insmod sit
ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote [SERVER IPV4 ADDRESS] local [CLIENT IPV4 ADDRESS] ttl 64
ip link set he-ipv6 up
ip addr add [CLIENT IPV6 ADDRESS] dev he-ipv6
ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6
ip addr add [ROUTED 64] dev br0
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
radvd -C /tmp/radvd.conf
3. After saving startup script, paste the following code into the box and click “Save Firewall”:
iptables -I INPUT 2 -p ipv6 -i vlan1 -j ACCEPT
4. Reboot the router and you should have IPv6 connectivity for all connected (and IPv6 capable) clients.
The only problem for now is that by doing this, you are leaving yourself with no firewall (on DD-WRT’s side) through IPv6 and you need to have properly configured firewall on your computer.
I’ve contacted the developers about including ip6tables and they might soon fix that (well, it’s not really broken).
Oh, and here is the list of material that helped me:
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
Yes, it’s true. On the foundations of WordPress 2.9 and my very own design, my thoughts, creations and tricks are going to be published and made available to the whole world.
