IPv6 on OpenWRT (with SixXS)

As I wanted to be part of the IPv6 net at home, I registered at http://www.sixxs.net and applied for a tunnel. And what do you know: They had a PoP in the very city where I live (Zurich). The next step (after my tunnel was enabled), was to enable IPv6 on my Linksys WRT54G v2.2 running OpenWRT Kamikaze.

There are some guides on setting up IPv6 on OpenWRT (e.g., http://wiki.openwrt.org/IPv6_howto ), but they leave out some important details. The guides advise you to install:

ipkg install kmod-ipv6
ipkg install radvd
ipkg install ip
ipkg install kmod-ip6tables
ipkg install ip6tables
ipkg install aiccu

However, in order to have things work properly over a SIT tunnel (which is what SixXS uses), you need to install three additional packages:

ipkg install kmod-iptunnel4
ipkg install kmod-tun
ipkg install kmod-sit


After installing these, and getting you SixXS tunnel confirmation mail, edit /etc/aiccu.conf but do not set the server's IP address in this file; AICCU will figure that out for you.

A simple AICCU should now do the trick, and indeed:

root@:~# ping6 -c 4 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.l.google.com (2001:4860:0:1001::68): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=0 ttl=55 time=54.3 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=1 ttl=55 time=52.9 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=2 ttl=55 time=56.0 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=3 ttl=55 time=54.8 ms

Google Gears on Ubuntu 7.x

When trying to install Google Gears on Firefox on Ubuntu 7.x, I failed miserably; The Firefox add-on manager would claim to install Gears, but after a Firefox restart, gears would still not be installed.

Fortunately, I was not the only one having this problem, and the others facing this problem already found a solution. Details can be found, e.g., here.

A quick summary of the problem and the solution: the problem is that Gears uses a C++ library that is not installed by default on Ubuntu 7.x. The solution is easy though, run

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

to install the missing library, restart Firefox, revisit gears.google.com, and off you go!

Garmin GPSMap 60Cx and EGNOS - Finale

After two earlier posts on the trouble I had with getting EGNOS to work on the Garmin GPSMap 60Cx, it seems that the trouble are now solved because of Garmin's latest GPS-chipset firmware upgrade.

As of February 18, 2008, the 3.60 firmware is available for the GPSMap 60Cx itself. This update changes some small maps things unrelated to EGNOS. There also is an update for the GPS Chipset type G, and it seems that this update did the trick for EGNOS. I now routinely get good SBAS signals on either Garmin channel 33, 37, or 39. The smallest EPE I have seen so far is 3 m -- a little more than I expected, but this might have been caused by a poor constellation.

The attached image show a nice 4-m EPE under some tree cover at an old fortress near Lake Zurich.

Thanks, Garmin!

Experimenting with OpenSocial

Google's OpenSocial allows one to automatically connect his identities on multiple public profile sites. See, e.g., http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/ .

These are a few of my identities:

Hyves: me
Plaxo: me
LinkedIn: me
OpenID: me
Bergboer.net: me

Basically, all that is needed to establish one's identity, is a bidirectional pair of rel="me" links. So, if this site points to niekbergboer.bla.com (say) with a rel="me" attribute, and that site points back to this site with the same attribute, OpenSocial will pick up the fact that these sites all belong to me identity.

Many sites, however, do not allow one to directly edit the rel attribute of a link. In that case, just add a plaintext link. Things should still work, as long as at least one link of the pair has a rel="me" tag.