Joe's Random Ramblings

As a reminder that SoCal is earthquake country, we just had another nice shaker.
A 5.0, according to the USGS, centered near Hawthorne and Inglewood, i.e., fairly close to the LA Airport, LAX.
Update: downgraded to 4.7 by now.
There apparently have been a couple of aftershocks, the biggest one a 3.1. But I didn't feel any of them.

Groklaw reports that in the seemingly never-ending The SCO Group saga, the US Trustee in their bankruptcy case has motioned for Chapter 7 liquidation, i.e., liquidation of the company.
This has been long overdue. SCO has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy for too long already and has been draining its remaining money instead of seriously working on reorganizing their business to get out of bankruptcy. Liquidation is the logical consequence.

Earlier this week, I got an Asus Eee PC 900. It came with Windows XP Home installed, which I obviously didn't want to use.
So, I downloaded what used to be called Ubuntu Eee, but now has the rather silly name "Easy Peasy".
The name may be silly, the project certainly is not.
Installing it was a breeze (overwriting the useless XP Home), and everything worked right out of the box, including the wireless network and the webcam. Even suspend and hibernate work flawlessly. I used to have problems with Linux hibernate on my dual-boot laptop, but here, no issues at all.
I must say, I am impressed. Now taking all the Windows stickers off the case...

From CNN:

The Redmond, Wash.-based company said sales fell 6% from a year earlier to $13.7 billion, missing analysts' expectations of $14.1 billion.

Meanwhile, the company's net income fell 32% to $2.98 billion, or 33 cents per share, in its third quarter ended March 31.

And one of the reasons is the shift to netbooks, which often run Linux:

The recession has also prompted many consumers to opt for cheaper, scaled-down "netbooks" that perform only basic tasks such as e-mail and accessing the Internet. They typically run a lower-cost version of Windows or an open-source operating system such as Linux.

Microsoft has recently claimed a high market share on netbooks, but that's most likely overstated. For example, I recently ordered a netbook with XP, but once I get it, the first thing will be to wipe XP off it and install Linux.

I am trying to set up IPv6 on my Linux box which is connected to an AT&T DSL line.
Since the DSL modem only supports IPv4, I have set up an IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel.
According to the IPv6 specs, this tunnel sends the IPv6 packets to the special "anycast" IPv4-address 192.88.99.1.
Update: The script I used to set up the tunnel is from here:
http://www.altocumulus.org/IPv6/
And the IPv6 routing table:

$: route -A inet6
Kernel IPv6 routing table
Destination                   Next Hop       Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
::1/128                       ::             U     0      135      1 lo      
::75.3.241.4/128              ::             U     0      0        1 lo      
::/96                         ::             U     256    1        0 tun6to4 
2002:4b03:f104::1/128         ::             U     0      0        1 lo      
2002::/16                     ::             U     256    0        0 tun6to4 
2000::/3                      ::192.88.99.1  UG    1      109      0 tun6to4 
fe80::200:5aff:fe71:6c07/128  ::             U     0      0        1 lo      
fe80::211:11ff:febe:743e/128  ::             U     0      0        1 lo      
fe80::/64                     ::             U     256    0        0 eth0    
fe80::/64                     ::             U     256    0        0 eth1    
fe80::/64                     ::             U     256    0        0 tun6to4 
ff00::/8                      ::             U     256    0        0 eth0    
ff00::/8                      ::             U     256    0        0 eth1    
ff00::/8                      ::             U     256    0        0 tun6to4 

I tried an nslookup to see if things work:

$: nslookup
> set querytype=ANY
> ipv6.l.google.com
Server: 192.168.0.1
Address: 192.168.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
ipv6.l.google.com has AAAA address 2001:4860:b002::68

So far, so good.

I then tried to ping ipv6.l.google.com, and that fails:

$: ping6 ipv6.l.google.com
PING ipv6.l.google.com(2001:4860:b002::68) 56 data bytes
^C
--- ipv6.l.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 2999ms

Seems that AT&T somewhere does not route to 192.88.99.1 correctly.
A traceroute shows:

$: traceroute 192.88.99.1
traceroute to 192.88.99.1 (192.88.99.1), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 0.389 ms 0.295 ms 0.286 ms
2 adsl-75-3-255-254.dsl.irvnca.sbcglobal.net (75.3.255.254) 9.080 ms 6.618 ms 5.788 ms
3 dist1-vlan60.irvnca.pbi.net (67.114.48.130) 6.760 ms 6.202 ms 6.407 ms
4 bb1-p2-1.ksc2mo.sbcglobal.net (151.164.42.7) 5.838 ms 6.740 ms 6.345 ms
5 ex1-p13-0.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net (151.164.188.138) 7.729 ms 7.855 ms 7.360 ms
6 asn6939-he.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net (151.164.251.86) 7.319 ms 15.424 ms 7.344 ms
7 10gigabitethernet1-3.core1.pao1.he.net (72.52.92.21) 17.020 ms 16.658 ms 16.775 ms
8 * * *
...

So it seems that AT&T is handing this off to he.net, and there it just hangs.
Pretty lame.
I had an online chat with AT&T tech support, and they weren't much help, either. The first thing they said, of course, was "we don't support Linux". When I pointed out that Windows Vista also has IPv6 built-in, and that my question was about IPv6, not Linux, the tech support guy was staying on, but still, couldn't get me any useful information.

Update: The problem turned out to be the DSL modem, which seems to filter the tunneled IPv6 packets.