When devices have IPv6 addresses, using the IP address isn’t feasible anymore. There has to be some sort of name lookup mechanism. It’s just too long to remember an IPv6 address and there are fiddly things to watch for. Nobody is going to run a real DNS server in their house either.

In the simplest case of using only link-local addresses, you’re just not going to remember your closetserver is fe80::216:e6ff:fed8:d122. You can put a host entry on your desktops, but this involves updating everything by hand. Link-local addressing also presents an additional challenge in that if you have a computer with multiple interfaces (think: laptop with a gigabit LAN interface and a 802.11 wireless interface), you have to specify the interface to use in your /etc/host entry, i.e.

fe80::216:e6ff:fed8:d122%en1  closetserver

This would tell your application to use the en1 (wireless) interface to get to closetserver.  But, if you turn off your wireless and plug into your switch, all of a sudden en1 is the wrong interface to use. Now you have to go edit /etc/hosts again to change from %en1 to %en0.

A slightly more advanced example is if your home network uses your router (in my case an Apple Airport Extreme) as a 6to4 gateway.  The IPv6 address is still to long to remember, but now the network prefix can change based on your externally visible IP address.  Today closetserver may be 2002:4770:2e84::216:e6ff:fed8:d122. Tomorrow your cable modem may reset, giving you a different dynamic IPv4 address and thus a different 6to4 prefix. Now closetserver’s address has changed to 2002:4778:1156::216:e6ff:fed8:d122, and you need to go update all those /etc/host entries.

Solution: Multicast DNS (mDNS). Also known in some documents as “serverless DNS”.

It turns out there’s at least already one solution for all this running behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of, Multicast DNS. This part of what Bonjour/Zero-conf networks are built on. Each device joins a multicast group on your LAN, advertising and responding to name lookups without contacting an external DNS server or /etc/hosts.

Almost all Apple OS X and iOS devices already have Multicast DNS (mDNSResponder) running, which is how things like iTunes sharing and streaming work, and lets me access resources on the network via name such as “firecracker” for my desktop without knowing the IP address. On Linux, this is handled by Avahi. On Windows, it’s Bonjour for Windows.

This isn’t strictly a problem with just IPv6 either, and there are probably other things out there that do this. This is most interesting to me because the majority of my devices are Apple products.

Here’s how it works:

From my laptop, I want to ssh to closetserver (which is running Avahi). In order to use mDNS, I need to use a “.local” suffix:

lapdance:~ bwann$ ssh -6 closetserver.local

My laptop queries the mdns multicast address ff02::fb on port 5353 asking anyone for a AAAA record of closetserver.

16:01:20.585290 IP6 lapdance.local.mdns > ff02::fb.mdns: 0 AAAA (QM)? closetserver.local. (30)

The mDNS responder on closetserver responds to the multicast group with the AAAA record to use.

16:12:12.098910 IP6 2002:4770:2e84::216:e6ff:fed8:d122.mdns > ff02::fb.mdns: 0*- [0q] 2/0/0 (Cache flush) AAAA 2002:4770:2e84::216:e6ff:fed8:d122 (80)

Then the ssh program initiates the usual TCP with closetserver and we’re done:

16:16:33.518129 IP6 2002:4770:2e84::216:cbff:fe09:a76e.60425 > 2002:4770:2e84::216:e6ff:fed8:d122.ssh: Flags [S], seq 832255505, win 65535, options [mss 1440,nop,wscale 2,nop,nop,TS val 1053744031 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0

Now if I change from wireless to wired, change my external IPv4 address, or even use a new desktop, I can still use the same hostnames without changing anything.  Neat!  This would also be useful for ad-hoc networks as well.

Men & Mice has a great presentation describing Multicast DNS.

Sep 30 2010 16:31:02: %ASA-3-716057: Group <webvpn> User <bwann> IP <23.131.43.173>
  Session terminated, no AnyConnect Mobile license available

AnyConnect for Mobile          : Disabled
AnyConnect for Cisco VPN Phone : Disabled
AnyConnect Essentials          : Disabled

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cisco-anyconnect/id392790924?mt=8#

“Let’s go take a look at them, is this your first Mac?”

“No, this is number five for me.”

“Is this for home or for business?”

“It’s a desktop for work. (too late, I know where this is going). I just want a base Mini.”

“Er, okay, well if this is for business then we have this business program to…”

“No, I just want a Mini.”

“Right now we’re also offering $100 on a printer…”

“No, I don’t need a printer, I just need a Mini.”

“If you get one, then you’ll want to buy Apple Care for $150…”

“No, don’t need it, I just need a Mini.”

“Oh, well, if you don’t have any questions I’ll go back and get one!”

It’s almost perfect for air travel. In the air, it’s very convenient to stuff in a seat back pocket, or go through email or read an e-book without worrying about the guy in the seat in front of me leaning back and crushing my laptop screen or praying for a seat with a power connector.

In the terminal, it’s another story. The lack of multitasking is annoying. Fire up irc, nobody chatting, want to switch over to email? Gotta quit irc and miss anything new. It’s not clear that it will ever really be solved due to Apple being very particular on what they’ll allow in the background (audio, location, application suspension). But, the upshot with 3G, suck it $7.95/day airport wireless.

Google Maps is handy on the road. My Garmin StreetPilot doesn’t have a lot of details in places like Grand Tetons National Park. With the iPad I can fire up Google Maps for more detail, including topological contours. Amusingly without rotation lock on, turn a corner and the screen flips. Unfortunately, as I discovered with the iPhone last year, the places you generally really need a map in, there’s no cellular coverage.

Apparently the iPad also requires some serious juice to charge. More than once I’ve noticed that plugging the iPad into my MacBook it tells me it’s not charging. I don’t know if this is because the MBP is drawing all the charge to its own batteries first, or a limitation of the USB port. Plug it into the wall, it’s happy.

Friday after work I went over to the Apple store to actually play with one in person before putting in my order. I was pleasantly surprised to learn the 3G models happened to go on retail sale that day.  Five minutes later I walked out with one.

So far I’ve pleased with it. The thing is wicked fast compared to an iPhone.  Normally it takes a few minutes to sync up my Exchange folders on my iPhone, even over wi-fi. I always attributed this to the sheer bulk+number of messages and a pokey Exchange service.  Not so on the iPad. It sucked it them all down in a few seconds.  Document reading is great, I can load up the Amazon Dynamo whitepaper and have it readable without scrolling. Amusingly, between the Mac, iPhone and iPad, I have three things that make noise when I get email now.

I highly suggest everyone go out and buy one to boost my portfolio value.

After another early venture to the Apple store, I finally got my hands on an iPhone. Today I discovered the speaker doesn’t work. At first I thought it was a Feature[tm] that iTunes, games, etc didn’t play sound without the ear buds. Then I called it and discovered it doesn’t ring at all. A call to Apple, now I have an appointment tomorrow to exchange it or otherwise deal with it.

I need risk management friends that I can pry with overpriced martinis to teach me about the exciting fields of operational and market risk. Anyone?

New fans installed in MacBook Pro. Expensive lil buggers, $49 each from eBay. One of the more tricky MBP repairs I’ve done. Several fiddly little wires to move out of the way. After spending 45 minutes flipping through Google Earth on dual monitors, I declare success since it didn’t overheat and shutdown.

Since I’m now unsick, I started walking to the office. Takes about 20 minutes each way. The hill to my apartment is much, much longer when walking it. My lower shins already slightly burn from the climbing.

I’m amused, the FAA airport facility directory for the Empire, NV airport (1A8) has a remark “displaced threshold marked by 8 white tires.” There’s also a one-foot berm around the runway, presumably to keep all the dust clear.

I’m headed to Amsterdam either the week before or the week of Christmas. A colleague decided against going, so it’s now on me. I can only image the amount of hell the airports will be during this time. I’m hoping my frequent flier status will get me past a lot of lines or the company decides to send me business class.

Another colleage was browsing over his Continental miles today and realized he’s 170 miles short being elgible for silver elite status next year. I always thought the stories of people flying somewhere and back in a day for mile bonuses was silly, but now I understand. Spending the $108 to fly to Houston and back is worth it in his case. He also discovered that with the amount of miles he has, he can redeem them all + $61 for a trip to Amsterdam. I’m not that vested yet, but poking around today I figured out I can go anywhere in the US for my miles + $10. It’s odd, because the last time we checked into upgrading an international flight would cost X miles and a $430 service charge; here they just want $61?

My IKEA halogen lights burned out a transformer the other night. The lights were getting dim, and then I started smelling smoke. There was a little tuft of smoke coming out of the transformer on the wall. After killing power, I had to cut the wires leading to the light strand, as the terminals on the transformer were charred and melted to the point I couldn’t get the screws out. So of course, I went out and bought the same fire hazzard light set again. I need light in my apartment in order to search for a safer replacement!

I stayed up until 3 AM Saturday morning, then spent the rest of Saturday watching Heroes season one. I couldn’t stop watching! The fact there was so much Ali Larter, and later Missy Peregrym (ok, Hayden Panettiere too, but she’s like nine years younger than me), in high-def goodness certainly helped.

I ventured into the steam room at the gym the other day for the first time instead of the sauna. It was all nice and chokingly humid, then WSHHHHHHHHHT, the steam generator kicks in and this jet of steam shoots into the room. All of a sudden it got much hotter, and I couldn’t see the door nor the far wall. Quite frankly I thought this must be what it’s like at first being in a gas chamber.

And now the result of the Safari trial. The past two weeks I temporarily switched from Firefox to Safari at home (OS X Tiger) and work (Windows XP) to try out the Apple way. So far, I’m pretty disappointed and have already abandonded it at work after it screwed me on a ticket entry today causing me to lose a lot of typing. Safari is pretty basic and a lot of the little things I took for granted in Firefox just aren’t there. Pretty much all of my gripes exist in both Windows and Mac versions.

Here’s the gripe list so I can remember a year from now why I hated it:

• Safari either doesn’t cache submitted forms or I’m abusing some bug/different functionality in Firefox. In our ticketing system I frequently use the back button after viewing details of a ticket (the previous step to get here is even a GET request); Firefox will happily take me back to the previous page, untouched, whereas Safari complains the previous page has expired and wants to post the form again. IE7 does this too, which leads me to believe it’s a functionality of Firefox I’m relying on. This killed me in doing ticketing work as I frequently flip back and forth to look at information and don’t want to wait on resubmitting an action to our slow ticketing system. To make sure I was sane, I went back and duplicated the same action in both browsers and Safari did the same thing.
• Safari doesn’t handle plain text pages very well. If I try select-all on a plain-text page, copy, then paste into pine or a textarea form, it drops almost all carriage returns and linefeeds and turns it into a huge blob. This happened on both the OS X and Windows versions.
• By default, Safari also uses a proportional-width font in textarea boxes. This makes lining up command output and other plaintext things a pain in the ass.
• I don’t have a quick sub-menu drop down on the back button in Safari. In Firefox if I wanted to go back X pages, I could click on this and just go there. Safari requires me to go to the History menu, and then it mixes all tab history together.
• Safari doesn’t work well with some of our self-signed SSL websites. On one of our internal web development sites, it flat out refuses to work with HTTPS. Other pages it may work and one mouse-click later it doesn’t (says it can’t open a connection). This is what caused me to lose a considerable amount of work today.
• Safari doesn’t have a convienient flashblock application. The only plugin I’ve seen will disable all flash content until you go to a drop-down menu and re-enable it. Flashblocker in Firefox blocks all flash and then allows me to click on individual elements to play the file.
• Safari does maximize properly on my 2nd LCD, whereas Firefox will crop off the menu and title bar at the top of the screen when maximized.
• Safari doesn’t like the Remedy forms I use on a vendor’s website. It throws some parse error and I’m unable to submit the form.
• Safari doesn’t seem to save me in memory consumption either. After several days, Safari and Firefox used similar amounts of memory.
• Rendering speed, both seem similar.

I am finally credit card debt free, yippee! I gave in and paid off my last two cards in one lump sum. Digging around in one of my bank accounts I had setup to auto pay off a card, it had long been paid off and I had a $800 credit built up. I don’t expect to get 29% or whatever interest rate on the balance, much the pity. A year to go on truck payments, then I’ll be even happier!

I also cut Cingular loose today. I bought a Nokia 6310i off eBay on the cheap and put my T-Mobile prepaid SIM into it. After using it for a few days, I ported my number over to it today. After taxes, I’m paying right at $90/month for Cingular’s national coverage with roaming included. I don’t use my phone or roam as much as I used to, and $100 of prepaid minutes will last me for months. The 6310i is an older GSM model in the same family of my 6360, which I’m attached to. The size is comfortable to hold, volume control on the side, identical menus, and the 6310i even sounds better with an obvious audio bass boost.

The 6310i does have Bluetooth, I was excited when my Mac discovered it. I could finally join the late 1990s and link it to my computer! The excitement quickly went away when I figured out iSync wouldn’t work with it. I found another sync program called Onsync which claims to have support, but it wasn’t working for me.

Speaking of phones, I watched Steve Job’s MacWorld keynote and the introduction of the iPhone. It looks incredibly slick, the browser and email is a great improvement over other phones I’ve used. I have often wanted the exact ability for a device to know my position via GPS and let me use Google Maps to see what kind of food, services, business, etc, are around my immediate vicinity. I have no plans to buy one though, they’re ridiculously expensive and I went with pre-paid mobile service precisely to get away from contracts. Cisco is already suing them in the Northern District of Califoria court for an injuction to stop using the name. Either a business unit didn’t get the memo, or their agreement wasn’t reached yesterday as expected. heeeeee!

To me, there’s a few things missing on the iPhone. No removable battery, you’re screwed when it eventually wears out, nor can you slip on a charged battery when it runs low. I haven’t heard if third party developers would be able to make apps for it, I can imagine the platform would make for some interesting tools. The lack of a iChat is sort of surprising, but this can probably be fixed later with software — you know, because audio, SMS, and email is not enough to stay in contact with all your friends. For those of us already with a Nano, I wonder if they’ll release a “lite” phone without the hard drive.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the iPhone was, “wow, it would be really cool if it had an IR port and I could use it as a remote for Front Row, or even better yet a universal remote!” I say this because of the relative small form factor and I am more likely to have my phone at hand, not my three remotes for television/DVD/VCR/xbox media center. To me it just makes sense. The multi-touch screen would function nicely for a multi-device universal remote.

At first, the AppleTV had my attention. After reading the specs and what it can’t do, I’m less interested. It “plays the same video as iPods play” which means it can’t play DivX or VIDEO_TS from ripped DVDs, both of which are trivial on my Xbox + Xbox Media Center. I do have a DivX, XviD, WMA components for Quicktime, so that might work; still leaves out VIDEO_TS. I knew an attempt to get Linux running on it would surface, I was pleasantly amused when I saw a link on Digg saying “omg iTv would be perfect for Linux and mythtv!!@#$” Who knows, I might just buy one and live life through Apple to see what it’s like. I really need HDTV first.

I hit IKEA yet again. This time I picked up a bunch of picture frames. Sunday night I printed several sets of photographs from my trips, framed them, and put them up in my apartment to fill in gaps. My livingroom has series from Badwater and Kendall Katwalk. The blue skies match very nicely with my blue futon and existing Burning Man print. For the bathroom I did the token nautical theme; a series of a lighthouse and sea shells from Discovery Park in Seattle and coastal picture from Galveston.

I leave for Amsterdam this weekend. I’ll be over there a week for work. The plan is to have Saturday off, but I’m not holding my breath. The realization that I’m flying across the Atlantic to another country for the first time is starting to sink in.

Either my MacBook Pro with sketchy RAM (which only reboots about once every two weeks now) or the 10.4.7 update screwed me over. During the update it rebooted and hosed the OS. There’s all sorts of whacky unresolved dependancies causing the MBP to not boot. It even reverts to text mode at startup to cry for help. I figured out I can boot into “Safe Boot” mode and have a minimally working desktop, but not enough to save me. I tried re-applying the 10.4.7 update with little success so far. Starting Software Updater dies with Java symbol errors. Interestingly I can run Safari so I downloaded the 10.4.7 package (only en0 work as wireless is disabled since no kernel extensions are loaded). The package silently exists when I try to install it. Looks like I’m going to have to blow away the OS and start over. I hear the OS X installer has a “Archive and Reinstall” which will basically reinstall /System and other stuff, while preserving /Users/. I’ll have to do a backup before I fiddle with this. This will be the fifth time I’ve done a stunt like this and have gotten exceedingly efficient at it.

In other news, I now own a welding helmet, jigsaw, 4″ angle grinder and ten pounds of e-6013 and e-7018 welding electrodes. The punchline to this is that in order to use the grinder outside, I’m going to have to run a 100′ extension cable from my apartment, or hookup a hugeass 1000-1500 watt inverter and drain a marine battery.

At this rate I could really use a house with a garage or some tin work shack on an acre of land.

A friend from work offered to let me use his welder this weekend, so I can build my hitch-mounted vise. Tomorrow I’m picking up 2″ square tubing and a vise from Harbor Freight. I need to go by an Army surplus store to find me some work clothes. Old Army BDUs have made nice welding clothes; I don’t really care if I set them on fire, they’re comfortable, lots of pockets, slip over whatever I’m wearing at the time, and cheap. Plus I can see if there’s anything else that’d be useful in the desert. I’d really like to have a shemagh.

I did manage to finally get my ticket to Seattle. It was furiously aggrivating to do. I first looked at prices Sunday night on Travelocity. Monday afternoon I looked again, prices had actually dropped and there were more flights available, including a good price through Alaskan Airlines. I tried buying, then all I kept getting was “this price is no longer available”. I went over to Orbitz, same thing. I tried directly on alaskaair.com. That time I got as far as putting in my credit card information before getting denied. I gave up and called Alaska Air and booked it that way. I give e-commerce a failing grade in this case.

Anyways, I’m leaving for Seattle on Tuesday and returning early Sunday morning. Plenty of time to hang out with Alex & Victoria!