BenV's notes

Morons

World IPv6 Day!

by on Jun.08, 2011, under Morons

Today is proclaimed World IPv6 Day, in order to motivate everyone to just fucking get it done already. And test if people have issues today of course 🙂
They’ve had years and years and still major ISPs haven’t even heard of IPv6 or simply can’t be arsed because there’s little demand for it. (Boohoo, “it costs money to upgrade our ancient equipment“)
So attention everyone: if you don’t have IPv6 right now, mail your ISP, bug their contact for(u)ms, and spam their phones. You want it! 🙂
If you’re hosting content and don’t have it: bug your provider about it as well. It’s saddening to see how few hosting providers today still don’t offer IPv6, even though it’s been out there for over a decade!

One of the reasons my home connection is with XS4All is that they deliver native IPv6 to the doorstep.
All machines at home automagically receive an IPv6 address from my modem and it just works ™. No hassles with tunnels or anything, simply turn it on and it works.

As for the “Why would I care?“. Because it’s fun to play with. Because it’s neat to have so many public addresses.
No more NAT and port forwarding to get your webserver reachable on the internet, but simply open up port 80 in your firewall and you’re done!
You’ll have so many addresses (assuming your ISP are not major dickheads that only hand out single IPs, but they won’t) that you can put an IPv6 address
on every device you have, for every program you have, for every pixel on your screen and still you’ll have tons to spare.

If you’re not sure if you have it, there’s this test to check, but I sure hope you know about the state of your connection without such tests 😉

In case your stupid provider is being the usual dumbdumbhead and won’t be bothered (and obviously you can’t switch because they have the local monopoly) you can get IPv6 connectivity for free through a tunneling broker by at least two parties that I know of. One of them is Hurricane Electric, the other Sixxs (although they can be dicks, so I’ll be a dick by not linking them ;))
It will give you the ability to tinker with IPv6, so give it a shot if you’re new to it. Did I mention it’s free? 🙂

But how do I configure IPv6 on my Slackware machine?
Well, if you do it properly and get it through your ISP natively your modem will take care of it. It’ll announce your prefix to your network and if you have your kernel set to autoconfigure it (which is default, as long as you’ve loaded the ipv6 module) it’ll get an address based on your mac address.
Adding addresses manually is just as easy as with ipv4:

# Example out of thin air
root@somewhere# modprobe ipv6 # if you hadn't done this yet ;)
root@somewhere# ip -6 addr add 2001:1234:3214:abcd::80/64 dev eth0
root@somewhere# ip -6 route add default via 2001:1234:3214::1 dev eth0

So go and check it out, it can be fun 🙂

Oh yeah, obviously my notes are available on IPv6. And it seems to be a lot faster than google at the moment 😉

ipv6 ready

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Another round of Adobe Cancer

by on Feb.24, 2011, under Morons, Software

Needless to say Adobe had an update today.
Since we’re running a windows 2008 server with users that don’t have administrator rights, Adobe is very annoying to start with.

<Adobe>”Hey I have an update! Oh, I can’t install it because you need administrator rights, but I’ll keep bugging you with it anyway, MWHOAHAHHAHA”

So if that isn’t enough already (and they have an update about every week … if not more often), the piece of cancer can’t even update. Even when running the updater as administrator:

Adobe Cancer Update

Mysterious fail

Of course it would be terrible to state what the problem is, so they only give you “Error: 1403” to work with.
Thanks Adobe, really useful. It’s unfortunate that some morons here insist on needing it (Because some idiot customers send us PDF files with chinese fonts and other rubbish that isn’t handled well in better pdf readers).

Feh.

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Hate Sony? Fight the cancer!

by on Feb.20, 2011, under Morons

If you’re like me you probably already hate the scumm that’s called Sony.
For installing rootkits on your pc. For taking away the ability to run linux on your PS3.
For being a Sony Cancer.
They’ve been assholes for as long as I can remember. Just check out their latest Playstation network agreement if you want to see how they trample your rights.

Anyhow, the guy being sued by them today (geohot – the one giving back linux on the ps3) has now setup a donation place to get some good lawyers.
So if you have a bit of coin to spare for a good cause, this is it. Anti Cancer! Pro Linux! What else could you want to spend your money on? 🙂

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The Adobe Cancer

by on Mar.09, 2010, under Morons, Software

They’ve managed to piss me off once more.
I had to do a windows reinstall (XP of course) for some idiots that fubar-ed their machine, so after the usual install, 5 million windows updates, service packs, reboots and firefox install I figured I should probably install flash for them.
How hard can it be to install Adobe Flash? (continue reading…)

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Bye bye Ubisoft

by on Feb.18, 2010, under Morons, Software

How incredibly stupid can they possibly get… like a dumb user that keeps running virus infected “naked hot girls!!!” screensavers, they keep adding DRM.
And now we’ve reached the point where they expect you to stay connected constantly to play a single player game.
Aahahahaha. Bye bye Ubisoft, may the pirates laugh at you and dance on your grave.
Alas for Settlers 7.. could have been an interesting game.

However, I expect them to revert their plans when enough badmouthing hits the news and make them “only” half as bad as they currently are.
We’ll see.

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CMake issues

by on Feb.13, 2010, under Morons, Software

I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine why anyone would use cmake as an autoconf alternative. (continue reading…)

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Dragon Age: Origins

by on Nov.10, 2009, under Fun, Morons, Software

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)

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Qmail + Spamdyke and fail2ban

by on Nov.03, 2009, under Morons, Software

Yesterday evening I was curiously looking at some tcpdump traffic that went through our dom0 of Xenbro. There seemed to be a ton of weird DNS requests. And with weird I mean spamlike domains, like familiesfirstmedical.com. After wondering for a bit I realized they were coming from our service domU that runs mail for the junerules.com domain. (continue reading…)

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Another wordpress update

by on Oct.21, 2009, under Morons, Software

Version 2.8.5 is here! Some important security hardening going on, fixing a trackback DoS attack (or so they claim). Some more details over here. As usualy the automatic update failed for me, so once again the fix for this error:

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1538482 bytes received

Either patch it manually:

  • Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
  • The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

--- wp-admin/includes/file.php.org 2009-10-21 17:03:47.000000000 +0200
+++ wp-admin/includes/file.php 2009-10-21 17:03:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -445,7 +445,7 @@
if ( ! $handle )
return new WP_Error('http_no_file', __('Could not create Temporary file'));

- $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 60));
+ $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
fclose($handle);

[Download not found]

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

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Widelands, settlers and scons

by on Sep.18, 2009, under Fun, Morons, Software

Today the project to try out is Widelands, apparently a Settlers clone.
Since I loved the Settlers (the first one was the best) when the graphics were still acceptable, it is interesting enough to try it out. What I loved about the Settlers was the whole simulation concept. The construction of buildings, the little lemmings that moved the goods around, chopped down trees, fished, etc. The entire war aspect of the game was terrible (what do you mean my maximum level guy just got p0wnz3d by their new lowlevel rookie?!) . Therefore I liked the games that followed less and less. Settlers 2 was acceptable, a welcome upgrade in graphics and interface and stuff like that, but the war aspect… blegh. Then at 3 I had enough of the series. Why can’t it be a simulation where tribes co-exist in peace? I see how that might not attract many gamers, but how about an option huh? Another thing that was great about the Settlers 1 was the multiplayer multi-mouse splitscreen mode, where both players had a mouse on 1 PC and could control a single empire together. With SVGA mode it was great 🙂 (continue reading…)

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