I’ve got some servers sitting 300~500ms away, behind a bad NAT, and GRE/pptp can’t make it through. Quick way to solve it? Build a small crappy VM, install ssh, and make the following modifications to files:
/etc/ssh/sshd_config: append the PermitTunnel directive. Pick one you like from `man 5 sshd_config` /etc/ssh/ssh_config: append the Tunnel directive. Again, check which you want from `man 5 ssh_config`.
Quickly generate a key for use for the tunnel dial and push it to your dial host: ssh-keygen -C “tunneling key” -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/tunnel_rsa
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/tunnel_rsa user@tunnelhost
Now start up the tunnel: ssh -NTCf -w any user@tunnelhost
Slap IPs on each side: client:~# ip addr add 192.0.2.1/32 peer 192.0.2.2 dev <tundev> tunnelhost:~# ip addr add 192.0.2.2/32 peer 192.0.2.1 dev <tundev>
Also, I noticed that between two debian hosts the tunnels defaulted to state DOWN, so a quick ip link set up dev <tundev> was needed each side.
Ping across, check if it works, and if all’s good you should be able to route via the tunnel and do whatever you need to. Since ssh is generally pretty capable and usable everywhere (even over some crazy portforwards), this should get you going fairly easily.
So I decided to, instead of spamming people up through my blog and IRC and jabber and …. each time I find something cool, rather make a concentrated little project for it.
And I had a useful domain for it around from 2010 as well. So, presenting Earnoms!
Check out the about page for a summary of the project, but definitely keep those music links coming :)
So we survived the day pretty well. Yay for things going as they should ;)
A quick summary would be having one query regarding being unable to hit our test site and that turned out to be a browser issue at the client. The following counters from it (stats from around 15h00 SAST):
Not bad, considering we only took it live sometime last night. Some other people didn’t get by quite so well on v6 day though. Yahoo was one of them. When trying to go to ‘www.yahoo.com’, we get redirected to ‘za.yahoo.com’ with the following DNS records:
vandali % host za.yahoo.com
za.yahoo.com is an alias for fd-fp2.wg1.b.yahoo.com.
fd-fp2.wg1.b.yahoo.com is an alias for ds-fp2.wg1.b.yahoo.com.
ds-fp2.wg1.b.yahoo.com is an alias for ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com.
ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com has address 87.248.112.181
ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f00e:1fe::3001
ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f006:1fe::3000
ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f006:1fe::3001
ds-any-fp2.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f00e:1fe::3000
This then blows up at one of their Accelerators:
Worth a slight thought, since Yahoo actually appears to see use over much of Africa.
All said and done, a fairly good day. Didn’t notice any major blowouts elsewhere in the internet (although I should note I wasn’t tracking all news), and I look forward to some write-ups by the usual people (Renesys, HE, Evilrouters, etc) in the next few days. We appear to remain one of the most well-connected IPv6 ISPs in South Africa, and in a pretty good position overall.
So, it’s World IPv6 Day^W^W^WIPv6 Launch Day (rebranding lulz). Go test your IPv6 at some appropriate site like here (hosted in South Africa) or here (somewhere else than South Africa, I didn’t check).
Google also had some conference announcement about the next stage in Maps. I wonder if it’s this thing I saw on Google Maps last night: Mapmaker. It appears to be 4sq meets Waze meets .. something. Let’s see at 9am PST.
Update: here’s a screenshot.
Second update: (fuck you WordPress editor) apparently Mapmaker’s been live since mid-April. Talk about a quiet launch.
Seriously, if you don’t care about rage (or politics, or beyond-fucked-in-the-head idiots, or …), don’t read this post.
Hey FPB, fuck you. Yes, I said fuck. That’s a swearword. Stick it up your ass.
Here’s a copy of Brett Murray’s ‘The Spear':
Here’s a copy of it when it became more expensive. You know, after some mouth-fuming idiots splashed more paint on it:
And guess what, you can’t do shit. Censor it for age 16? Require measures barring underage people from accessing it? Fuck that. You people need your world adjusted, it’s a little bit closed off at the moment.
Some years ago, before the age of cheap international access on local ISPs arrived here, dual-homing (or n-homing, depending on how pimp you were) on your residential connection was quite the fashion among .za tech-heads. But not the fancy sort with BGP and decent best-route selection, just a really grubby sort: two accounts, one local (as in .za routing table) and one international. You can read up about the full setup over here on Stefano’s site.
Due to the nature of the split, there was some fun. Fun in the order which things might come up, fun in which session’s routing is ready first, fun in DNS server overwriting, that sort of thing. Of course, I mean fun tongue-in-cheek, since it was mostly an annoyance. Especially when ddclient picks the wrong PPP session (“the config says ppp1, why are you using ppp0?”), or doesn’t want to ignore its cachefile (forcing you to wrap it in another script and delete the cache yourself), or when your line flaps and all pppd instances go into this weird race condition where they suddenly all acquire the same IP, or ….. well, I guess you get the idea. It was painful.
Thankfully times have progressed, and now it’s possible to get IPv6. Hell, if you’re in the right place you can even get a static allocation of v6. Working for AS37105, this is of course one of the work perks, since we (the tech team on the v6 deployment) dogfood it ourselves to make sure we know that things are actually working. Things we usually note are the following:
explosions in HE.net’s v6 core – hey, it happens
client apps misbehaving – surprisingly, chrome on my desktop is one of these
“mixed” support – mikrotik, for instance. you can telnet/ssh it on v6, but not winbox to a v6 address (I don’t recall if I’ve tested whether it connects if a hostname resolves to v6 address..mental note)
Personally, the best part for me is not having to ever deal with broken dyndns anymore, or having to maintain lots of funky NATs, or having to tunnel home and route traffic via the tunnel. If I just quickly want to ssh to my desktop, it has a hostname in DNS and it works. If I quickly want to check up on my traffic stats or anything else, I browse to yariman (my gateway/home store). It’s great, and makes my life that much nicer.
All of this said, World IPv6 Day next week! Are you all ready for your few days of carnage as other shitty ISPs run around unprepared? Bring on the future!
One other thing, props to PH.Fat for another good track. The track alone is cool enough for me to share it, but then I saw that the album (available on their website) is creative commons, and that just wins a bit harder. Nicely done, guys :)
P.S. Fuck you, WordPress content editor, and your stupidity in paragraph designation flow after bulletpoints.
Ah, fantastic news strikes again. From this article:
“The system has been configured to allocate 128 IPs, with 124 IPs for passenger use. However, due to the number of passengers (115) utilising multiple devices (some as high as 2-3 devices) on the plane, more than 3 times the allowed connections were constantly requesting access to the internet,” explained WirelessG CEO Carel van der Merwe.
Now, some quick searching indicates that they’re using tech from Row 44 to do this thing. If it’s just satellite downlink, then I quite don’t get the R3.5 million (~$436k USD given a quick check of the current ZAR/USD) pricetag. If it’s the whole shebang, then I guess Row 44 is making some damn nice licensing fees out of airlines on DHCP leases.
Either way, I find it pretty damn hilarious that they didn’t plan for something like this on a flight for tech journos.
In lieu of solar flares, and unicorns, I propose a new protocol name to use when dealing with people who don’t understand routing and friends, people to whom any level of tech explanation would be white noise:
MGP. Stands for Magic Gateway Protocol. It knows just what to do at all times.
Every now and then I run into a little something online which proves to me that the scene(s) isn’t(/aren’t) dead yet, and I’m a little bit rejoiced at it. Everyone toiling away in obscure little corners, still churning out some amazing things. And, for your enjoyment, I present the following.
