cacti, cactid -> spine; nanobsd

Hmm, been a while since I upgraded my cacti & cactid ports on my FreeBSD machines, and found that the cactid has been renamed to spine. Yay. Took me a while to notice that the smoke-ping-like Advanced Ping wasn't working with ICMP and even longer to remember why and how to fix it. Had to chmod the spine exec to 4555 (setuid, and yes it's evil) so that it would have the necessary permission to open the socket(s) to send ICMP. Maybe I will remember to check here when the port is renamed again and save myself some time!

I've also been working on a fresh nanobsd build for my Soekris SBCs, and I can't thank Bruce Mah enough for his help earlier last year when I was having some build issues. I had it working after consulting with him last year, but have had many other irons in the fire since then and am just now getting back into this particular project. Ultimately, I want to replace my power-sucking FreeBSD-based firewall with this 12v DC, CF-based storage Soekris board. I will get around to a more detailed post in a few days, I hope.

Radio Net Etiquette

Just a little vent for today. I had recently slipped out of the habit of checking into the NI4CE NTS net each evening at 20:30 local time, but now that I am getting back into the habit, I am finding the same irritation that caused me to lose interest before. Other operators who key up their mic and start transmitting non-stop to Net Control without first dropping to see if they are the only station to key up. There are a couple folks in particular who do this incessantly and I figure it's because they don't know any better, and who am I to call them out? It's not like there is some law or regulation that states that they must unkey and verify that they aren't unnecessarily doubling with another station, but you'd think that after hearing so many other stations exercise the same good practice that these folks would attempt to do the same. Alas, they are oblivious and continue forward.

I really peaked last night when a piece of traffic was destined for my city and I was ready to take the traffic. As soon as Net Control called for my county and cleared the repeater, I keyed up and said "Net Control", then unkeyed as usual (for me, anyway) to ensure that I wasn't violating someone else's prior transmission, and as usual one of these one-shot bandits completed their entire check-in and was able to take the traffic. Totally ticked me off, especially because we get so little traffic anymore and it's difficult to keep skills sharp when traffic is so light. Bah.

DD-WRT and IPv6

Yesterday, I took what I thought was a step forward for a long-ignored Linksys WRT54G v3.0 (SN: CDF80E553386) and upgraded from v23 SP2 to v24 RC 6.2, but what a mistake (for me, anyway). I lost IPv6 functionality and that was a killer for me. So, I spent the next couple of hours working backwards through various releases, trying to restore IPv6 functionality. Here's a breakdown:

No IPv6 Support:
DD-WRT v24 RC-6 (01/02/08) std
(SVN revision 8743)

DD-WRT v24 RC-6 (01/02/08) std
(SVN revision 8743)
(this is really the "generic_nokaid" version)

DD-WRT v23 SP3 (12/21/06) std
(SVN revision 5366)
(what's up with the snowflakes?)


IPv6 support restored with the above version, sans kaid, noted below:
DD-WRT v23 SP3 (12/21/06) std
(SVN revision 5366)
(this is really the "nokaid" version)


So, I don't really understand why the versions report themselves to be the same from the browser console, even though they are using a different feature set (if that's the right term). Speaking in terms of feature set, a system like Cisco uses in their IOS would be useful to distinguish between the versions. It's great that the firmware file name is different, but from the web interface, you don't really know which feature set you are using (std, std_nokaid, generic, etc.). Oh well.

For those interested, here are the commands I used to enable IPv6 in the WRT54G using the above firmware (v23 SP3 std nokaid from 2006-12-21). You can set this up for boot-time configuration by navigating to "Administration" -> "Commands", entering the two below commands into the text box, and then click on "Save Startup" button.

(watch for word-wrap on these two commands)
ip -6 addr add 2001:4830:2502:8001::a00:3/64 dev br0
ip -6 route add default via 2001:4830:2502:8001::1 dev br0

Not to bash Linux at this point, but I sure do *LOVE* the way all of the IPv6 configuration in FreeBSD has been integrated into the usual tools (ifconfig, netstat, etc.).