Spent all day doing paperwork and reviewing BGP. Not that I’m new to BGP, but I wanted to review some things that I’ve not needed to use before, like route reflectors.
Tomorrow: more paperwork that needs to get finished up before the end of November, and then starting to research MPLS, VPLS, and EoMPLS. Yay.
Well, not too much to report. I’d hoped to be a little further along by now, but duty calls and my job takes precedence over fun-time.
I made it through the remainder of the development view tutorials, which walk through the typical screen layout stuff, how to handle buttons, forms, etc… Nothing too complex. Normally I’m not much for tutorials, but in this case it’s nice because now I have ready code examples already at hand that I can use for reference when I start putting together apps.
I’m still trying to think of a good app to start with. I have a few ideas that I think could work, and I’m hoping this week that I’ll have a few hours to spare that I can start using to flesh out one of those ideas.
Well, I haven’t exactly gotten very far in the process of App development. A client decided to pull a web application project out of mothballs, so that’s been keeping a lot of my spare time tied up after I spend the usual 50-60 hours a week on my full-time job.
I did manage to work my way through some of the screen layout tutorials. I think I’m going to like the XML screen layouts. It looks like you build the layouts in XML and then reference them from the Java app. I like the idea of separating format from function. Back when I did Perl CGI, it was always a struggle to try and keep the HTML looking halfway coherent even though it was broken up through the Perl code. PHP is a little more reasonable, but not much.
I’m hoping to spend some more time on Apps this weekend. Maybe a few more tutorials and I’ll think of the next killer-app, right? 
I’ve decided to jump into Android app development. I figure I can write apps just as well as everyone else that’s making money off these devices, so why not? So far I’ve got the SDK installed, Eclipse (which I’ve used before), and the ADT Plugin for Eclipse. Now I’m waiting for the SDK Manager to download and install all it’s stuff, which seems to be taking a very long time.
Luckily it sounds like Android Apps are written in Java, with which I have some experience. I’m hoping the learning curve will be mercifully short. Now, time to come up with a million-dollar idea!
Grrr. Nothing like working with a completely new technology to really wear a guy out.
I’m building a test network for IPv6 using old Cisco equipment that we had on the shelf. A 2811 as my tunnel to Hurricane Electric, then a 3725 as a core router with BGP running between the two. Another 3725 as my edge router connected to the core router with EIGRP between those and routes being redistributed between BGP and EIGRP. My original plan was to then start by having the edge router run a DHCPv6 server and connect to it with a laptop.
Not so fast. Turns out that to have EIGRP for IPv6, I had to run the latest 12.4T IOS train. But, that train doesn’t support DHCPv6 address pools, although it supposedly will do prefix delegation. It was a disappointment, but not a complete show-stopper. Although I suspect our eventual deployment will use DHCPv6 for address assignment for tracking purposes, for initial testing it is sufficient to use router solicitation and advertisement to get the addressing piece done.
On to the laptop configuration. I have an old Dell running the latest updates of WindowsXP. WindowsXP supposedly supports IPv6. However, that support apparently doesn’t include DHCPv6 options. The XP machine would do the solicitation and figure out it’s IP and default router, but couldn’t get it’s DNS from DHCPv6. Without DNS, there’s not much point in having Internet.
Time to switch to Linux, which has had IPv6 capabilities for quite some time. It turns out, however, that it’s IPv6 support also has limitations. I loaded up Ubuntu 11.04 for testing. I was able to get RS/RA working for addressing, although it seemed quirky. Sometimes it seemed that it wouldn’t work right until I used the Network Manager app to change the IPv6 settings and change them back again. Also, from what I found DHCPv6 options-only wouldn’t work natively. I ended up having to install Dibbler to add that functionality. (side note, Dibbler is also available for WindowsXP, although I have not tested it).
At this point I have a working IPv6 Ubuntu desktop, although I haven’t had much chance to really test it out with IPv6 sites. Hopefully I’ll have time to continue with that tomorrow. The next test will be to install a customer router and test out prefix-delegation.
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I haven’t posted anything in awhile, so I thought I’d say something about IPv6. We’ve been holding off on any real IPv6 planning because we’ve been waiting for our upstream providers to be able to offer native v6. We have our ARIN allocation, but there hasn’t been much we could do with it until now. [...]
I’ve been working on a web application lately involving a single server and multiple clients, where all the printing needs to happen at the server rather than at the clients. Usually I’d be using Linux for the main server, which makes things like this easy because of all the free command-line tools to generate and [...]
In my last post I mentioned that I was getting ready to implement Signature Pad. Like pretty much every jQuery plugin I try to use, the documentation and examples are never quite exactly what I need. Usually this leads to frustration and eventually a decision to roll my own solution rather than trying to figure [...]
I’ve been working on a little project lately that will require users to be able to sign their name on a touchscreen, and then have the digitized signature stored in a database for later recovery. I’ve not had a chance to try it yet, but it looks like Signature Pad should do the trick. It’s [...]
I’m thinking pretty seriously that it may be time to drop my Twitter account. I came to Twitter late in the game, when many people were already using it. It took me a long time to sign up, mainly because I just didn’t see any purpose in it. So many people just seemed to be [...]