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Ok so I haven't written anything here for like.. 2 years. Oops.

Anyway, thought I'd share this note on getting a 6to4 tunnel set up on OpenWRT Kamikaze in a rather unusual situation: my OpenWRT router is behind an ADSL modem which is NATing, with the OpenWRT router the designated DMZ. This is because in NZ we use PPPoA for DSL, not PPPoE, so I can't do bridge mode without a fancier modem than I have. Because of the DMZ setup, 6to4 (protocol 41) traffic flows back through to the OpenWRT router, but is translated to its internal IP.

I followed the instructions at wiki.openwrt.org/IPv6_howtomostly, although they're a little out of date for Kamikaze, so I merged in advice from this blog.

It didn't work. The tunnel came up ok, but traffic didn't flow. Lots of tcpdump'ing to diagnose later, I figured it out.

The culprit in the init script: ip tunnel add tun6to4 mode sit ttl 64 remote any local $ipv4

The problem here is that $ipv4 is set to the public IP in order to calculate the 6to4 address, but the tunnel needs the local endpoint set to an address on a local interface, which for me is the NAT address. To fix this, I just added another variable, $ipv4_local, setting it to the internal NAT address on eth0.1, and changed the line to ip tunnel add tun6to4 mode sit ttl 64 remote any local $ipv4_local

Working IPv6 on OpenWRT! Yay!

My posts are getting a bit out of order again. Sorry!

Slava told me off on Friday for not blogging about him yet, so I guess I should do that now. Slava came down to NZ from Canada to show his lovely girlfriend Marie-Pascal (look I remember her name now!) around our beautiful nation, and of course to catch up with all the people he left behind here. It's been great having you over Slava and I hope your trip back has been less encumbered by smelly feet!

Slava as you all know is the author of the Factor programming language, which I made him present at one of our work Thursday pizza sessions. At least a few people showed up, which was nice. He's also a pretty good drinker, merrily swigging on my bottle of 42 Below last Saturday at our post-SHDH party. Last Friday we (this includes Marie-Pascal) we out on the town in Wellington to show him some Wellington nightlife. This included Southern Cross, Matterhorn, Vespa, Shooters (to break the pattern of decent places) and Attic (new place above Subnine on Edward St). Was a good night out.

So that brings me to this weekend, where I took a trip to Auckland for Planet Hardcore, an event that hasn't happened since around this time in 2005, when I last tripped up to Auckland with Eddie for it. This year we were lazy and flew, rather than last time when we drove. It just so happened Slava was in Auckland again just prior to flying home, and they had a car, so we got a ride from the airport on Friday night. Thanks for that guys :)  We also went out on the town in Auckland on Friday, but not before me trying to navigate from Ponsonby to the Viaduct Basin, but ending up walking down a squishy grass path next to a motorway that eventually ended us up at a dead-end naval base. Oops. A $12 taxi rescued us from that little situation though.

I'm not really up with the play on Auckland bars, but I knew from a friend of mine from Auckland that I should go to The Met on High St, so we tried that, but they wouldn't let us in because we looked "Too Cas". Slava thinks dressing up to go to town is gay, but I don't blame him. None of us were especially well dressed for the night out. So we didn't go to the Met. We ended up in a rather deserted bar called the Rose and Crown, listening to bad music while sucking through jugs of beer and some lovely shots. Eventually we headed over to Viaduct Basin for some clubbing, but were disappointed by the choices on offer. Next we were led by a lovely gay asian guy to a bar called Globe somewhere downtown, which was our final point of call for the evening. At around 4am we said our final goodbyes (Slava and Marie-Pascal were flying out on Saturday) and turned in for the night.

Of course we spent a fair bit of Saturday sleeping, but we did manage a massive walk while I tried to navigate us from downtown to Newmarket on foot by the longest route possible. I overshot Grafton and got us most of the way to Epsom by the time we consulted my in-phone GPS to get us back on the right track again. We eventually found Newmarket and located Space, the venue for Planet Hardcore that evening. We then caught The Link bus (in the wrong direction) back to town to get some more sleep before the big night out.

After waking up again, we decided we really wanted to eat Hell for dinner. Unfortunately Hell is in really stupid places in Auckland, so we had to walk all the way out to Vector Arena just to get our fix!

Having fed ourselves, it was time to head back to Newmarket, once again on the Link in the wrong direction (too easy to do) and to Space, which turned out to be a really kick-ass club. The theme for the party was eighties, so of course we turned up in the appropriate garb. The photos should be in my gallery sometime soon... (look under parties)

PH was absolutely awesome, but 8 hours of mayhem certainly took it out of me! It was nice to see how many people took the theme seriously! Some absolutely rad costumes out there!:)  I really should write all about how great each set was and blah blah blah, but I can't be bothered. If you care, just come talk to me about it.

Luckily we scored a free ride back into town from John (?) at 7am, and got into nice snuggly bed by 8 and slept through to about 1. We went and had some nice curry for lunch at the "authentic asian foodcourt" on Queen St, then had a 1 hour somewhat lukewarm spa on the roof of our backpackers (Base on Fort St) before wandering up to the IMAX theatre, only to discover that Harry Potter is the current IMAX movie. Screw that. We saw the new Fantastic Four movie, which was even cheesier than the first, if that's possible. Not too awful though.

The rest is pretty uneventful. We managed to fly back home without issue, despite the Qantas check-in lady telling me I'd already checked in somehow. Oh, and some lovely comedy on the plane when one of the flight attendants doing the safety demonstration put the lifejacket on inside out and then failed to find the light, whistle and inflation mouthpiece in time to the safety video. She looked a little embarrassed when she discovered what she'd done, but got a good laugh from some passengers :)

So now I'm safely home in bed back in slightly-colder Wellington. Quite an eventful weekend, huh? Hope yours was as exciting!

I was lucky enough to be in the pilot of SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, held yesterday at Southern Cross in Wellington. We had a good time sitting around chatting, eating, drinking and listening to some lightning talks. I won't go into details because I'm sure other bloggers have covered it better, but it was definitely a fun day! Many thanks to the sponsors, Google, Microsoft, Mindscape, Actrix and Cafenet!

Various people's photos are available on Flickr here. I didn't take any myself I'm afraid.

Ok so I wouldn't have actually gone to see it if noone had asked, but it just so happened our flat decided to go see it. And it was good! Well what I mean is that it was exciting, loud, lots of explosions etc. As with most movies, the technology bugged me (and the fellow geeks of my flat). I saw serious product placement for Apple and HP in there. I mean really, the Pentagon uses Apple Cinema Displays... yeah... Let's use up all the taxpayers money.

Anyway, it gets one of those "go see" recommendations from me. Also learned of impending release of the Simpsons movie, I guess I'll be back in the cinema again soon enough...

Just a quick followup post. I'm home now. Nothing much new to report except the sunrise from the plane was beautiful (and the southern alps are quite pretty too in the morning), and it's bloody freezing in NZ! I have caught a cold in the space of 8 hours, and am shivering in my room.

Chris should be arriving on his flight from Sydney shortly, and I'll go pick him up.

That is all :)