I have been chosen!

Debian Squeeze has been released, so have a picture of Squeeze:

IPv6

This weekend I set up an IPv6 tunnel for my home network (using tunnelbroker.net). The only real difficulties were (i) automatic configuration does not happen on hosts with IP forwarding enabled, and this applies to IPv4 forwarding as well as IPv6 forwarding (ii) automatic configuration and Linux's ethernet bridging don't seem to play very together very reliably.

Having IPv6 of course means that programs might actually use it, and sometimes this can be inconvenient. /etc/gai.conf lets you re-order hostname lookup results but this doesn't seem to be enough to actually stop the IPv6 address being used. Therefore I wrote a little LD_PRELOAD-based utility to completely suppress IPv6 addresses in getaddrinfo() results:

$ telnet ftp.uk.debian.org 80
Trying 2001:470:1f08:80b::2...
Connected to debian.hands.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]q

telnet> q
Connection closed.
$ noipv6 telnet ftp.uk.debian.org 80
Trying 83.142.228.128...
Connected to ftp.uk.debian.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]q

telnet> q
Connection closed.
$ 

Programs that use other APIs to look up hostnames won't be affected.

It includes a noipv4 program as well.

Get it here. Currently only works on Linux but shouldn't be hard to adapt to other Unix platforms.