Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
07 2008
The Kilmurry Lodge Hotel in Limerick is playing host to well over 100 mapping enthusiasts this weekend, for an in depth view of the Open Streetmap project. Thanks to a persuasive Steve Coast, and trojan work by one Christian van den Bosch, the second international State of the Map conference was brought to Ireland; and thanks to the generous loan of equipment and expertise from HEAnet, the Irish NREN, we have the technology to make video recordings of the presentations.
It's been fantastically interesting thus far. I brought a car full (literally, including the entire back seat and some of the passenger seat) of cabling, adaptors, microphones and gaffer tape. I've used most of what I brought :)
We've been a victim of our own success, for the first time running out of IP space in the /16 allocated to wireless networking. I'm now regretting only bringing a single wireless access point, though dropping the lease time for the addresses appears to have helped. I was also marginally surprised at how many of the devices in the DHCP table were obviously iPod / iPhone type devices. It would appear that the average Open Streetmap contributor is slpa bang in the middle of the Apple target market :)
I'll post up links to the talks as soon as they're available.
Edit: Of course, I meant that a /24 was allocated to the wireless access point. I've never managed to make OpenWRT handle anything over a /24's worth of addresses. Apologies for implying that we had upwards of 64,000 devices on our conference network: my guess is it was more like ~300.
posted at: 15:23 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
After yesterday's worldwide BIND DNS update, I noticed that on Ubuntu systems, at least, the package maintainer provides a db.root with IPv4 addresses only, for the root zone DNS servers. If you want IPv6 connectivity to the root nameservers (or at least the ones that have IPv6 connectivity available) you can update your root zone to the latest definitive one available with the following command:
dig +bufsize=1200 +norec NS . @198.41.0.4 > /etc/bind/db.root
Note that your DNS root hints file, db.root, will now have AAAA records detailing the IPv6 addresses for those root servers that support them.
posted at: 12:16 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
An international team of citizen cartographers is preparing to descend on Limerick, Ireland, in what has been called a 'mapping revolution.'
Open Streetmap.org's second annual gathering will take place in the Kilmurry Lodge Hotel on the 12th and 13th July. The project groups over 40,000 volunteers who - armed with GPS receivers, bikes and notebooks - are surveying the streets, footpaths, peaks and rivers of the world. Anyone can contribute and anyone can use the resulting map.
Often compared to Wikipedia, Open Streetmap differs from traditional internet maps in its depth of coverage (others are restricted to just streets) and its open philosophy.
Anyone can download the Open Streetmap data and make their own map from it - one popular example being a unique webmap of worldwide cycle routes, where bike-friendly roads are emphasised and motorways toned down. By contrast, other maps are covered by restrictive copyright rules, such as those produced by Ordnance Survey of Ireland or by Google.
Registration for the conference is open, with further information available from www.stateofthemap.org or www.openstreetmap.org.
posted at: 15:15 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Since upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) I've noticed that Firefox on my laptop drops into 'Work Offline' mode every time I suspend and resume my laptop or change connectivity type. While offline mode is indeed useful, I'd much rather I had to manually select this mode, rather than have the hassle of having to repeatedly tell Firefox it's online. I use a combination of wired, wireless (802.11b/g/n) and 3G connectivity throughout my average day, so perhaps this affects me more than it would others.
It appears that Firefox 3 on Ubuntu queries Network Manager to see if it's online or offline, and sets its status according to this. A neat feature, but it appears to only indicate an offline state, forgetting to turn it back online again afterwards. The internet suggests that this might be due to a bug though it seems there's some debate as to whether it's a Network Manager bug or a Firefox bug.
In order to fix this, I specifically disallowed Firefox from conversing with Network Manager (over dbus), with the net result that Firefox always chooses it's default mode of being online.
Edit the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf file and replace each instance of
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
with
<deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
You will have to restart dbus for this to take effect, and I noticed some slight strange effects until I rebooted. Firefox now appears to be firmly convinced it's always online, which was the aim; and probably not far from the truth on my laptop. Note that other applications that query Network Manager in a similar fashion, such as Pidgin will also assume they are online all the time, since they are also denied access to query Network Manager.
Thanks to Nikitas350 for his helpful post detailing this solution.
posted at: 10:39 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
