IPv6 Testing on Apple Personal Hotspot

I have IPv6 set up and running on my home network, but there was some testing I wanted to run remotely. My local Starbucks WiFi isn’t running IPv6 according to my quick test with https://test-ipv6.com/

The same test from my iPhone on TMobile shows it’s running IPv6 by default.

I had read somewhere that Apple supported IPv6 on the personal hotspot through a loophole in the netmask routing algorithms used by most providers..

When I tested the local network connection on my computer while connected to the Apple Personal Hotspot, it appeared to be running IPv6.

Mon 10/28/2019 14:57:08.69 C:\Users\Wim>ipconfig /all

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : WimSurface
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : WIMSWORLD.local
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : WIMSWORLD.local

Wireless LAN adapter Local Area Connection* 4:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct Virtual Adapter #4
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : B6-AE-2B-C1-21-16
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes

Wireless LAN adapter Local Area Connection* 6:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct Virtual Adapter #5
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : B6-AE-2B-C1-24-16
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes

Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : home
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Marvell AVASTAR Wireless-AC Network Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : B4-AE-2B-C1-20-17
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes

Ethernet adapter Bluetooth Network Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Bluetooth PAN HelpText
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : B4-AE-2B-C1-20-18
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2607:fb90:f2a:1b9b:4d30:692:7441:1cf4(Preferred)
Temporary IPv6 Address. . . . . . : 2607:fb90:f2a:1b9b:2495:be8c:b229:b0b6(Preferred)
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::4d30:692:7441:1cf4%4(Preferred)
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 172.20.10.2(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.240
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Monday, October 28, 2019 3:01:16 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, October 29, 2019 2:46:49 PM
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : fe80::1089:a438:80a9:f8e%4
                                    172.20.10.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 172.20.10.1
DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 95727147
DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-1D-D8-F3-3B-B4-AE-2B-C1-20-17
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : fe80::1089:a438:80a9:f8e%4
                                    172.20.10.1
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

Mon 10/28/2019 15:03:26.55 C:\Users\Wim>

Unfortunately when I connected to my phone from my computer via the personal hotspot, I wasn’t able to get positive IPv6 results. Obviously the hotspot was working since I was able to get to the test site via IPv4 without issues.

I’d read “RIPE NIC: ‘In Five Weeks We’ll Run Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses’ “ earlier today and have always been interested in understanding more of the nuances of using IPv6 compared to IPv4. Getting Ready for IPv4 Run-out has more information on how they are allocating IPv4 addresses..

 

 

FAA Drone Questionnaire

I got an email from the FAA asking me to participate in a questionnaire about recreational drone use and information the FAA can provide.

One of the questions was How long do you typically fly? My answer was 60 minutes.  I usually have three fully charged batteries, each of which will fly for approximately 28 minutes. I like to land and swap batteries with a few minutes to spare, giving me a total flight time per session of close to an hour.

The form doesn’t like any answer more than 30 minutes. One more example of how out of touch the FAA is with the rapidly advancing technology.

Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Screen Flicker

My nearly four year old Microsoft Surface Pro 4 recently developed a screen flicker issue. I’m sure it was some driver update that was installed, but I’m not exactly sure when. The observed activity is that a horizontal section at the bottom of the screen about the same size of the mouse cursor flickers with data that is duplicated from the top of the screen. The rest of the screen appears to be bouncing up and down by one scan line, making the text nearly unreadable.

I searched online, and found references to flicker problems with some cases being purely hardware related and requiring replacement by Microsoft. I also found references to the problem only occurring after the screen data had not changed for a few seconds. This static screen problem matched my problem exactly.

I found a workaround by enabling the seconds display in the clock in the task bar. This is done by creating a registry entry. If the following is in a “.reg” file it will set the value to show the seconds on the clock.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"ShowSecondsInSystemClock"=dword:00000001

I read that the seconds are not enabled by default because it saves a bit of processing power, which can be important on battery powered devices. For me the difference is minimal and worth not spending more time researching a probable driver issue that may be taken care of automatically in some future windows update.

I hope that this helps someone else. The screen flicker/jitter was annoying and I wasn’t able to find the root cause.

 

Monitoring Raspberry Pi with MRTG

I’ve used MRTG for simple monitoring for years. It’s easy to get working and dependent on very few packages. It stores it’s data in simple files. This both limits it, and makes it easy to move or duplicate.

I wanted to monitor each of my Raspberry Pi network interfaces because they are connected via WiFi and I can’t monitor a particular switch port for each device. I’ve spent nearly a year searching for the reason that MRTG didn’t enumerate the interfaces before coming up with a simple snippet fixing my problem.

Adding this line to the end of my /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf file and restarting the snmpd allowed me to run cfgmaker and see my network interfaces.

view   systemonly  included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.2

Quick and dirty addition and query:

sudo echo view   systemonly  included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.2 >>/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
sudo systemctl restart snmpd

/usr/bin/cfgmaker --no-down --zero-speed=100000000 public@localhost

Thanks to https://www.seei.biz/cpu-temperature-of-a-raspberry-pi-via-snmp/ for giving me the simple answer that I’d been trying to figure out for over a year.