Let’s suppose your current IPv4 network is a classical 172.16.0.0 with a 255.255.0.0 netmask ( /16 in short ), and that your IPv4 NAT-router is located at 172.16.255.254.
The first thing you need to do is to configure one of the interfaces of your IPv6 router, let’s say eth0, with a fixed IPv4 address in the same subnet of your router, like 172.16.255.253.
Then you have to make sure that your NAT-router forward protocol 41 to your IPv6 router. If this is not the case, you can simply put you IPv6 router in the DMZ. Be careful when you do that! Be sure to apply strong IPv4 firewall policies and keep the daemons listening to that interface at the minimum, maybe on non-standard ports.
After configuring the IPv6 router default IPv4 route ( to your NAT-router of course ), test if you can reach an address outside the local subnet, like 8.8.8.8 ( Google Domain Name Server ).
You’ll also like to assign an IPv4 address to the other network interface, for instance eth1, to allow some daemons to listen to an IPv4 local address ( like sshd or named for IPv4 ).

Debian and other Debian-related distros usually store the network configuration inside the /etc/network/interfaces file.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 172.16.255.253
   netmask 255.255.0.0
   gateway 172.16.255.254

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
   address 172.16.255.252
   netmask 255.255.0.0

In the tunnel configuration page on the HE’s website you can find the routable /64 subnet. Mind the difference between the tunnel IPv6 addresses, that usually are something like 2001:1234:5678:abc::1 and 2001:1234:5678:abc::2, and your routable IPv6 subnet that will be something like 2001:1234:5679:abc::.
The IPv6 address of eth1 is static ( this is a router after all ) and  must belong to your routable subnet. You can choose of using a simple address, like 2001:1234:5679:abc::1, or, if you’re a bit paranoic, you can randomize it to something like 2001:1234:5679:abc:5f32:9b8c:d12e:15fa.
Because your routable subnet is not gonna change unless you destroy your HE’s tunnel and create a new one, you can configure the eth1 IPv6 address as static and put the configuration inside /etc/network/interfaces, by adding the following lines:

iface eth1 inet6 static
   pre-up /sbin/ip6tables-restore < /etc/iptables/ipv6firewall
   address 2001:1234:5679:abc:5f32:9b8c:d12e:15fa
   netmask 64

The second line is needed to enable the ip6tables firewall.

The configuration for ip6tables is based on a more or less ’standard’ requirement: all the hosts behind the router have unlimited access to the internet on every protocol or port while they’re not reachable from the rest of world with the exception of some ICMPv6 messages.
Just to avoid some types of DOS attack, I’ve decided to limit the amount of ICMPv6 echo requests the router ( and the network behind ) is gonna receive.
The content of the /etc/iptables/ipv6firewall file is the following:

# Generated by ip6tables-save
*filter
:INPUT DROP [23:2392]
:FORWARD DROP [4:320]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [30:2888]
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp --icmpv6-type echo-request -m limit --limit 5/sec -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp --icmpv6-type echo-request -j DROP
-A INPUT -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -i eth1 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -i sit1 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -o sit1 -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -i sit1 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp --icmpv6-type echo-request -m limit --limit 5/sec -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp --icmpv6-type echo-request -j DROP
-A FORWARD -i sit1 -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT
COMMIT

Then you need to enable IPv6 forwarding at boot time by putting the following file ( you can name it as you want, as long as it ends with .conf; I’ve called it ipv6_forwarding.conf ) inside the /etc/sysctl.d/ directory:

# /etc/sysctl.d/ipv6_forwarding.conf

net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1

The next thing to configure is the router advertisement daemon, that can be installed ( as root ) using the command:

# apt-get install radvd

The configuration file is /etc/radvd.conf and should be similar to this one:

interface eth1
{
   AdvSendAdvert on;
   AdvManagedFlag on;
   MinRtrAdvInterval 5;
   MaxRtrAdvInterval 15;
   AdvLinkMTU 1280;
   prefix 2001:1234:5679:abc::/64
   {
   };
};

Some flags are required ( like ‘AdvLinkMTU’ set to 1280 ) for the tunnel to work, some are optional ( like ‘AdvManagedFlag’ ). Maybe next time I’ll wrote how to configure a DHCPv6 server. DHCPv6 is a little more complex than DHCPv4 also because it must be deployed side-to-side with router advertisement, but allows far greater flexibility than its IPv4 counterpart.
In the meantime, with IPv4-reachable nameservers answering with AAAA records, there’ll be no real need for IPv6-reachable nameservers on the short term ( that is, until IPv4 will be the mainstream protocol ).

The last part is to set up the tunnel using a shell script. Actually, two scripts are used. The first one contains only variables like the username, the tunnel ID and the password that should be passed via http on SSL to configure the firewall at Hurricane Electric and tell it our public IP.
The file I created is named HE_personal.sh and is stored inside /root with 0700 permission. The content is the following:

#!/bin/sh

USERNAME=■■■■■■■■
PASSWORD=■■■■■■■■
TUNNELID=■■■■■■■■

The other file is HE_tunnel_setup.sh that contains the real commands needed to create the tunnel. I’ve decided to launch it manually ( must be executed as root ) but you can decide to launch it at boot time writing an init.d script or by simply using another ‘pre-up’ directive in /etc/network/interfaces. The content is the following:

#!/bin/sh

. /root/HE_personal.sh

rm ipv4_end.php*
wget --no-check-certificate https://$USERNAME:$PASSWORD@ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/ipv4_end.php?tid=$TID

ifconfig sit0 up
ifconfig sit0 inet6 tunnel ::123.45.678.90
ifconfig sit1 up
ifconfig sit1 inet6 add 2001:1234:5678:abc::2/64
route -A inet6 add ::/0 dev sit1

The –no-check-certificate flag for wget is needed because of a little issue with an HE’s SSL certificate. Mind the prefix of the sit1 interface and the remote endpoint of the IPv4 tunnel.

After rebooting the IPv6 router, ip6tables and radvd should be already up and running. After launching the script the tunnel should be configured without issuing any other command.

To check if the hosts had received an IPv6 Link-Global address you can use:

$ ifconfig -a

under any UNIX, Unix-like or Linux operating system or

> ipconfig /all

under Windows ( any version after Windows XP SP0 ).

Then you can test if the hosts can reach the IPv6 internet using ping6 under any UNIX, Unix-like or Linux operating system ( excluding Oracle Solaris ) or using ping under Windows or Solaris.

Bye

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SPOILER FREE

Gurren Lagann is funny. Really. The soundtrack is cool even if the OSTs of GunBuster or EVA are on another level, but there are some tracks that are worth listening to them. The plot is… well, sorta same Gainax plot from “it’s all fun and games” that lead to “mankind is gonna die”. The plot is simple, not too complicated and, compared to other Gainax’s productions, funny. Really.

DieBuster ■■ ■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ GunBuster ■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■ Gainax ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■ “Nadia: the secret of Fuzzy”■ ■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■ ■■ ■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■

So probably the last three minutes ■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■ ■■ ■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■■■■ in the last episode. And that’s it. Period.

Bye

* If you see a lot of ■, don’t worry. The article was actually written this way.

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So, farewell, then F-22

I’m not gonna spend too many words on this project, because it is well known that the F-22 was designed during the Cold War era, introduced the concept of “air dominance” instead of the common “air supremacy”, had problems during both the development phase ( flight control issues ) and the operational phase ( oxygen flow regulation issues )…

But even after all that, I still think that less than 190 aircrafts are not enough and that the F-15C fleet is aging, even considering things like the AESA AN-APG63. It’s like upgrading a computer without changing the mainboard. You can do that for a while, maybe, but you can’t do that forever. Even the mighty B-52H will probably be phased out earlier than expect.

Anyway, farewell, then, F-22. A lot of novels, movies, fictions and games were “based” on a future with you, a future that is gonna last really less than expected.

Bye

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So yesterday I finally decided to watch トップをねらえ! ( Toppu o Nerae! ) [ Aim for the Top! GunBuster ].

I’m not gonna write something you can easily find in less than 30 seconds googling for “GunBuster” and keep in mind that I’m gonna talk about more or less deeply about the plot, so:

IF YOU DON’T LIKE TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SHOW, STOP READING RIGHT NOW.

That said, lets talk about GunBuster using the point of view of an otaku who has seen both Nadia and EVA ( and possibly even the episodes of Kare Kano directed by Anno ).

As usual, loneliness and lack of self confidence are two of the most important topics in Anno’s works and GunBuster’s not an exception, in fact the main character Noriko could be a good “prototype” of EVA’s Shinji. She believe she could never do what others ( especially Coach Ota ) ask her to do, she is hated by her schoolmates and other pilots because they think she has been choosen only because she is the only daughter of the admiral killed in the first battle with the aliens, she sometimes disobey orders and she also feel remorse for her partner’s death ( like Shinji in EVA during the Unit-03 activation incident, even if in a different way ) in the third episode.
By a certain point of view, the story of Noriko is the opposite of Shinji’s one. Shinji is a lonely guy with the need to open himself to the others that will, hopefully, end up living like a normal guy, while Noriko will end up being lonely because of the various WARP speed travels that will make her friends on Earth to grow old and possibly die while her relative time flows only for some months.

Jung could also be seen as the “prototype” of Asuka ( even if the shade of red of her hair is more similar to that of Miss Grandis in Nadia, but by the way… ). She is strong willed, German ( even if she pilot a soviet unit, but in 1988 Germany was still divided ), she believe of being the best machine pilot in the universe and is gealous of Noriko, at least at the beginning, while at the end she will become her partner with the GunBuster and will even try to go with her and Kazumi inside the black hole bomb near the the end of the last episode, that is equal to committing suicide and die with her friends.
In the end she will be alone anyway because of the time lapse between the moment the black hole bomb detonates and when Noriko and Kazumi will came back to the Earth.

Coach Ota is a character with some aspects that will be present in Nadia and EVA in the characters of Nemo and Gendo respectively. A part of his attitude emerges for example when he try to motivate Noriko to do her best or when he try to explain her, even in an hard way, what happens during real combat operations. Another part of his attitude could be seen at the beginning of the show, for instance when he’s looking at Noriko in difficulty during a duel ( a thing that remember me the first battle of the Unit-01 in EVA ) without doing anything.

GunBuster is one of the few examples of science-fiction serie, with FTL-capable space ships, that considers relativistic time dilatation effects. This is an element that has an heavy impact on the plot. Just mention the fact that in the fifth episode Noriko will graduate at 17 years while, on Earth, she actually is 27 and one of her best friend back in school, Kimiko, already has a daughter. In the last episode Kazumi that has been on Earth for about 10 years is now 30 while Noriko is about 18.

A lot of elements could be seen in the show that will find a place in the following series, from clothes to control rooms and including the end credits of the last episode ( scrolling horizontally rather than vertically, an idea Anno will “recycle” later in Evangelion – Death ). The last episode is purposely in b/w 4:3 letterbox format with only the very last scene in colours ( the real purpose is unknown, but any Anno fan knows he loves to make this sort of things and, the most important thing, the overall result is really good! ), with the last battle that is not “animated”. During the last battle only drawings are shown ( more or less like in the episode 26 of EVA ).

The original concept of GunBuster was to realize a 25 episodes-long serie as could be noticed by listening to the second soundtrack CD, which in fact contains a serie of audio-trailers created for the purpose.
Of course Gainax + Anno fans are accustomed to budget cuts ( EVA ), episodes’ number replanning ( Nadia ), change of ideas ( Kare Kano ) and similar thing, in fact, considering that the show’s anything but simple, some events and facts have little to no time to be exposed as they should be ( like “why those space monster are attacking humans?“, “why machines are piloted by young girls wearing a swimsuit?” and other questions of sort ).

Personally, I didn’t believe that a six episode anime would have impressed me that much. Anno did it again, less than with EVA but certainly more than with Nadia. The plot, the drawings and the excellent soundtrack really worked well. If there’s something that I don’t like of the show is the “super-robot” GunBuster: I’m not a big fan of that sort of anime, I prefers mecha like those from the Full Metal Panic universe than the various Mazinger or Jeeg, but considering the type of otaku Anno was at that time I can say I don’t care too much.

Before someone ask if there is an happy ending, I’ll answer in the same exact way I’m aswering this question during these days:
“Yes, there’s an happy ending, and is one of the saddest happy ending I’ve ever seen in my life“.

My advice’s to watch it, it’s worth spending three hours of your time. Really.

Bye

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Long version:
The Royal Air Force Museum of Colindale is one of the best aviation museum a person could visit. There are so many aircrafts that an enthusiast will spend an entire day to see everything.
The visit is enjoyable at all ages, in fact there are many interactive panels and monitors showing the history, the facts and trivia of every aircraft ( including quizzes I passed with an average of 9.7 / 10 per aircraft ).
The various halls, from the smaller one of the “aviation milestones” to the larger bombers’ one, all contain something unique that could be hardly seen in other places or museums around the World.
From hystorical aircrafts like the Sopwith Triplane or the Vickers Vimy, to the Supermarine Spitfire ( a total of four version are on display! ), the Hawker Hurricane and Typhoon, the Avro Lancaster, the English Electric Lightning and Camberra, the Blackburn Buccaneer, the Avro Vulcan and the latest Panavia Tornado and Eurofighter Typhoon ( the unique english DA2 ”Black Typhoon” is on display ).
There are a lot of other aircrafts that served with the RAF but were not designed or build in the United Kingdom, like the Boeing B-17, the Consolidated B-24, the North American B-25 and P-51 and the McDonnell F-4 Phantom ( with the Rolls-Royce Spey engines, of course: what did you expect? ).
There is an entire hall dedicated to the Battle of Britain in which all the four bombers used by the german Luftwaffe, the Messerschmitt BF-110, the Junker JU-87 and JU-88 and the Heinkel HE-111 stand together. On the other side of this hall, it’s also possible to enter in a Short Sutherland flying boat.

During my visit at the beginning of October I had some small talks with a really nice attendant in the “aviation milestones” hall about the situation of the air forces and the navies in our respective countries. Needless to say we were both skeptical about the future.
Seeing how simple and yet how complicated were the aircraft of the past is something that always make people thinks.
The wreck of an ill-fated Avro Halifax, retrieved from the sea of Norway after many years under the water, stay in the bomber area, rembembering us what being a bomber’s crew meant during WWII.
Walking under the wing of the Avro Vulcan and standing under the bomb bay ( that now contains an LCD panel on which are showed some clips of the aircraft during the Cold War era ) is just great because really gives you the idea of how big the airplane really is and how advanced

The museum continuosly acquire new aircrafts. Always in the aviation milestones hall, there were two “brand new” ( well, sort of ) items: a WWII Gloster Meteor, that at the time of the visit was still undergoing re-assembly, and the mock-up of a Lockheed-Martin F-35A. The aforementioned attendant told me that there are about 20 aircrafts in storage they’re unable to show because of space issues.

So, in the end, if you’re an aviation enthusiast and you’re planning a trip to London, just add a day to visit the RAF museum at Colindale ( you can reach it via underground, is in zone 4 Link to Google Maps ) because… the place is great and the admission is free: go visit it!

Bye

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For instance, as far as other desktop OSs can arrive, nothing, in my opinion, beats Windows 7 nowadays.
MacOS X is a very good OS, but as long as it’ll run only on Apple hardware, I’ll never gonna use it.
GNU/Linux-based distros like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, etc. are today very good OSs, but there’s an overall lack of agreement between developers and, even worse, an incompatibility issue between licenses that lead to a “reinvention of wheel” time after time ( the Big example: ZFS and btrfs ).

So, while I usually like Microsoft products, sometimes I think that some little or big decisions have been made without thinking too much to a certain part of the users.

My first criticism was about Windows Phone 7, that is a really good mobile OS for the average user. But as long as I want to: sync my contacts with Outlook rather than Windows Live, join a domain, run native C++ applications and other things, Windows Phone 7 is not a choice for me. I’m still fine with Windows Mobile 6.x.

But MetroUI caught my attention when I first tried the developers’ preview of Windows 8 some days ago.
The concept behind MetroUI is the “unification of the user experience”, a marketing expression used instead of “users are getting more and more lazy and they don’t want to bother about what’s under the hood” ( meaning they don’t care what they’re using: a mobile phone, a desktop computer, an ATM or a washing machine ).
Many people think touchscreens were one of the biggest revolution in the late ’00s market. Probably they’re the same people whose jaw drops on the floor when I tell them my first experience with a touchscreen was in 1994, in a ship command bridge on a green phosphor CRT monitor used to manage the course ( Yeah, I actually steered a 200 yards-long ship ). By the way, they’re right if considering only the consumer market.
The idea of unifying the UI between “handy” devices ( mobile phones and tablets ) is hardly new and, most important thing, it works. After all, they’re similar and they’re expected to work in a similar way.
But, in my opinion, if the differences between a mobile phone and a tablet are like the differences between a car and a van, those between a tablet and a PC are more like those between a GA aircraft and an airliner.
They’re not similar, they’re not expected to be used in the same way. I don’t expect to find a manifold pressure gauge in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 ( or an ATR-42 or an Airbus A380 ) in the same way I don’t expect to find a FMS console in a Cessna 172 ( or in a Piper PA28 ).

Saying that I don’t like MetroUI would be wrong. I just think that MetroUI has no reason to be the default UI on a desktop OS. I also think that standard utilities should remain non-Metro applications. I find unacceptable that the remote desktop connection client is available only as a MetroUI application on a desktop machine, as I find wrong not giving the user the option to actually kill the application, even by some abstruse key combination, I don’t care, and not just suspending it.
For seventeen years I closed an application in Windows by clicking on the top left ( top right starting with Windows 95 ) corner button of the application window, or by pressing Alt + F4. In MetroUI I can’t quit application like this. I find it a bit ( well more than just a bit ) disappointing.

In the end, considering that there’s a lot of research behind the dvelopment of an operating system ( and Microsoft really care about what users think, or wouldn’t have released Windows 8 Developer Preview publicly ), what I’m starting to think is that average users are beginning to be afraid ( I could have used the word “tired”, but I didn’t ) of the keyboard as well as, following Windows 95, users started to be afraid of the command line.

What I’d really like, as a power user, as an enthusiast and as an experienced user, is a choice. As there are six versions of Windows 7, I’d like the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 8 use explorer as the default UI instead of MetroUI.
We will wait for the beta versions to see what will appens.

Bye

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This wiki list a serie of commands that would compile and install NetBSD-current assuming that a release of NetBSD is already running. So because I already had a NetBSD 5.1 running on Mirage, I thought of following the “short way”… only to find out that fetching the sources via anoncvs took nearly 4 hours. I’m not blaming anoncvs, because trying to fetch the tarball and extracting all the files took nearly 2 hours two days later.

Now, the most “interesting” thing is that the build script, before compiling the kernel and the userland, need to compile the compiler, because NetBSD 5.99 need GCC 4.5 compiled for the target architecture ( in this case, sparc64 ).
I was just thinking to stay with 5.1 ( losing some opportunity offered by current, like some ZFS support etc. ), when I tought about doing some test on a VM in VirtualBox. During the installation process I choose to get the sets ( a bunch of tgz files ) from http rather than from the CD. Looking at the options for the http install, I tought of doing something “nasty”:

using the 5.1 installer to install 5.99.

It’s longer to explain than actually doing it, but this is possible because on the nyftp http mirror ( http://nyftp.netbsd.org/ ) inside the pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/ directory are stored the last five build of NetBSD-current. Inside each directory ( named after the date and time of build ), there are the directories for each architecture, containing the binary sets ( the bunch of tgz files ) that will be used from the installer.
So, after changing the options in the installer accordingly to what is needed, the installation can start and will end with only two minor problems.

The first one is that it’s not possible to set the root password, the second is that the rc_configured variable in /etc/rc.conf will not be changed by the setup program, resulting in a single user boot after reboot, with the root filesystem mounted in read-only.
But these are problems that even a NetBSD newbie know how to solve ( If someone is interested in something like NetBSD-current, then a basic knowledge of vi and of the standard UNIX commands, like mount or passwd is take for granted ).

Mirage is now running NetBSD-current with a LVM volume ( not as powerful as ZFS but require a lower overhead ) in the Sun StorEdge FlexiPack 599, and has been configured as a NFS ( Nightmare Network File System ) Server.

Bye

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So, this is how I have made the bridge on Nighthawk ( a double Pentium III – 800 MHz with a Gig of RAM and a pair of UWSCSI3 disks ), under CentOS 6.0.
The two NICs are both based on an Intel 82559 chip. The first one is integrated into the motherboard, while the second one is on a PCI slot.

OBVIOUSLY, a network bridge has ONE MAC address ( could be the same of one of the two NIC or could be a different one ) and ONE IP address, unless your playing with aliased interface over a bridge, but this is not the case.

The integrated NIC is eth0, the NIC on the PCI slot is eth1 while the network bridge is nbr0.

So, these are the configuration files:

# /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE="eth0"
HWADDR="00:30:48:AA:BB:CC"
ONBOOT="yes"
BRIDGE="nbr0"

# /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-nbr0
DEVICE="nbr0"
TYPE="bridge"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
IPV6INIT="yes"
IPV6_AUTOCONF="yes"
ONBOOT="yes"

The bridge takes its IP address via DHCP. If a static address is required, file ifcfg-nbr0 must be changed according to what is reported into the RHEL Deployment Guide.

Bye

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This post is just a reminder that was set 17 years ago ( yes, in 1994 A.D. ), when Lightning ( Intel 486DX2 ) was pretty new and when I first “flew” using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 5.0, Spectrum HoloByte’s Falcon 3.0 and – the reason this post exists – Origin’s Strike Commander, the CD edition that included the “Speek Pack”, the “Tactical Operations” expansion and, of course, the July 2011 issue of Sudden Death… yeah, the July 2011 issue in 1994.

Bye

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One thing that is driving me mad during these days is that on many sites, blogs, forums etc. there are a lot of explanations about how IPv6 works, but really few explanations on how to make it working.

So now I’m not gonna explain what IPv6 is, or how it works, because I’ll assume that the reader has at least a basic IPv6, IPv4 and UNIX / NetBSD understanding.
I’m gonna write down the steps I performed to get IPv6 connectivity ( assuming your ISP isn’t already giving you native IPv6 connectivity, otherwise you can stop reading now ) using a D-Link DSL-2640B aDSL modem-router with a standard firmware ( support IPv4 only ) and a NetBSD/i386 5.1 based router ( any computer with two NICs ).
I currently have no firewall on the DSL-2640 and no services / daemons running on the NetBSD router.

In this first post I will illustrate how to get IPv6 connectivity via a tunnel broker. There are many free services availables. I choose Hurricane Electric ( HE from now on ) just because a pair of friends already use it and told me that it works.

The tunnel created with an HE’s endpoint is static and request that you have a public pingable IPv4 address.
If you are behind a router that does NAT, like me, this could represent a problem, so I created this page to test if I can ping my public IPv4 address.
The solution I found was to move the NetBSD router to the DMZ, so when someone ping my public address, actually it sends ICMPv4 requests to my NetBSD router.

Creating a tunnel on the HE website is pretty simple, just look at the image below:

1. Click;
2. Insert your public pingable IPv4 address

Just remember, for this specific configuration, when configuring the tunnel interface on the router, not to use your public IPv4 address but to use the private address of your IPv4 gateway. So, to create a tunnel in NetBSD ( 4.x or 5.x ) type the following as root:


# ifconfig gif0 create
# ifconfig gif0 tunnel $Your_IPv4_gateway $Server_IPv4_address
# ifconfig gif0 inet6 $Client_IPv6_address $Server_IPv6_address prefixlen 128
# route -n add -inet6 default $Server_IPv6_address

The tunnel should be up and ready. Just try to send an ICMPv6 echo request to someone using ping6, like ipv6.google.com ( you have to create and configure /etc/resolv.conf first ).

If you succeed, congratulations! You’re now on the IPv6 internet and halfway in configuring the router!

In the next part I’m gonna explain how to enable routing, configure the router advertisement daemon and make the configuration permanent.

Bye

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