generating ssh keys in 2025
I’m setting up a new system, and I always create a new key when I bulid a new desktop… Having not done it in a few years, I wanted to see what the recomended ssh key looks like these days.
new git learnings
watching the founder of github talk about git. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY here is what I learned:
new vim config
I started from scratch and built up a new Neovim config. Based on this video series: video by typecraft (thank you) Pushed to github here: https://github.com/bartman/nvim-config
improving find -exec efficiency
So today I learned about find -exec ... +
automount mmcblk devices
I put my camera SD/HC card into my laptop (running Debian/testing) and it didn’t mount. Usually I would just run the mount command to get it going: dmesg | tail mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt That unfortunately has some annoyances and I decided to solve this finally.
tunnelbroker vs IRC
IRC not working over HE.net 6in4 tunnel? read on… I recently switched VPS’s (to Digital Ocean) and because my new co-location provider does not come with native IPv6, I had to use a tunnel. Naturally I chose tunnelbroker.net. However, after reestablishing all important services, I noticed that TCP ports in the range 6666-6669 don’t work – not on IPv6 anyways. These are usually used by IRC servers. I did a bit of detective work on trying to figure out what was going on. Initially looking for solutions on the internet, but all I found were other people having this same problem with tunnelbroker.net tunnels.
HDD -> SDD
After reading and hearing everyone raving about SSDs for a couple of years it was hard to resists the upgrade. So I got an Intel SSD 510 120GB to replace my Seagate 2.5" laptop HDD. The prices in the ~120GB SSD category are pretty close. I chose the Intel based on reading that they have a low failure rate (I was unable to find the soruce when writing this up). The Thinkpad X61 only has SATA-II; the drive supposedly has better performance on SATA3. UPDATE: Samat K Jain points out that “the ThinkPad X61 is limited to 1.5 Gbps, even with SATA-II (Lenovo’s excuse: power saving, by keeping bus clocks down)”. Lots of discussion about that on the net.
how to manually create a 6in4 tunnel
I’m doing some IPv6 codig for a client and needed to setup a bunch of 6in4 tunnels. Thre are many ways to do this through distribution init scripts (Debian, Fedora), but I wanted something less permanent and more dynamic for testing. The procedure can be summarized in these steps: create a tunnel mytun between local 1.1.1.1 and remote 2.2.2.2 ip tunnel add mytun mode sit local 1.1.1.1 \ remote 2.2.2.2 ttl 64 dev eth0 give the local end an address ip addr add dev mytun f8c0::1.1.1.1/64 bring up the tunnel ip link set dev mytun up
Presentation slides published!
What a busy week! As the dust of the (extremely) well attended Ottawa IPv6 Summit settles, we are working through some post conference tasks. I’ve just updated the presentation page on the site to include the slide decks of most of the presentations. I am still waiting for files from few speakers. You view the ones which are available on the presentation page. As you may have noticed – if you were lucky to get in before we sold out – the talks were recorded. The results of the recordings will go up on our website within a few weeks.
What is IPv6, and why should I care?
[ NOTE: this article began as the front page of the IPv6 Summit.ca website ] Whenever you use the Internet, you are using an Internet Protocol (IP) - a set of rules for communication between computers. Internet Protocol Version 6 (or IPv6 for short) is an upgrade to the most widely available Internet Protocol (version 4, or IPv4). These Internet Protocols are used to assign each computer with an address (called an IP address) that uniquely identifies it on the Web and allows other computers to communicate with it.