bartman's blog

ipv6 on your desktop in 2 steps

Some people have been telling me that they “have no time” or “are too lazy” to setup IPv6 on their desktop, but would like to. Below are 2 easy steps to get IPv6 running on your Debian Linux sytem (shoudl be identical on Ubuntu, and similar distros). If you’re not running Linux, check out these pages instead: MacOS X, Windows.

growing a live LVM volume

I have an LVM volume, with xfs on it, that is almost full: $ df /scratch -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg-scratch 180G 175G 5.4G 98% /scratch $ sudo lvdisplay /dev/mapper/vg-scratch ... LV Size 180.00 GB ... But I have some more space in the physical volume. Let’s grow the logical volume.

distributing DNS list through radvd

If you have an IPv6 Linux network at home, you probably have a Linux host on the perimeter that’s running radvd – this is the server that responds to IPv6 neighbour discovery (ND) requests, distributes the default route to all your hosts, and tells your hosts how to auto configure themselves. All these tasks were handled by the DHCP server, albeit a lot differently, in the good old days. The one other thing that dhcpd did for us was to tell all the hosts where the DNS servers were. So, do I need to run the IPv6 version of dhcpd AND radvd?

Canadian ipv6 drought

Apparently there is a huge shortage of Canadian registrars that can provide full ipv6 support. The only one I was able to find is BareMeta.com, which despite it’s TLD operates out of Victoria, BC. I haven’t switched yet, because while they support ipv6 glue records for .ca, they don’t for .net yet. Here is the discussion on dslreports.com where it was mentioned.

ipv6 certification

I’ve finally gotten onto the IPv6 bandwagon and went through the process of converting my network to IPv6. Ya know, the end is near. I am using an he.net tunnel, and am almost done going through their certification process.

m4a to mp3

I was at Bridgehead earlier today and heard a cool tune. I asked the staff what it was, and they told me that it was Low Strung. After coming home I wanted to get the CD, but was unable to find it anywhere but iTunes. I don’t do iTunes, because Apple doesn’t do Linux… but fortunately my wife has a Mac. So, after getting the album I had to convert it from .m4a to .mp3. I figured I’d share my script… convert-m4a-to-mp3. You’ll need to grab a few packages to use it: apt-get install zsh faad id3v2 twolame toolame.

git 1.7.2 is out

Just announced is release of Git version 1.7.2. Scanning through the ReleaseNotes the following look interesting: git -c var=val will override config git show :/pattern now uses regex git no longer squelches if it doesn’t find .git (useful when using in PS1) git checkout --orphan name makes a new root branch (no parent) git cherry-pick can now be given a list of refs git log --decorate learned to colour more things

console=ttyS0 with grub2

Just a quick note so I don’t forget now to enable console logging on systems running grub2 (like Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid). edit /etc/default/grub set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX to "console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=tty0" run update-grub reboot ( more info can be found here )

How many times is my function used within an executable?

I am working on a large kernel module which had just come out of a large (and fruitful) internal API refactoring exercise. I now want to go through and cull the unused functions. It turns out, all that is needed is the readelf utility (part of binutils package).

vmlinux on Ubuntu

If you’re trying to do post-mortem analysis on a crashed river, or trying to find kernel-level bottlenecks with oprofile, you need the decompressed kernel w/ debug symbols. This comes in a form of a vmlinux file. Some distributions ship debuginfo packages, namely RHEL. On Ubuntu this seems lacking.