The Treehouse Blog

I’ve used Hurricane Electric’s excellent free IPv6 Tunnel Broker for years since Kuhn can’t be bothered to provide native IPv6. I’m occasionally a NetFlix subscriber. I’ve had trouble re-starting my Netflix subscription over the past few weeks, and today determined it is because they are doing evil things with IPv6, or more likely, with my tunnel broker specifically. Why does Netflix make it hard for me to give them money? I fixed this by filtering AAAA records for a number of Netflix domains on my local DNS server. Some good references follow:

• Workarounds for Netflix and the blocking of IPv6 tunnels
• Return A records but not AAAA records on specific domain in bind9

Since the root zone was signed this week, I spent a bit of time today setting up DNSSEC validation on my home recursive server.  It was relatively painless (so far).  I did opt to not enable DLV though – not fond of it receiving every host name I resolve.

Resources:

• RHEL RPMs from http://people.redhat.com/atkac/bind/5.6-test/ – if someone finds a better source for BIND 9.7+ RHEL RPMs, I’d like to know.  I had no luck building from the Fedora SRPMs.
• http://www.isc.org/community/blog/201007/using-root-dnssec-key-bind-9-resolvers – instructions for setting up BIND to use the root key.
• http://fanf.livejournal.com/107310.html – A more thorough walk-through of setup.

One resource I would have liked to find and could not was a deliberately unvalidatable non-root zone/record that could be used to see a validation failure.  If anyone knows of or finds such a thing, please pass it along.  Now we get to wait for .com, .net, etc, to catch up to .bg and .uk in the publishing of DS glue for deeper validation.

UPDATE 7/22/10:  Just found the following site which makes available bad records for testing purposes: http://dnssec-tools.org/testzone/index.html

Awhile ago I finally upgraded my home wireless network (a single WAP54G v2) from TKIP to AES.  This has been something on the to-do list since I got rid of the Axim (which wouldn’t support AES).  I tested my two wireless client devices – a laptop and my G1, and they seemed fine at the time.  All was well.

Later I noticed that the G1 was not functioning on my home network, yet worked on other similarly secured networks I connect to.  It would connect, obtain an IP address, but not pass traffic – which is a pretty bad scenario since the G1 wouldn’t automatically fail back to its GSM data connection.  I did the typical troubleshooting with “forget”-ing the network and reconnecting, etc, but this was unsuccessful.  More detailed analysis showed that almost immediately after DHCP completed successfully, the G1 would see no traffic generated from the network, and the network would see no traffic generated by the G1.  With the laptop working fine through all of this, it really seemed to be a problem with the G1.

After essentially exhausting other options, I turned my attention to the WAP.  I tried changing the SSID which didn’t help, and reverting back to TKIP, which worked fine.  I then decided to upgrade the WAP’s firmware, from 2.07 (2004 era) to 3.04 (2005 era – still 5 years old!).  The wireless security settings are more granular than the former version – and after reconfiguring – the G1 works on AES.

Hopefully this time it will keep working.

When I am occasionally asked about what might be used for networking two random buildings together, the first two thoughts are generally private DSL and wireless.  I’ve not had any personal experience with private DSL, but I know that Patrick had used it in the past, and I think he had used Flowpoint gear.  As I have a possible project in the works, and want to know a bit more about what I’m talking about, I bought a group of  5 FlowPoint 2200s on eBay.

Configuration didn’t go terribly smoothly.  While I was able to setup a typical 9600-8-N-1/no-flowcontrol rollover connection to the boxes, they would seem to not recognize keystrokes after the boxes booted.  If they were configured to do that, I haven’t been able to figure out how.  Fortunately with watching my DHCP server to find their IP addresses (they seem to try to lease them even when statically configured), and using the password override which thankfully works on telnet and not just console, I was able to reconfigure all but one of them.  The last one refused telnet connections (presuming a firewall setting).  If anyone has any idea what might be wrong with the console setup, or other ways of resetting the box, I’d be interested to hear.

As for the point-to-point, or what they seem to call back-to-back portion of the configuration, I found a document describing the setup process.  The routers would link up using this, but would not seem to bridge.  Bridging would be a much easier and more elegant solution for the applications I’m looking at.  I switched the protocol to RFC1483 instead of PPP which seemed to allow the bridging configuration to work.

While approaching ancient, the Flowpoints appear to be the cheapest back-to-back SDSL options out there.  Mine do seem to have a max speed of 1536 kBPS (that’s a T1 less ESF overhead, iirc), but that would probably be fine for my needs.  Anyone using better cheap gear?

I went to a local AT&T store last Tuesday and signed up for service on the G1.  I put the phone on the counter and after the sales guy asked if it were unlocked, and I said that it was, things moved on quickly.  He took my information and began the process.  I walked out with a G1 on AT&T’s network and a receipt for $0 for the SIM.  I checked out data in the car, and it was working despite not having the “wap.cingular” APN settings, which I added later just in case.

I checked my online account access upon getting home.  The sales guy hadn’t setup data access, so I quickly selected the unlimited data and text option.  It also seems that the phone hadn’t been branded a “smartphone” so all of my options were for non-smart phones.  I asked the tech for detailed billing to be enabled (apparently there’s a fee for that in AT&T land) but I couldn’t tell from the website whether it was or not.  Later detailed call logs became available, so I guess it is enabled.  Unlike Verizon, only outgoing numbers are listed, which is a lot less helpful.  UPDATE: Either I missed them before or they didn’t work before, but the detailed call log does seem to have originating numbers now.

I am understandably nervous about data usage charges until I get the first bill.  Recently the bill amount was listed – something like $114 – but I can’t see the bill itself for a few more days.  Some quick figuring suggests this is reasonable for a month’s worth of service and an activation fee, but I’m not sure that’s what it is listing.  Even more recently, itemized data sessions began appearing in the details, all under my unlimited data setup, so I think things are setup correctly at this point.  UPDATE: I have now been able to see the whole bill, and everything seems to be in order.  The changes I made to my account seemed to be retroactively applied on the date I made the change (ie, the date of service start).

The number port from Verizon took about 14 hours.  This was a lot longer than Chris Z. had experienced.

I’ve purchased a few accessories – an adapter to allow both 3.5mm audio and power to be connected simultaneously – for occasional audio use in the car.  Also a mini-USB car charger and additional mini-USB to USB cables for use at home and work. I have not bought a case.  The slide-out keyboard seems to make the possibility of a good skin-type case almost nonexistent.  I also didn’t buy a charging cradle, so even though I have two batteries, I’d have to swap them to charge (like the VX8600 which I also had two batteries and no charger, and unlike the X30 which I had two batteries and a charging cradle).

A few software migrations (updated in previous entry) have been completed, so the X30 will be placed in deprecated status this week.  The 5 items I always check my pockets for before going to work can now be reduced to 4.

One other minor annoyance is that I’ve already found some places that AT&T has lower signal strength than T-mobile had.

I might be turning into an Android fanboy.  The iPhone is still much prettier though.