UPDATE: I wrote a new post with newer and faster benchmarks.
After the Snowden revelations, I personally started looking more into encrypting my online activities and making sure
sites that ran on my server were (relatively) secure. Eventually I put this blog behind HTTPS as well, not really for
any security benefit, since I’m not talking government secrets and the blog has no admin panel, but rather for learning
about TLS and how to set it up properly. Problem was, it seems I did not read about things properly. This blog post
describes one result of that ignorance.
So I went and ordered myself a new server. My old one was a VPS from
Linode with 1 core, 1 GB of RAM and a 24 GB disk. The new one is a dedicated
server from online.net with 8 cores, 8 GB of RAM and 1 TB of hard disk space.
At the same time it is only slightly more expensive so I jumped at the opportunity. How reliable it actually is will
only be shown with time, but I like living on the bleeding edge. So I thought I would write a blog post about all the
stuff I run into when setting up the new server. Note: This post is meant for reference only, not as a guide. Be sure
look for recommendations from people wiser than myself regarding any security settings.
Whatever you think of Internet scammers, they sure are inventive. They keep figuring out new ways to scam people for
clicks, money, or whatever it is they want. Today I noticed a new type of auto-sharing spam page that was unwittingly
shared by a Facebook friend of mine. It takes form as a regular looking clickbait page that lures you in with its title,
but when you go to the page, it fools the user into sharing it on their own page.
For some reason, while browsing the Interwebs, I stumbled upon
Carolina Eyck, a German
theremin player. The theremin is a fascinating electronic instrument played
by moving hands in front of the instrument, without touching it. It has a very unique space-y kind of sound. Even though
I am not musical in any way, after seeing a few videos, I suddenly had a great urge to get myself one and learn to play
it. To save everyone’s ears, I won’t be doing that, but will just settle for listing some fun videos.
Last night, when I was supposed to go to bed early, I instead decided “I’ll just quickly code that one thing”.
Way too many hours later it was ready: Mebe now has RSS feed support. There are two types of feeds, one for
all posts in general and another for tag feeds.
This means you can now follow this blog with your RSS reader too. Just subscribe to /feed. Or, if
you want to follow a certain tag, subscribe to /tag/tagname/feed.
PS.: RFC 822 dates are stupid. Just look at this abomination
I came up with.
I host IRC shells (user accounts with SSH access for IRC usage) for several of my friends. Some of them that run
inferior OSes use
PuTTY to connect. Last week, I got word that one of them was
unable to connect to my server, getting no error on their end (just seemed to never connect).
If there’s one thing I miss from the old pre-touchscreen phones we used to have, it’s
physical keyboards. Physical QWERTY keyboards, to be exact. From the
Nokia 6800 series,
to
the Communicators,
the E70
and all the way to
the N900,
I’ve always loved their
typing speed and power, especially with regards to terminal usage where special
characters are essential. Sadly, after Nokia’s betrayal and the subsequent flop with
the N950,
the market wasn’t looking that good. There were mostly a couple of Android
phones, but I’ve never been a fan of the OS.
Update 2015-06-08: With the latest update,
1.1.6.27 Aaslakkajärvi,
there’s no longer need to do this from the command line. You can now find the same setting in the
Settings app, System → Mobile network → long press your mobile connection and select Edit → select “Dual” in the “Protocol” dropdown.
It seems you still need to reboot the mobile network connection after doing this, so I suggest you disable and re-enable
it just to be sure.
IPv6 has surely been a long time coming. First RFC’d in 1996, it has been 19 years
and it’s still not widely available. In Finland none of the three major ISPs offer IPv6 for regular broadband services.
We are way past the end of IPv4 address space, but so far no one has seemed to care.
Times are changing, though, at least in Finland. The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority — FICORA — has
dedicated the 9th of June this year as the
National IPv6 launch day. Any ISP participating must enable
IPv6 permanently for all or selected contract types. All the big ISPs are on board, so the future is looking good. So
far DNA has opened the game by enabling IPv6 on all of their mobile data packages. And not just some lame transition
technology, they have native dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 on the same network, giving a /64 prefix to each client. Elisa
have also started IPv6 trials on selected mobile contracts. No word yet from Sonera. Hopefully this will eventually push
them to add IPv6 for non-wireless broadband too.
As I have a DNA mobile contract, I obviously had to enable IPv6 straight away. My phone runs Sailfish OS, which got dual
stack support in the latest update (1.1.4.29 Äijänpäivänjärvi). There’s no UI for it yet, so it has to be enabled
through a D-Bus message. The command for enabling dual stack is the following:
It can be executed without devel-su. Note that the mobile network must be down when executing the command. So it’s
easiest to turn airplane mode on while running it. The setting persists through reboots.
Suddenly, IPv6!
Based FingerTerm.
As you can see, my public IPv4 address is different from the internal one (it's NAT'd), but IPv6 allows for
direct connectivity.
This is a good start, really looking forward to an IPv6 enabled Internet. Thanks, FICORA! 😊
PS.: If you tried the above and want to go back to single stack IPv4, you need to change the command so that the last
part says variant:string:"ip".
