So… joining Twitter on December 21st 2006 (and leaving shortly thereafter, re-joining 9 months later - check on When Did You Join Twitter) makes me what? A web developer? An IT journalist? A pro-blogger? Or maybe a futurist or innovator?! Guess I should have joined 5 months sooner…

“Our” Apple-family welcomed a rather old guy this weekend, a Power Macintosh G4, the one with AGP and gigabit ethernet. Thanks to Apple for pointing me how to differentiate between models.

I just love the design of these machines: the graphite color; the big Apple-logo on the sides; the handles on the top and last but not least: the easy way to open the hood.

FYI: this particular PowerPC is app. 10 years old, has dual G4-processors at 450MHz, 896MB RAM and two hard disks: 30GB for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server and 80GB for data-storage. Maybe it ‘ll end up replacing the old PC-hardware that is powering this site, giving it a fresh install of FreeBSD during the summer holiday. ;-)

Over the last couple of weeks this blog hasn’t had a proper post. Instead it was filled by automagically created Twitter updates. In the meantime lots of things happened: too much to write down here. Instead I’ll focus on my (re-)achievements with IPv6.

I had IPv6 enabled a couple of years ago, using a 6to4 tunnel, offered as an experimental service by my ISP XS4ALL, but neglected it after installing a new hard drive. This time around, I choose SixXS for the tunnel broker portion and installed their AICCU-tool on my aging FreeBSD-host. FYI: experimenting with OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54GL wireless access point failed kind of (since Tomato-firmware is not supporting IPv6 yet) and left me with this single-host option.

It turned out the so called router advertisement daemon (man 8 rtadvd), needed to propagate IPv6 addresses to our MacBooks and my Linux- / WinXP-host, was able to route between the interfaces /dev/tun0 and /dev/net/fxp0. Not the most cosmetically sweet option, but nevertheless: it’s working like it should - with a local IPv6-subnet in my LAN.

And now what?! What’s the use in running IPv6 when no one else does? Create demand. Think pr0n! In fact, have a look at this presentation below to illustrate that statement:

Fck, the fcking Thing is f*cked - Props go to b10m for pointing me to this one!

Just as in the days of VHS, Betamax and V2000 it’s pr0n that matters. And where do you find pr0n these days? Right: on USENET and Torrent-sites! Regarding USENET, this blogpost will get you started once you have IPv6 up-and-running: Easily Get free newsgroup access over ipv6 in Ubuntu. Of course it’s not about Ubuntu but on the USENET-providers (with high retention!) that will give you free access to their newsgroups containing a huge amount of (semi) illegal content, not only pr0n, but also warez, ebooks, DivX-movies and the whole lot, as long as you connect over… IPv6! And since “The Pirate Bay” is having an IPv6-tracker but is in stormy waters, more and more people will turn to USENET for their “specific needs”.

So? It’s only a matter of time until the RIAA will find out about IPv6 and call for appropriate actions… In the meantime do whatever you think is right (or not). :-P

I was getting too curious, so last evening I decided to install third-party firmware named Tomato (version 0.03.0747 to be specific) on my brand new Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 wireless LAN-router.
This specific router has not been flashed before: no DD-WRT or HyperWRT or whatsoever. The actual flashing was a breeze: after resetting the device and it’s NVRAM by pressing the resetbutton on the back for about 20 seconds I uploaded the file “G\code.bin” from within IE7 under Windows XP. Why IE? In the online forums it is noted that some other browsers are having some problems during the upgrade-process. Indeed, I’ve done this before on a previous Linksys WRT54! :-P
A powercycle afterward just to be sure and when I connected to IP-address 192.168.1.1 there is was: the first Ajax-enabled Linksys web-GUI!!
After (re-)configuring all the network-settings and getting my WLAN on the net again I was ready to dive a little deeper into this new kid on the block.

Tomato is based on the latest Linksys firmware v4.30.7 and it’s main advantages (besides the ones you’ll find in most of the other third party firmwares) in my opinion are the CIFS-client and the web-GUI. With the first one you can mount a Windows- or Samba-share to store bandwidth-logfiles. The second has some SVG under the hood to generate bandwidth-charts and QoS-pies, which look really nice in my default browser Firefox (here IE7 lacks the SVG-support which is now built-in in Firefox).

So far I am very much impressed with this firmware-release! I hope I feel the same in about a week or so, if no updates are released in the meantime.
And compared to the DD-WRT-firmware, it turned out Tomato will not have to reboot itself for every minor tweak that has been made: just an ordinary sighup of the process like any good Unix does will do.

The only (minor) issue I had was enabling the Frame Burst in the Advanced -> Wireless-settings. It stays disabled after saving the settings. This same option worked on previous installed firmwares on my 1st router though maybe I should sent Tomato’s developer Jonathan an email about this.
NOTE - this issue was solved in a later version!

But even if this release is still in an experimental or beta state I think it’s very stable and well equipped for usage on a daily basis. Go and give it a try if you got a WRT54 yourself!!