Unable to ping6 host.local in FreeBSD

If you’re not able to ping6 host.local from your FreeBSD box, where host.local is some host running Avahi (or some other mDNS server) in your IPv6 network, then you might need to patch your dns/nss_mdns FreeBSD port as mentioned in this posting on freebsd-ports@. Anyways, happy FreeBSDing…:)

ipv6.google.com resolves to an IPv6 address

abbe [~] chateau $ dig aaaa ipv6.google.com

; <> DiG 9.4.2 <> aaaa ipv6.google.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41367
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ipv6.google.com.               IN      AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
ipv6.google.com.        7062    IN      CNAME   ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com.      300     IN      AAAA    2001:4860:0:1001::68

;; Query time: 390 msec
;; SERVER: ::1#53(::1)
;; WHEN: Wed Apr 16 15:43:50 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 82
abbe [~] chateau $ telnet ipv6.google.com 80
Trying 2001:4860:0:1001::68...
Connected to ipv6.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: ipv6.google.com
Connection: Close

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=8b8a663a80b66872:TM=1208342637:LM=1208342637:S=5_cmeO1B5B_pcWdY; expires=Fri, 16-Apr-2010 10:43:57 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:43:57 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Length: 0

Connection closed by foreign host.

As, you can see ipv6.google.com is resolving to an IPv6 address, and also I can connect to it :). karora on #ipv6 at irc.freenode.net told me that at Google, most of the IPv6 transition work has been done. So like sig_wall I also changed my /etc/hosts to point {mail,reader,www}.google.com to IPv6 address of ipv6.google.com, and to my surprise couple of google.com services worked but not orkut.com (I don’t use it :P)

abbe [~] chateau $ cat /etc/hosts |tail -1
2001:4860:0:1001::68 www.google.com mail.google.com www.orkut.com reader.google.com orkut.com ipv6.google.com

Anyways, happy IPv6ing….;)

Wanna print to HP LJ 1005 on CentOS

I discovered that I need foo2zjs while trying to print to an HP LaserJet 1005 printer (attached to a Windows XP Professional box) from a CentOS 5 client. foo2zjs not only supports HP LaserJet 1005 but also couple of other printers too, so do check out its homepage. Unfortunately there’re no prebuilt RPMs available for this on any repository, so I’ve to hack my own. Anyways, Ubuntu has a package for foo2zjs in their repository, so no worries Ubuntu users.

So the whole episode (i.e. trying to figure out what I’m missing) was frustrating for me. /me thought this earlier, but now I think things like this should happen, so that I’m forced to learn. Anyways happy printing ;)