One month to go?

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So as I write, today is 29 June 2012.  As of yesterday, 29 July 2012 was Geoff Huston’s prediction for RIPE to get down to the final /8 (although I notice it’s now at 28 July), at which point the supply of IPv4 addresses to Europe and the surrounding region effectively dry up, along with the APNIC region which “exhausted” last year.

The “head-in-sand” mentality still appears to be quite prevalent still, and I’m not sure that’s going to change until the day actually happens.  Here’s hoping it’ll come soon …

World IPv6 Launch

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So today, Wednesday 6 June 2012, one year on from the previous World IPv6 Day which was held on Wednesday 8 June 2011,  is officially World IPv6 Launch Day.  Major web sites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others including Akamai, the content distribution network, have permanently switched on their IPv6 support today and, unlike last year, aren’t turning it off this time.  I’ve no idea whether this will have any effect in driving IPv6 adoption, but we can only hope I suppose.

What was more worrying, but probably not surprising, was the large number of inaccurate press reports on the subject.  The BBC News web site seemed to be telling us that IPv6 had only just been invented and switched on, when in fact it’s been around since 1997 in one form or another.  Then there was the usual ‘who needs IPv6, just ignore it’ articles and lots more besides.  It really doesn’t help when the press get it wrong like this!

My biggest disappointment of today was that, although Google had trumpeted how IPv6 compliant it was now, I thought I’d go for the obvious test and send an e-mail from Gmail to my own email address, which sits on an IPv6-enabled server.  And guess what – although you can access Gmail’s web interface over v6, you can’t actually send the mail using v6 – looking at the headers, I was disappointed to see that the mail was delivered to my server over IPv4.  That said, Google Talk (XMPP) is available over IPv6, so that’s good at least.

So, happy World IPv6 Launch day, and the next milestone is going to be RIPE running out of addresses, if the predictions are correct, in about two months’ time.

XMPP “fun”

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Had lots of “fun” tonight with my XMPP-compatible instant messaging server, ejabberd.  For some reason since I moved it between servers it has been misbehaving.  This has been a “fun” one to track down, since it wasn’t obvious.  But tonight I have found the answer.  Erlang (the language that ejabberd is written in) is a little obscure at times, but it turns out that if you turn the logging up enough, then you see strange errors in the logs.  After a bit of Googling, the answer turns out to be a bug in Debian.  The ejabberd package depends on the erlang-xmerl package being installed, but Debian for some reason forgot to make that a dependency of ejabberd as described in Debian bug 670307.  Hopefully they’ll fix that soon, and until they do, the fix is just to apt-get or aptitude install erlang-xmerl so that the package gets installed.

Why I’m blocking mails from Yahoo!

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If you are sending e-mail to me from a @yahoo.com address or from a service provider that uses Yahoo! as its wholesale provider such as BT Retail Broadband customers (@btinternet.com), you are unlikely to be able to send to me any more.  Why is this?  Because Yahoo! have decided to block my very recently allocated IPv4 address range so that I cannot send mail to any Yahoo! customer or any of their wholesale customers – presumably because they think I’m a notorious Russian spammer or something (since the /16 that this block of addresses is in seems to contain blocks of IPs from places such as Russia and Kazakhstan).  Which might be tempting to think, apart from the fact that my IPv4 addresses were blocked before I could even send them a single mail.  Despite having proper SPF records and DKIM signing all outgoing mail, attempting to send mail to their servers results in a message thus:

421 4.7.1 [TS03] All messages from 178.238.157.69 will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/421-ts03.html

Yahoo will not explain why my IPv4 addresses are blocked, they sent a canned reply stating that they will do nothing about it, and that their spam blocking methods are so secret that they can’t (read: won’t) tell me why, with apparently no right of appeal.  For obvious reasons, I consider this to be totally unacceptable behaviour on their part.

As far as I can tell, Yahoo! are the only major ISP who are blocking my address range, so using Hotmail, Gmail, etc. should work.

So, Yahoo, if you’re reading this – if you do not unblock my IPv4 address range on your servers (178.238.157.64/26), then your customers will not be able to send e-mail to me until you unblock them.

If you are a customer of an ISP directly affected by this, you may wish to take this matter up with them if you wish to carry on receiving e-mails from me.

Renumbering

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Renumbering all your hosts is always “fun”.  Today I’ve obtained a new range of addresses from my ISP, Andrews & Arnold, a shiny new /26 block of IPv4 (and in time before RIPE runs out, too.)

So for those of you that care about these things, you’ll notice I have a different IPv4 address range now (the IPv6 addresses are unchanged).  Hopefully this won’t make a scrap of difference to anyone, but if you do experience problems, let me know.

E-mail Happenings

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It’s now less than four days to go until the MX record for garysoft.co.uk disappears from my DNS server.  In English, this means that any mail you send to ….@garysoft.co.uk will not work any more – but you’ve had two or so years to update your address books, so hopefully this won’t affect any of you.

But in case you hadn’t noticed, just replace garysoft.co.uk with garyhawkins.me.uk in the e-mail address, and all will start working again.

Instant Messaging reorganisation

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I found out an interesting thing the other day – that the instant messaging client I’ve been using for quite a while, Pidgin, doesn’t actually support some features in the XMPP protocol.  (If you’ve never heard of XMPP, it’s the open standard protocol behind instant messaging servers such as Google Talk, but you can run your own XMPP server if you like and that’s what I’m doing, using a piece of software called ejabberd).

The main problem with Pidgin (or more correctly the library underneath it, known as libpurple) does not support the concept of ‘priorities’, apart from a hard-coded default of 1 (or 0 if you’re away) mainly because most other instant messaging services don’t have the feature, and as libpurple supports mutiprotocol, this is a bit of problem.  In case you’re wondering, XMPP priorities are useful for times where you have multiple IM clients running at once and you want to choose which one provides the ‘status’ to other users.  For example, I could run client on my desktop, and one on my mobile phone, and one on my laptop, and I might decide to give the desktop client the highest priority, and if that one is offline, then the laptop takes over, and if that one’s offline, then the mobile takes over.

So, I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement instant messaging client.  The one I’ve decided to settle on is called Psi+ (which in turn is an enhanced fork of the Psi instant messenger).  It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac.  One advantage of it is that it is designed for XMPP only, so that it doesn’t have to work around the limitations of having to support MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL, etc. as well.  At first, I found it a bit complicated to use  – but then again the ‘advertising’ for it does clearly state it’s an XMPP client for ‘power users’ – and that it certainly is.  It’s chock full of features including a few little known ones, like being able to set ‘mood’ and ‘activity’ (so, for example, you could set mood to ‘Thirsty’ and activity to ‘Drinking’).  It also, more importantly, supports XMPP priorities properly, and also does XMPP Jingle voice calls too.  It took me quite a while to set up since there are so many things you can set, but now that I’ve got it how I want it, I’m pretty pleased with it.

Unfortunately, one casualty of this means that my MSN account can’t be used with Psi+ so I’ve decided to cancel it.  Therefore, if you were talking to me using MSN, you’ll now have to switch to XMPP instead – but I don’t think that will affect too many people.  You can reach me on XMPP at gary.hawkins@garyhawkins.me.uk using your favourite client.