The past few weeks have been jam packed with academics and post-grad job hunting, so I’ve had little time to play around with technology. This week, in a few hours of time, I deployed IPv6 in my school research lab, the research lab webcam, and my colocated server (this blog). My domain name, compbrain.net, now has both an A record and an AAAA record. I’ve noticed that machines with 6to4 IPv6 addresses tend to pick the IPv4 A record over the IPv6 alternative when both records are available.
Thanks to Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 Tunnel Broker, setting up these IPv6 networks was fairly painless. The only real exception here was in my dorm room, as our residential network filters inbound ICMP (inbound anything from the public net really) and prevents Hurricane Electric from allowing a tunnel to be created. To work around that, i’m using 6to4 on my DD-WRT powered WRT310N. The DD-WRT docs have a decent writeup on 6to4 available here.
Will Hacking ipv6, networking, school, webserver
Quick note for myself and anyone else looking to replace lighttpd or apache2 with nginx for serving php (ala wordpress):
http://frankkumro.com/2009/01/03/ubuntu-nginx-and-php5/
Will Hacking nginx, php5, ubuntu, webserver
Today at school we finally fixed a nit that had been bothering me since about the time I arrived. For historical reasons our college mail server holds the A record for the college domain name. For that reason, attempts to access http://ccs.neu.edu instead of http://www.ccs.neu.edu ended up displaying an error page.
Since the primary purpose of the server in question is to handle e-mail, no webserver was installed. After stumbling upon http://aleksandarsavic.com/nginx-redirect-wwwexamplecom-requests-to-examplecom-or-vice-versa/ I whipped up a 6 line config for nginx, and deployed it on the machine. nginx is lightweight enough to be installed specifically for this purpose without making a drastic impact on the machines other tasks.
Here is our config:
## Redirector for ccs.neu.edu
server {
listen 80;
server_name ccs.neu.edu;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
rewrite ^(.*) http://www.ccs.neu.edu$1 permanent;
}
Will Hacking nginx, school, webserver