World IPv6 Launch – and this time they’re not switching it off

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World IPv6 Launch logoLast year, World IPv6 Day was held on 8 June, where lots of well-known (and some not-so-well-known) Internet sites turned on IPv6 for a day to see what would happen.  Well, the Internet Society have come up with a sequel, called “World IPv6 Launch” – to be held on 6 June this year – and this time the plan is not to switch the IPv6 off.

Major companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and the Bing division of Microsoft are taking part, which is probably a large proportion of the IPv4 traffic currently going and up down the Internet today, so it will be interesting to see what effect turning on IPv6 will have.  Although it must be said that most ISPs in the UK have been very slow to roll out IPv6, some have and this will at last mean that we get to talk to all these big sites over the new protocol at last.

I’ve never really made a big secret of the fact that I think the UK ISPs really need to get a move-on with the v6 rollout – at the time of writing, the predictions are that RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses around the end of July, so time is now of the essence.  What are you all waiting for?! (I suspect the answer is “someone else to do it first”)

More details at http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

Review: Christmas Presents

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A little bit late than never, since today is the twelfth day of Christmas, but never mind.  Favourite present this year has to be Shaun the Sheep series 2, followed closely by the Blu-Ray edition of A Matter of Loaf and Death, which conveniently goes very nicely with the new HD TV and Blu-Ray player that I bought in November.  Looks very crisp and sharp in HD.  It’s easy to keep me entertained (as long as it involves Wallace and Gromit or Shaun/Timmy) …

Apart from that, no socks this year (good), no slippers (also good), and only one box of deodrant and shower gel.  Which is nice since I can never seem to use it at the rate I get it… (perhaps I should stop buying it during the year!)

Review: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

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So I finally bit the bullet and decided to replace my T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) – the first ever production “consumer” Android phone with a newer model.  I went in the end for the  Sim-Free version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for several reasons – one, it’s a “Nexus” phone which means that Google tightly control the user experience and firmware, so there’s no unexpected surprises or manufacturer/operator add-ons in there.

Compared to my previous phone, it’s certainly much lighter, and seems a lot more “flimsy” – but much of that is probably because it’s lighter.  The screen size is far bigger than the old one, at 4.65″ diagonal and is one of Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays.  Very nice quality screen, nice vibrant colours.  One of the downsides of having a thin phone though is that there isn’t enough space for a “real” keyboard like the G1 had – personally, I found using the onscreen keyboard of the G1 a total nightmare because the combination of large fingers and too small a screen size meant that I ended up getting the wrong letters out most of the time.  Thankfully with the Galaxy Nexus this isn’t the case, since the screen size is bigger and therefore more accommodating to my larger fingers.

The phone has NFC (support for contactless smart cards, etc.) built in and does actually work (inasmuch as I proved that the NXP application could detect my Oyster card), which when the carriers/card companies/banks get their act together could be very useful.  Battery life is also much improved compared to the G1 (which frankly isn’t hard).

The phone comes with the brand-new Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system which is completely different in design but thankfully I had a go with it on the Android Emulator before I bought the phone so I knew exactly what to expect.  A big downside of this phone is that there is no SD card slot, it just has 16GB of internal Flash memory.  However there is a good reason for this, which is that most applications can’t be moved to an SD card slot anyway, so there’s limited use for it.  I can cope with that, and the phone therefore isn’t able to work as a USB Mass Storage device, but can cope with the Microsoft MTP and PTP protocols so it appears as a Windows Portable Device, and you can use that to copy files to and from the phone.

Camera is average (at 5 megapixels), but I’m not too worried about that since I don’t tend to use a mobile phone to take serious pictures anyway.  Front camera is 1.3 megapixels.  There are no physical buttons on the phone apart from the volume controls on the left, and the power button on the right – all the other buttons are ‘soft’ buttons and are part of the display.  This seems a bit odd at first, but you soon get used to it.  And the ITL41F firmware update rolled out to me yesterday to fix the so-called ‘Volume bug’, which probably wouldn’t have affected me much anyway since the mobile provider I use does not use 900MHz 2G, but I’m glad to see it fixed anyway.  Another nice feature is that it does support (albeit in a limited way) 5GHz wireless networking, which means I can use it with the 802.11a standard (I don’t have an 802.11n capable access point).

As this phone is a Nexus, unlocking the bootloader was a relative piece of cake – install the phone USB drivers, and put the phone into fastboot mode, then run “fastboot oem unlock” from the Android SDK software, and accept the ‘Do you really want to do this?’ message on the phone, and job done.  It does however wipe your phone when you unlock the bootloader, but at least that means I now have the choice of any third-party firmware that I like once Google have stopped issuing updates to the official one.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the phone, having had it less than a week.  The only thing I’m really unhappy about is the fact I can’t get a suitable pouch case for it yet, but that’s only to expected with a newly-released phone.  I can definitely recommend buying one if Android’s your thing and you’re looking for a no-nonsense Android phone.  Some people may not like the “bare Android” experience though, and might be better suited to going for a phone with the extra bells and whistles put in.

Review: Oxford DSO Stage 1

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Probably not the most exciting event for most people, but last night was ‘Oxford DSO Stage 1’ – that is, the first stage of digital switch over when one of the analogue channels was turned off (BBC2 in our case) and in its place (on the relays, anyway) goes the ‘BBC A’ digital mux containing the BBC channels (obviously, including BBC2).

Two weeks from now, on 28 September, all the other analogue channels get turned off and the relays start broadcasting all three digital muxes, with the main Oxford transmitter broadcasting all 6 muxes at full power.

Sad as it was, I thought I’d stay up till midnight to see BBC2 analogue disappear – there was a trashy film on BBC2, but instead of going off at midnight they actually waited until 01:13 (end of the film) to turn it off (I was yawning a lot by then!).  Snow appeared on the screen, and BBC2 analogue was gone forever.  At the same time, BBC1 analogue also disappeared, but that was to come back by the following morning.

Then I went to bed (understandably).

The following morning, I was expecting the worst.  The powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to switch UHF channels 34 and 53+ around which could only have ended up in disaster.  (The reasoning behind it was sensible – to get all the PSB muxes into Group C/D so existing non-wideband aerials could be used).  Instead of the box thinking ‘oh, it’s the same LCN (Freeview channnel number) just on a different UHF channel’ it just refused to show it.  Hmph.  So I had to do a manual retune on the box.  And just as I feared, this did the usual thing of deleting all my timers on the replaced channels.  I really don’t understand why the manufacturers haven’t sorted this one out yet – it makes things very user-unfriendly.

Anyway, retune done, everything worked okay again and I had all six muxes back.  I will have to do all this again on September 28 when more channels move (68 is moving to 60-, 51- moving to 62, and 34 is moving to 59-, and 29 moving to 55 – putting all the muxes in Group C/D at last).  And I’ll lose virtually all my timers – again :(

garyhawkins.me.uk now DNSSEC enabled

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Today I have managed to get the garyhawkins.me.uk domain DNSSEC enabled.  So what is it and why do you need it?  DNSSEC is a mechanism for digitally signing your DNS servers so that you can reliably prove that the result you get back is the correct result and not a fake one provided by an attacker.

Say, for example, Google signed their google.com zone with appropriate DNSSEC keys (which, actually, they haven’t got round to doing yet!)  Instead of the computer just blindly accepting whatever results have been given to it, the computer will first do a verification check on the results returned by verifying a special digital signature given to every DNS name.  If the digital signature is wrong, then the result is invalid and an error will be returned.  So when you type in “www.google.com” into your web browser, then you can be something very close to 100% sure that you are being sent to the correct web site, and not a fake one.

(This is quite similar to, but not exactly the same as, the way that DKIM works with email – the mail headers are digitally signed and decrypted with a special DKIM key stored in the DNS in an effort to verify that the mail has genuinely come from the sender and/or domain name that it says it has.)

In theory, this means that if an attacker were to redirect all requests for garyhawkins.me.uk to another server, then the attack would fail because the attacker shouldn’t have the private key to sign the response with, because the response wouldn’t decrypt with my public key stored in the DNS.  So therefore, it makes it very difficult for an attacker to return fake results, hopefully meaning that when you access a server on garyhawkins.me.uk, you’re getting the real results!

Review: Tesco Bread Sauce

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Had to buy a different brand of bread sauce last week since my usual brand was either out of stock or they’ve stopped selling it.  So I thought I’d give the “house brand” a try.

First impressions were, well, about average – it was a rather finer powder than the other stuff, and I wasn’t that enamoured with the ingredients list – celery powder?!  But I measured out half a pint of milk, brought it to the boil and mixed the powder in as per the instructions, then simmered it for a few minutes.

I found the sauce to be very smooth (which is not necessarily a good thing in my book), but the overpowering taste of celery in the sauce really put me off.  All in all, it tasted quite bland, and too much celery and onion taste.  And it wasn’t very thick.  A rather disappointing bread sauce overall, but not entirely inedible either.  But I probably won’t be buying that again if I can help it.

Rating: 3 out of 10
Comments: Need to do better, Tesco!

HTML mail revisited

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So, I’ve been using HTML mail for a while, as you may have gathered from a previous post, but there’s one thing nagging me about it – the HTML email signature is a bit too ‘busy’ for my liking (especially with the full-colour 64×64 image I had in it).  If you write a relatively boring email with a full-colour logo in the signature, that somehow makes the signature look out-of-place somehow.  But then again, a plain text email signature looks a bit too boring.  I could go for the ‘inbetween’ method, which is a ‘boring’ signature but in HTML, but that doesn’t seem to serve any sensible purpose either way.

So, for now, I’ll think I’ll go back to using a ‘boring’ signature for now – at least that way Thunderbird manages to send the mail entirely plain text only if there are no HTML elements in it – which suits me fine.  Then if I must use HTML, then it can do it on an as-needed basis.

Answers or comments on a postcard please … (or in the comments section)

Rough guide to grub-efi-amd64 on Debian Wheezy

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This is a rough guide on how to get Debian testing (wheezy) to boot from UEFI.  I’ve tried on Squeeze but unfortunately there’s so many bugs in it that it basically fails for me on an Intel S1200BTL motherboard with AMI Aptio UEFI.

The Debian Installer CD does not yet boot from UEFI itself so the process is made a little bit more complex than it might otherwise be.

Step 1 – Preparation

  1. Back up your data.
  2. Please make a copy of your data for safe keeping purposes.
  3. Store a second copy of your data somewhere where it won’t get wiped.
  4. Have you backed up your data yet?
  5. Backing up your data is a really good idea.
  6. Please back up your data, and do it now before you forget.
  7. Reminder – don’t forget to back up your data.
  8. I’d install a copy of backup software and use it if I were you at this point.
  9. Backing up is a good idea.
  10. You are strongly advised to do your backups before you attempt steps 1-9.
  11. Burn yourself a Debian Installer CD so that you can recover if it all goes wrong.
  12. Make sure the CD you’ve just burned actually works.

Step 2 – Make sure you have an EFI System Partition

UEFI machines require a special partition called an ‘EFI System Partition’ to store boot loaders and other assorted drivers from, unless you fancy installing GRUB2 to a USB stick, that is.  100MiB seems a reasonable size for it and must be FAT32 formatted otherwise the UEFI probably won’t see it.  If you are going to be installing Microsoft products on this box, then you should make it the first partition, but the UEFI standard itself doesn’t require this.  If you are using GPT partition tables, the EFI System Partition needs to have a type GUID code of C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B (if you are using parted to make your partitions you can turn a partition into an EFI System one by running the command set <partition-number> boot on which will set this for you.  MBR (“normal”) partition tables should use partition type 0xEF for it.

When you create it, it should be formatted with a FAT32 file system and you must ensure that it has a directory called efi placed in the root directory.

Step 3 – Boot into your existing Debian system

If you haven’t already, boot up your existing Debian system and log in as root.  Please ensure you have a working grub-pc (BIOS) configuration (i.e. GRUB 2) before you go any further.  If you are still using GRUB 1, then upgrade to GRUB 2 and get it working before you carry on.

Install the grub-efi-amd64 package using aptitude or apt-get.  This conflicts with the grub-pc package and will cause the old ‘BIOS’ grub to be removed.

Mount your EFI System Partition on to /boot/efi, and it’s a good idea to make sure it’s always mounted on boot by altering the fstab.

Now run grub-install (The EFI version does not require any parameters).  This should install the grub-efi files to your EFI System Partition.  Once the installation is complete, you should find a single file in \efi\debian called grubx64.efi.

Important – Check your grub.cfg to make sure that it loads the efi_gop module in the load_video function.  If it doesn’t, your computer will boot, but you won’t see the screen display!  (Some old UEFIs may need efi_uga instead, but most UEFIs use efi_gop these days.)

Step 4 – First UEFI boot

The first time you boot from this, there will be no entry in the UEFI boot manager to start it up automatically, so you’ll need to go into the EFI Shell and boot grub2 by hand.

Shut down your machine, and reboot into the UEFI setup and switch mode from BIOS to UEFI.  (Not all UEFIs need this step – some like my AMI Aptio has a mode which will let you boot from either BIOS or UEFI).

Boot into the EFI Shell.  At the prompt, type in fs0: to switch to the EFI System Partition, and then type \efi\debian\grubx64.efi to start GRUB manually.  If all has gone well, you should be rewarded with the bog standard GRUB2 boot menu as normal.  Choose your kernel and off you go!  Don’t forget to congratulate yourself that you managed to UEFI boot your Debian install on the way!

Step 5 – Reinstall grub2

This may sound a bit silly, but it’s the easiest way of getting a boot option into the UEFI boot manager.  Once your machine has succesfully booted again, load the efivars module by typing modprobe efivars, make sure the EFI System Partition is mounted at /boot/efi, and then run grub-install again, then update-grub.  You should find now, if you run efibootmgr, that you should have an entry “debian” in there which will boot the new grub install you have just made.

Finally, make sure that efivars module is loaded every time you boot by inserting it into the /etc/modules file.

Scary Search Engines

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It’s quite scary sometimes how search engines appear to pick up your links so quickly.  (Unless I just happened to catch the spider crawling my web site at just the right moment).  Now I seem to feature in Google Blogs somewhere at the top of the list, and all kinds of other stuff.  Of course, I had to do something to screw ’em up – I’ve just changed the URL of my “Full Size Blog” … :)   Try again Google! :)