Our ISP has been saying that they will be rolling out a trial of IPv6 for more than 3 years now. Since this does not appear to be forthcoming I decided instead to make use of an IPv6 tunnel.

This tunnel behaves in much the same way as a VPN tunnel. You use IPv4 to connect to an endpoint, then use IPv6 addresses on the tunnel virtual interfaces. I used the Hurricane Electric tunnelbroker.net for my home IPv6 access, and a sixxs.net AYIYA tunnel for my laptop when away from home. I chose the AYIYA for my laptop since it is NAT friendly and is a better choice if your IPv4 address changes regularly. Both services are free.

Since I have a simple Linux machine as my main router this was actually a straightforward process. If you have a router that supports IPv6 tunnels, this can be even easier. In my case I had to setup the tunnel interface in /etc/network/interfaces (this is a Debian install, this should be the same for Ubuntu). The actual IPs have been obfuscated):

After enabling the nvidia drivers for my optimus based laptop (Intel iGPU + nvdia discreet GPU), kwin crashed regularly. The main symptom was that application windows would not respond to mouse clicks, even though the mouse cursor still responded.

The fix was to create some symlinks in /usr/lib that pointed to a specific OpenGL library as apparently the nvidia OpenGL library was getting called by default (this should not be the case since optirun should be loading the nvidia libraries at run time).

This seems to have corrected the issue for now.

I recently heard about the VPN service from ProXPN. Since they were using OpenVPN under the hood I thought that it would be pretty straightforward to get running on my Ubuntu laptop (running 12.10 at the time of writing this). I have Vyper VPN (also using OpenVPN) working on this exact same configuration.

It turns out that officially there is no support for Linux, and the only downloads were .dmg (OsX), and .exe (windows)files. This was not looking good.

What I did first was to use 7zip to extract the contents of the downloaded .exe file. In the extracted folder was a folder called "config". In this folder was the .ovpn config file, was well as a folder called "ssl" which contained all of the required certs:

With this information I was able to build a command line to connect to the ProXPN service. The only two missing pieces was an auth.txt file containing my ProXPN username (an email address) and password. This is the same username and password you used to register with them.

Shared folders are pretty easy to access. It turns out that is also pretty easy to do under Linux as well.

The only catch is that you need to create the mount point first, just like most other file systems.

I was looking for a client side keep alive since I do not have administrative access to all the machines I ssh in to.

Basically you create or edit the following file in your home directory:

and in this file you enter the following line:

Change the interval to whatever you like, I find once per minute is usually good enough and there does not seem to be any performance impact.

I found this tip at the following site:
http://madphilosopher.ca/2005/07/an-ssh-keep-alive-tip/

This is an update to my earlier command line frequency scaling script. This version uses the dialog utility to provide a rudimentary GUI.