IPv6

September 15, 2008 by nxt

I decided it was time to start experimenting with IPv6.
I started with go6.net, so I created an account and installed the software for the tunnel on my linux machine.
apt-get install tspc
add the account info to the config file and you're ready to go. It worked instantly. However it was a little slow (200kB/s and ping times up to 300ms) but that is probably related to the distance between our locations.

So next I tried Hurricaine Electric which have an endpoint at the AMS-IX so that should give me better speed, or at least better ping times. They offer no custom software but instead use protocol 41. Unfortunately it seems that my linksys BEFW11S4 router doesn't let that traffic through (not even when I place my machine in the DMZ) so I looked on.

I finally ended at SixXS which also has several tunnel endpoints in the Netherlands and offer an UDP based protocol that is capable to pass through NAT.  Their software works I get very good speeds and ping times here. The only downside I could find is that you'll have to wait for a week before you can request a /48 subnet, but this should'nt be a big problem, just be patient and besides it gives you the time to figure out how you want to configure your network.
Their service works very good and I'm glad I signed up there. 

Now all I need to do is find a router that is capable of passing protocol 41 and convert my ayiya based tunnel to one that provides less overhead.

 

IE8: opt-out mime sniffing

July 22, 2008 by nxt

According to a recent blog entry on msdn  Microsoft has finally decided to fix a very annoying 'feature' of internet explorer. Mime-sniffing.

 It always irritated me that when I specified a content-type for a web page, Internet Explorer would just look at the content and say: "your wrong" and renders the page the way it thinks you intended.
If I give a html page text/plain as content-type I intend to let it show the source, not render it as html because if I wanted that I would have given it text/html as content-type.

At least in IE8 they allow us to disable the mime sniffing by appending ";authoritative=true" to the content-type header. This way it won't hurt other browsers and we are still able to provide the mime type ourselves.

 

Wireless

December 30, 2005 by nxt

I recently bought the 3com OfficeConnect travel router to have wireless internet whenever I'm at my parents.
I'm very pleased to see that - despite some reviews I've read - the range is very good.
I chose this one because it can function as an accesspoint, router or client. The client mode can be usefull when I'm with other people since my laptop (acer travelmate 800LCi) only has 11b, so I can get some higher speeds with this thing. It would have been nice though if it could optionally be powered by usb so that I wouldn't need to carry the adapter everywhere I go.

 

Apache 2.2.0

December 10, 2005 by nxt

I wanted to upgrade to Apache 2.2.0 on my windows server, but because of some changes in the APR library all modules need to be recompiled. In my case the most important ones are mod_ssl and the subversion modules.
It seems very difficult to compile the two with visual studio 2003 without compile errors :(
but I keep trying... I now have only two compile errors left to resolve.

 

linux

July 12, 2005 by nxt

I've finally installed Linux on my notebook. Which distribution? touch choice...
Eventually it came down to the difference in package management systems and the two systems I liked most are 'apt' which is found in debian based distributions and 'emerge' from the gentoo distribution. I went for gentoo mostly because I feel that it gives me more controll over what I want to install. I had my thumbs crossed because I really wanted to use the packages cd (you really don't want to wait untill KDE is compiled before you can use your system). I must have f*cked up somewhere in the process, because I only managed to install KDE from the packages disc (maybe I should have disconnected the ethernet cable?).
However overall I'm satisfied with the time the installation took, and it may be worth mentioning that the gentoo manual is very detailled and complete. I hope that I can take a peek at Sun's project Looking Glass once I figured out which ATI drivers I should use.

 

rss / nntp

July 06, 2005 by nxt

nntp//rss is an application that contains an NNTP server and allows you to represent RSS feeds as newsgroups so you can read the feeds with your favorite client (e.g. Outlook Express, Thunderbird, ..)
It comes with an web interface for administration & monitoring purposes