Recently in Techie :: Techno :: Category

If you want to check which version of Ubuntu is installed on a machine run the following command:

lsb_release -a

On Debian the command is:

cat /etc/debian_version

The redhat equivalent, which would work on redhat derivatives as well, is:

cat /etc/redhat-release

Either IrishDev has gone bang whallop, or they're having serious issues with their site. It's been giving a 403 error for the last few days for me, while others are reporting that it's been like that for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile Silicon Republic have unveiled a new site design. I'm not sure if I like it or hate it, but I honestly don't understand why they have the big white space at the top left of all the pages. It looks really really odd.

In totally unrelated news the submission form on Armchair.ie is finally working again! The captcha has been removed, so I'll probably get inundated with spammy junk, but at least the genuine links will also get through!

As I mentioned recently, this server is now available over both ipv4 and ipv6.

The next logical step was to get ipv6 of some kind working at home.

Unfortunately my isp isn't offering ipv6 (yet!), so I had two options:

1. Setup complicated networking stuff to get some of our ipv6 allocation to appear at home
2. Get an ipv6 tunnel from Sixxs

Option 1 might have been possible, but it would have involved bribing one of our network engineers to do it in his spare time, as I don't have the technical knowledge to pull it off

Option 2, therefore, was the one I chose.

I've been running OpenWRT on my linksys wrt54g for some time, so the howto on their site was one of my first ports of call.

Once I got my ipv6 tunnel from Sixxs I was able to use ping6 to verify my connection was working over ipv6 from the linksys.

Unfortunately I cannot get any form of ipv6 from my desktop! All I get are unhelpful messages about there being no routes :(

UPDATE: Jeroen from Sixxs and a couple of other people were extremely helpful and I finally got it working.

Running the following on the openwrt seems to have fixed the issue:
ip -6 ro add 2000::/3 dev <tunnel>

where <tunnel> is the interface for your tunnel

I also had to rejig a small bit of my config, as I'd put in /48 instead of /64

It's all working nicely now, so my next minor challenge is to get my Mac to use the ipv6 assignment on the network here.

Over the past couple of years this site has been IPv6 enabled from time to time, but it ended up losing its IPv6 some time ago.

It's now back and working again!

Thanks to Niall, who did some rejigging of DNS and network stuff yesterday to get it all working properly again!

The more content that is available over IPv6 the better.

Anyone who has a dedicated or colo server with us can get native IPv6 if they want. Simply ask!

This site, and several others, will be offline for up to an hour tomorrow. The server already got a RAM upgrade recently, but it's now getting a CPU upgrade.

While the performance of this site and most of the others on here hasn't been an issue there are one or two sites that might perform a bit better with slightly beefier hardware.

In any case I thought it was about time that I did some upgrades, as the servers could probably do with it.

The guys at XKCD have done it again!

I took delivery of some of their tshirts this morning, as well as my Top Gun tshirt

For the past couple of weeks I hadn't been getting any email notifications about pending comments on this blog, which is why some of them took so long to appear.

Since I tend to login to check for new comments every few hours and had also been hit pretty badly with comment and trackback spam, I didn't think too much about it.

I logged in just now and noticed more comments in the queue again, but no emails in my inbox.

So I decided to look into it a bit further and SSHed in to check logs.

Bizarrely they were completely empty. I restarted postfix and mail began to flow again.

I suspect that I broke the mail server slightly during an upgrade, but as it doesn't actually receive any mail I didn't notice.

So if you weren't getting any comment updates from here for the last while and suddenly got loads of them I apologise!

Niall pointed me at this.
Nice, but insane!

We finally launched our VPS hosting plans about 20 minutes ago.

You can now choose between Centos or Windows Server 2003 powered VPS with optional Plesk!

Paul and I had been working on ironing out the last few bugs and annoying issues on the site for most of this evening, which is why I still haven't eaten anything (not that I can't go without food for a few days - I have plenty of surplus!)

There are probably issues, typos and other errors on the site which we haven't spotted, so if you do notice anything odd please let us know: management@blacknight.com OR simply leave a comment here.

We'll probably be making the official announcement / launch in the morning