Luke Maurits » downtime http://luke.maurits.id.au Assorted geekery Sun, 06 Mar 2011 06:52:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Unplanned downtime, YouTube without Flash http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2009/05/unplanned-downtime-youtube-without-flash/ http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2009/05/unplanned-downtime-youtube-without-flash/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 12:20:18 +0000 Luke Maurits http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2009/05/unplanned-downtime-youtube-without-flash/ I had some unexpected downtime of this website (but not my mail service) recently which actually went undiagnosed for a few days. The cause was an annoying bug in lighttpd – annoying not so much because it is there, since everybody makes mistakes, but annoying because they actually seem reluctant to admit that there is a problem, even though there clearly is. A few days ago I set up an IPv6 tunnel with the very cool guys at SixXS. I can’t get native IPv6 from my ISP, but tunnel brokers like SixXS can act as an intermediary – my computer wraps IPv6 packets up inside IPv4 packets, send them to an IPv6 capable host in the SixXS system, which passes on the IPv6 packets over the actual IPv6 internet, and then wraps the response back up in IPv4 and sends it back to me. This offers practically all the benefits of IPv6 without me actually having it per se. In particular, I can now accept incoming IPv6 connections to my mail and web servers, and so now do so. It turns out, however, that enabling IPv6 support in Lighttpd has the effect of disabling IPv4 support on all Unix OSes other than Linux (because Linux takes the non-standard and technically wrong approach of having IPv6 sockets accept incoming IPv4 connections). I didn’t notice this immediately, of course, because I could access my pages just fine – via my IPv6 tunnel. Anybody on an IPv4-only connection (and that’s pretty much everybody) wouldn’t have been able to connect. Sorry about this.

Another quick thing: last night I learned, via undeadly.org of an astonishing little thing called HQTube: a Greasemonkey script which, using the well-known mplayer-plugin for Firefox, lets you watch YouTube videos inside your browser using mplayer, even if you don’t have Flash installed. Even more incredible than the fact that this exists and works is that it has been around since at least May 14, 2008 (date of the last update), and people are only just discovering this now. People using BSD operating systems that don’t have Flash support have been jumping through all sorts of hoops for years in an effort to get Flash working, and YouTube is normally a huge part of the motivation to do this. None of the other methods I’ve read about are close to being as easy or robust as this one solution seems to be. It should be much better known than it is.

]]> http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2009/05/unplanned-downtime-youtube-without-flash/feed/ 1 Downtime notice 000001 http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2008/11/downtime-notice-000001/ http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2008/11/downtime-notice-000001/#comments Fri, 14 Nov 2008 06:19:26 +0000 Luke Maurits http://luke.maurits.id.au/blog/2008/11/downtime-notice-000001/ I’m moving house in a couple of days, which also involves moving the server that hosts all services on the maurits.id.au domain. So for a few hours sometime soon this website will disappear and email sent to me might trigger an automated notice from your SMTP provider. There’s already an internet connection live and waiting at the new place and I’ll endeavour to get the server back online as quickly as possible. Hopefully I’ll be able to time things so that the downtime is only around an hour, but it might end up taking longer. Any good SMTP server will retry sending emails for a few days before giving up, so even if I’m down for 24 hours emails should still get through eventually.

I’ll post some news on my weather hacking project when things are back online!

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