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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’ve just moved my work PC from a cast off from a customer - it had a BIOS date stamped 2012, and was a rather shag Lenovo with a … Intel Core something and four GB RAM. Cheap though, ie free. I did wedge in a SSD to make it usable.

    I run KDE which isn’t known for being tiny and I have a Postgres DB and a few containers for experiments running. The new box is a i5 Intel G13 thingy - HP mini jobbie. Luxury

    To ensure that I am as disadvantaged as everyone else, I run ESET Endpoint AV and full disc encryption on it. It boots EFI and Secure Boot is enabled. I will pass a Cyber Essentials Plus audit (UK standard) without having to employ any misdirection. I’ve also read up on the US standards. The STIG for Ubuntu 22.04 is doable but my desktop is running 23.04 and 24.04 has just come out.

    I run my company and we have some customers who have some rather more stringent requirements than others. We also have our own standards.


  • I once named a load of servers for a helicopter company in the UK with elements. The cluster nodes were copper, silicon, etc. The cluster itself was called iron. The volumes were labelled fe_function.

    It worked - it was easy to read and the bits that implied “cluster” were grouped appropriately. All the other servers had random elemental names unless they were associated in some way, in which case the group would be used. The engineers (real engineers with oil or distressingly nasty lubricants in their veins) loved it - it made sense, without being too quirky. It was very legible.

    When those systems were hoicked out and replaced, the usual nonsense was applied: 2 char country code + 2 char site code etc etc ad nauseam. Followed by my absolute pet hate: 01. Oh so you might need 99 domain controllers? Yes you might, but not on one site.

    Let’s face it, it is mostly AD admins who don’t get hostnames. I blame MS - their docs and blogs strive to be … authoritative or at least look so. An entire generation (possibly two) of sysadmins have been sold up the river by MS and their wankery.




  • You don’t need to put the IPv6 address into your browser. The host command shows that you have got DNS sorted - try:

    $ dig @9.9.9.9 myserver.now-dns.net AAAA

    That should return an IPv6 address and the @9.9.9.9 means: use the Quad9 DNS server - 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 will also try external DNS servers - CloudFlare and Google. Hopefully that’s naming sorted out.

    Now to actual access. Your router will (probably), by default, block all inbound connections. I’ve just had a look at your screenshot and it has a menu entry: “Port forwarding IPv6”. IPv6 doesn’t need port forwarding really but I suspect that is how you allow access. I am now guessing. There is such a thing as IPv6 NAT and something called NPT (Network Prefix Translation) which is not for the faint of heart!

    Have a look around in that menu a screen shot might help.

    It might help if you tell us where you are (very roughly - country and perhaps city), your ISP and router model. I can get you to the point of all of this working but there are rather a lot of unknowns. I can see that your router offers Dutch or English so I will guess you are from the Netherlands.


  • As well as a link local address you should also have one or more globally routeable ones too. Hopefully you have at least one of those set up in DNS with a AAAA address. Therefore you should be able to put the address of your web server into your browser and off it goes. In theory IPv6 should be preferred by your browser, so even if both an A record and a AAAA record resolve for the name, IPv6 should kick in.

    A quick check would be:

    $ host mywebserver.example.co.uk
    

    That should return an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. The IPv6 address is the same for internal and external - there is no distinction, which can be surprising if you are used to IPv4 and NAT. The final bit of the equation is that your internet router needs to allow access “from all to globally routeable ipv6 address of the web server”.