Author: arved

last.fm wants my $$$

Since i am not living in de/uk/US last.fm wants to force me to subscribe again.
Probably i will spend some minutes on trying to get the last.fm proxy working on my server.
But because most of the users with similar or interesting taste don’t live in the three markets and the music catalogue will probably also focus on the three big markets. I guess last.fm will be boring in the future.
Looking for alternatives now…

My Server is back

About a month ago my root Server died because of hardware faults. Unfortunately it took my hoster some time to fix it, so when the new server was ready, i was on holidays.
But now i finally managed to complete the restore of the backup, and while doing it updating to FreeBSD 7.1, which has been released in the meantime.
So i think now everything should be working again. Now i just have to filter and read all the piled up email….

ipv6, long way to go

I think the first time i saw IPv6 on the Internet was in the late nineties on IRC, when it was cool to have a hostname like 3ffe:1337::dead:babe. A few years later i tried out freenet6 but stopped using it, when most of the IRC servers k-lined freenet6 because of script kiddies abusing it. IRC was and maybe still is the only IPv6 killer application.
Since 2005 i have been using sixxs.net and started using IPv6 on my LAN. If i can trust the gif-interface counters my sixxs.net tunnel currently transfers about 70MB/day, while the IPv4 interface claims to transfer about 300MB/day.
I recently converted not only this webserver but also the kde-freebsd Teams’ development host to ipv6only. I did not expect this to be a big deal, as all people having accounts on it are unix geeks. I was quite surprised that more than half of the users did not have any ipv6 experience.
Another datapoint is freefall.freebsd.org, a system accessed by unix hackers only. According to netstat there are currently 43 tcp4 ssh sessions and only 10 tcp6 sessions,
Even worse, of these 10 sessions three are freebsd.org-LAN sessions and 2 are from my systems.
So if you have something interesting to offer on the internet, shut down your IPv4 interface.

Webserver moved

If you can read this, the move has been successfull.
I have decided to move to euserv.de. The new webserver has more RAM and a better CPU. Unfortunately Euserv.de charges 10EUR/month for 6 additional ip addresses. So i decided it is time for IPv6.
Although IPv6 has been around for quite some time, there are still some rough edges:
FreeBSD jails IPv6 support requires a patch from Björn Zeeb.
For access via legacy IPv4 i wanted to use lighttpd with mod_proxy, but mod_proxy does not support fetching IPv6-content yet, the following hack is required.
What i still have to think about is aggregated content, like the planet or the weather-plugin. There are way too many sites out there, that don’t support IPv6. (Hello twitter, last.fm, weather.noaa.gov). Possible solutions are NAT, a webproxy, or i have to put the aggregated content somewhere else.

Looking for a new hoster

My old hoster decided to move all his servers to XEN. Since FreeBSD XEN Support isn’t really there yet, this means i need to look for a new hoster.
So i am checking out the FreeBSD-rootserver offers in the 20 – 40EUR/month range. I am quite sure, i don’t want to play with depenguinator, so a real FreeBSD system is the preferred solution.
I currently know about euserv.de and mainlink.de. Anything else?
My current system runs 4 jails handling my email and a few lowtraffic sites. It currently has 256MB RAM which is a bit low, so preferably the new system should have 512MB.