My ADSL provider Andrews & Arnold have provided me with a /48 IPv6 subnet, which seems somewhat wasteful at 2^80 addresses (throw that in your calculator) but certainly useful for testing nevertheless. Whilst slowly getting my head around the task that is variable-length subnetting of IPv6 ranges – painful at best – I decided to just throw in a /64 subnet and set a static gateway address on m0n0wall’s LAN interface to see if it would ‘just work’.

The result, is a working IPv6 LAN by simply enabling autoconfig from the m0n0wall box and telling Ubuntu’s Network Manager to use it. Et voila:

teh@desktop:~$ ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:29:fc:37:1d
inet addr:81.187.xxx.xxx Bcast:81.187.xxx.xxx Mask:255.255.255.240
inet6 addr: 2001:8b0:ff87:1:201:29ff:fefc:371d/64 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: fe80::201:29ff:fefc:371d/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1616524 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2224946 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:277202062 (277.2 MB) TX bytes:519498762 (519.4 MB)
Interrupt:18

You’ll notice that the last 80 bits of my IPv6 address on this host were assigned via autoconfig, using part of my MAC address (the part that doesn’t correspond to a certain manufacturer, IIRC) as well as some randomly-generated bits, too.

And to make my night, ping6 worked straight away, too:

teh@desktop:~$ ping6 2001:08B0:FF88:0001::1
PING 2001:08B0:FF88:0001::1(2001:8b0:ff88:1::1) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:8b0:ff88:1::1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3.81 ms
64 bytes from 2001:8b0:ff88:1::1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.130 ms
64 bytes from 2001:8b0:ff88:1::1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.132 ms

--- 2001:08B0:FF88:0001::1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.130/1.358/3.813/1.735 ms

Now to plan how I’m going to roll this out at work…

As I was having another (un-successful) crack at getting a disk controller (other than the motherboard’s IDE controller) to work with Nexenta Core v2, I’d again forgotten how I was meant to discover the disks as-probed by the OpenSolaris kernel.

Of course, Nexenta includes Ubuntu Hardy’s userland tools, but anything kernel/device-related is still very different to what I’m used to.

I finally found a particularly well-written post by Pascal Gienger, whom notes that:

First we will try to look up the disks accessible by our system:

# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

Type CTRL-C to quit “format”.

If your disks do not show up, use devfsadm:

# devfsadm
# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c0d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0
2. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
3. c1d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

You’ll notice that the virtual disks are mapped as IDE/ATA drives, so the disk device names don’t have a target specification “t”.

Which has helped me to finally find out that my second-hand (i.e. ‘borrowed’ from an old work machine) Adaptec RAID card, doesn’t work with Nexenta Core v2. Still, Core v3 will be out in a few months – maybe I’ll try again then.

Also worth noting, as it may be useful, iostat -En prints out similar information useful when searching for disks to use with ZFS.

Wrong. I tried at least three of the twenty I purchased (for a few quid) and none of them would even begin writing. Brasero/K3B both complained about incompatible media types.

Remembering that my DVD drive, a trusty NEC 3500A, was designed, built and purchased somewhere between 2004 and 2005 (4-5 years ago at this point) and that I hadn’t ever updated the firmware, I set about researching ways and means into doing this.

I came across this website, run by a pair of firmware hackers named Liggy and Dee whom have (between them) released, and continue to host, many firmware releases (both official and unofficial) for a wide variety of NEC optical drives.

What’s more, their binflash (or ‘necflash’) utility was even released as a Linux binary and it even provides compatibility for reading the official NEC .exe firmware releases! I was sceptical that it would work under Ubuntu 9.10 at first, but much to my delight it worked perfectly. With a little reading, I was able to dump my current firmware (2.16) to file and subsequently flash two different firmware releases: 2.58 (an OEM firmware release) and the latest, official NEC firmware 2.1A release.

The full output of my escapades for anyone curious:


~$ sudo ./necflash -flash -v -s Desktop/NECND350_v21A.exe /dev/sg2
Binflash - NEC version - (C) by Liggy and Herrie
Visit http://binflash.cdfreaks.com

Identified drive: 4 - 3031
Detected drive from Firmware: 4

You are about to flash your drive with the following firmware:

Vendor: _NEC
Identification: DVD_RW ND-3500AG
Version: 2.1A

Remember no one can be held responsible for any kind of failure!
Are you sure you want to proceed? (y/n) y

Entering safe mode
Sending firmware to drive at 0x006000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x00e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x016000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x01e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x026000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x02e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x036000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x03e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x046000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x04e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x056000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x05e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x066000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x06e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x076000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x07e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x086000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x08e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x096000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x09e000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0a6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ae000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0b6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0be000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0c6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ce000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0d6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0de000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0e6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0ee000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0f6000
Sending firmware to drive at 0x0fe000
Sending checksum to drive
Erasing flash block 2
Erasing flash block 3
Erasing flash block 4
Erasing flash block 5
Erasing flash block 6
Erasing flash block 7
Erasing flash block 8
Erasing flash block 9
Erasing flash block 10
Erasing flash block 11
Erasing flash block 12
Erasing flash block 13
Erasing flash block 14
Erasing flash block 15
Erasing flash block 16
Erasing flash block 17
Erasing flash block 18
Writing flash block 2
Writing flash block 3
Writing flash block 4
Writing flash block 5
Writing flash block 6
Writing flash block 7
Writing flash block 8
Writing flash block 9
Writing flash block 10
Writing flash block 11
Writing flash block 12
Writing flash block 13
Writing flash block 14
Writing flash block 15
Writing flash block 16
Writing flash block 17
Writing flash block 18
Leaving safe mode

Whilst the 2.58 OEM release didn’t fix my problems, 2.1A did and I now have a freshly-burnt copy of Windows 7 Pro to go and play games with. Nice one, Liggy & Dee.

Whilst I’m not a programmer, and exist far from the plain of ever pretending to be one – I do have some professional interests in playing with this. I’ll probably update this post a little later with some more, specific information when all can be revealed, but for now here’s a little taster:

root@gotest:~# 6g hello.go
root@gotest:~# 6l hello.6
root@gotest:~# ./6.out
hello, world

It works! This machine is an openvz container, running Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 and it works a treat, with the only exception that I couldn’t build Go with the standard ‘all.bash’ make script. I had to use the ‘make.bash’ script, instead for it to work – something about probing the network devices not working with the former script. Thanks go to Rob Pike from Google, whom seems to have been working pretty darn hard in the #go-wild IRC channel on Freenode recently!

Update: 34SP.com are now offering Google Go development environments, for those wishing to dabble!

Further still, they’re touting the fact that the OWA now has all of the features the regular Outlook desktop does!

Does this not strike anyone else as a move that would make Windows (and Office, particularly since itself and OpenOffice will by then both have full ODF compatibility) completely obsolete? Why would you pay for a Windows 7 site license, when you can upgrade your Exchange server to 2010, replace all of the Windows machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 3.1 and OpenOffice, and save your company thousands of pounds?

On top of this, they’ve supposedly tuned 2010 to be ‘less bursty’ in the way that it accesses the disk, as well as adding JBOD concatenation support. Does anyone else see that as ‘Please virtualise your Exchange servers’? Yep, so did I.

I suppose you could be running HyperV, but with Microsoft supporting iterations of Windows Server under RedHat Xen virtulisation, I really don’t see how they’re going to convince people to pay for their the majority of their bread-and-butter products, once Exchange 2010 débuts.

What’s next? Windows 7 released under the Microsoft Public License? Perhaps they’ll just call it ‘Windows Azure Client’ when they give it away for free…