Torfinn Nome - Life as a …

Rune started playing with Trixbox this week. Even got himself mexican and US based DIDs! So. As I’ve been planning on setting up an Asterisk SIP telephone server ever since I was inspired by Øystein Homelien when I worked for him at PowerTech sometime last century; Rune is to blame that I spent the last two days on doing exactly that. I signed up with a norwegian SIP provider, Phonzo, and got a nice deal on a Siemens Gigaset C450 IP DECT+SIP phone. And it works pretty well, it even has STUN support.
But. Why didn’t I know about ENUM before now?! I fell in love. Instantly. I enabled ENUM support on my Trixbox server, using Sipbroker, and registered my PSTN/GSM numbers at e164.org. Now, if only people could stop using that horrible Skype service (I refuse to link them), and start using services like Free World Dialup and Gizmo, and register the number in the ENUM database, we would all be able to call the the whole world for free. Regular telephone companies must be scared to death. No wonder the iPhone doesn’t have a SIP client - I bet Apple wants it, but I bet even more that AT&T refuses to accept it…
So. All of you: Get rid of Skype. Get a SIP (soft)phone. Get a free number. Register (ENUM) your current phone number. Make it point to your Internet SIP phone. Tell your friends.

Hm! As if I ever want to call people… (I still prefer e-mail for most communications. Good thing I registered my e-mail address with my ENUM entry!)

I recently bought an Apple Airport Extreme N. Mostly to get a more or less decent NAS. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it supports IPv6 out of the box; both automagical 6to4 and manual sit-type configured tunnels. As my trusty old IPv6-ISP PowerTech seems to have, temporarily (?), stopped caring about IPv6 (tunnel up, upstream IPv6 links down), I had to find an alternative tunnel broker. I ended up with SixXS. Got me a tunnel and a /48 net with reverse DNS to a low latency POP in Sweden. The tunnel terminates at a linux server (hosting this web page), from which I have delegated a /64 net to my Airport via a static sit tunnel. It’s working great, and all my hosting services are now multihomed. Not as great as if my physical upstream ISP (Lyse) would provide native IPv6, of course, but still. Now, if only you could nag your ISP to provide IPv6, maybe we could all finally get rid of that nasty NAT! (Oh, wait, that’s right, Apple was forced to firewall all IPv6 traffic by default after massive negative publicity. And there is no IPv6 NAT-PMP/uPNP yet. Here is an interesting read on the topic: Turning a feature into a flaw.)