Bitmand

I just want to share a couple of Mac apps I have stumbled upon.

First is Alfred, an excellent simple and elegant app launcher (Spotlight replacement). I am by no means a hardcore Spotlight user (and never used any of the other fancy app launchers), but Alfred is just so nice and simple. Period. I don’t think I ever will look back at Spotlight.

Secondly, there is Sparrow - a gmail reader app. At this point only gmail is supported but work is underway to support other imap servers as well. The keyword is (once again) simplicity! I can’t figure out of they take it too far, but I will definitely try this out in the near future.

The third app is Courier. An app to easily share files, photos and movies on your favorite websites (Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, S3, FTP etc.). Haven’t tried it yet - but is also on my totry list.

So, I got this server at Hetzner and it’s running FreeBSD. Hetzner provides native IPv6 so I thought I would request a subnet and try it out. Little did I know, that it would be so tricky to get up and running.

It seems that Hetzner is doing something a bit different. I got my IPv6 /64 but the default gateway is not in my subnet. The recommendation from Hetzner is to make a static route first and then add the default gateway. In Linux that is about all it takes - on FreeBSD, you need a couple of extra steps (they don’t mention that on their wiki).

First of, this is my information from Hetzner:

IPs: 2a01:xxxx:xxxx:3183:: /64
Gateway: 2a01:xxxx:xxxx:3180::1 /59

Now as you see, the gateway is not on my subnet - and creating a static route is easy, so this is what I did in rc.conf:

ipv6_enable=”YES”
ipv6_static_routes=”defgw”
ipv6_route_defgw=”2a01:xxxx:xxxx:3180:: -prefixlen 59 -iface re0”
ipv6_defaultrouter=”2a01:xxxx:xxxx:3180::1”

I am trying to route ipv6 trafik to the subnet with my default gateway to the interface: re0 - i rebooted, but it did not work. The defgw route was there, but not the default route. In /etc/network.subr I realized that the defaultrouter is simply added to the list of static routes (as the first) before being added. The problem: You can’t add a default route to an ip not on your net. And because the default route is the first to be added, this will fail. I changed line 1057 in /etc/network.subr from:

ipv6_static_routes=”default ${ipv6_static_routes}”

to:

ipv6_static_routes=”${ipv6_static_routes} default”

I rebooted again - success! I confirmed with netstat -rn that my static route and default ipv6 gateway was there. But I still couldn’t reach my default gateway. After several days of head scratching i got a tip from Hetzner support. On FreeBSD I should use ndp to set a default ipv6 interface - on the command line I simply did:

ndp -I re0

And bingo! IPv6 up and running. Now to make this setting permanent, start by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.inet6.ip6.accept_rtadv=1

Then add this line to rc.conf:

ipv6_default_interface=”re0”

Reboot and ipv6 should now be up at running at boot time :)

Btw. I haven’t added any information about setting up the ipv6 ip addresses, but they should ofcourse also be added to rc.conf like:

ipv6_ifconfig_re0=”2a01:xxxx:xxxx:3183::2”

( The default is a prefixlen of 64 that is why I haven’t added prefixlen to the above line )