More IPv6 testing

My dream is a simple one... I'd like to be able to send and receive email to my laptop once again, no matter where I am, no matter what networks I'm behind, and send stuff from the command line, while I'm offline. When you think about it, the pop protocol was one of the first steps towards the AOL-ization of the internet, imap4 was a coherently designed successor (stage 2), and gmail the end product of treating the browser as the OS (Stage 3). Gmail has great ease of use. It's downright addictive - and it works everywhere - and it has lousy filtering for when you are on tons of mailing lists - and of course requires that you be online to read it.

I just got off of gmail. I am tired of google having all my (base) mail and spitting ads in my direction. I also (incidentally) got off most of my mailing lists, and am re-reading up on procmail, to my dismay - server side filtering of your mailboxes makes sense, but can't we have invented a better syntax for it by now? :yuck:

Now there are all kinds of solutions to the email-on-the-laptop problem - fetchmail perhaps being the most common - but ideally - in an end to end connected world - I'd merely connect to the internet, update my ipv6 dns record, and mail would start to flow directly into my mailboxes - no imap or pop protocols required. My backup mx forwarder would temporarily store (and filter) my email and all I'd have to do would be to connect, and invisible, non-graphical daemons would take care of the rest.

Apache over ipv6 works, postgres looks like it would work... that's really about it for most of the services I run today. Irc works... Everything works... Maybe a git server I should put up...

So, anyway, I got imap and smtp auth working today so I can regress back to stage 2, and maybe, with a little more work, I can regress back to stage 0 - the way email was supposed to be - direct to my box.

imap works over ipv6 pretty good, as does rsync. Thunderbird tries first to connect to the ipv6 address, fails in 30 sec or so (at present, due to the routing issues below), then rolls over transparently to the ipv4 address.

IPv6's various tunneling mechanisms are giving me heartache, though. Tunnels on hosts where I have control of the routers are no problem - ridiculously easy - but wedging protocol 41 out via 6in4 tunneling hasn't worked on most of the commercial nets I've tried, nor the college where I'm staying at. I tried to setup an alternate mechanism (miredo) but that didn't work on the known public server I was aware of in Australia - and running the miredo server requires two consecutive ipv4 addresses?! on the server - an insane requirement. I'm looking into another method. Failing that I might fallback on openvpn or a derivative...

That gets me to my next bitch of the day - I have two machines here, both with wireless networking, but no access point. I USEd to have a wireless card that could act as an access point, but no longer, and no matter what I've tried ad-hoc mode seems to be broken on this card, too, so I can't get my stinking handheld to talk to my laptop even with an air gap of a few centimeters. Dumb.

And now I'm grumpy about all the captcha I've had to look at today. If I can figure out a way to blog via git I'm all for it.

Ah, well, it was a fun day, anyway.

Labels: ipv6, networking

  ¶ 12:03 AM