It's been a busy week for me. I've spent a lot of time trying to get things to work on my home network, and also a lot of time doing some after-hours projects at work.
One such project was making a scary but seemingly good leap of faith. I finally put Pop OS on my daily driver laptop, and it's doing pretty well. It's honestly a little fun in some ways to try and accomplish all the things I was able to do with my Windows machine, and it's enjoyable just how customizable of an experience it is.
One less fun project this week entailed me re-configuring my entire home network infrastructure. You see, my brother got a couple of UniFi access points, and was anxious to install them, but soon realized routing was going to be a problem. Seeing his state of things, I told him he could just have my simple router and I'd get a new one for myself. I then made the realization that practically everything on UniFi's website is out of stock, and found myself in a bind. But I wasn't about to be defeated that easily. I had been preparing, you see. I had built a pfsense router on a virtual machine on my server. And now, everything was configured and ready to be implemented- or so I presumed. I finally gathered up my courage, and put it to the test. Things were fairly weird at the start, as I was able to access the internet on that server- but only some internet. For some time, I was struggling, trying to figure out where my gap in logic was found. Then, I did a check to see if my public IP had changed, and that's when the wall grew taller, as I saw the format of my public IP had somehow, mysteriously changed from an IPv4 address to IPv6.
For those unaware of the difference between the IPv's, basically IPv4 is the older version of "addresses" (mathematically, there are 3,706,452,992 possible public addresses), and IPv6 is the newer standard (it's been around since the late 90's, but it's still gaining popularity) and allows 40,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. And no, I didn't bother trying to reason out that number, it's just too dang big. But they work a little differently from each other, and use a different number base altogether; IPv4 uses binary (zeros and ones) and IPv6 uses hexidecimal (base 16).
Anyways, I will be the first to admit, even after having gone to college and getting my degree in Network Management Technology, I still look at IPv6 with a look of uncertainty and fear. So, when I saw that address, I kind of maybe gave up in that moment and decided the effort of undertaking this change was perhaps of less value than I originally anticipated. I followed the advice of the age-old maxim and "Ran away and lived to fight another day". But rest assured there will be more to follow on the resolution to this obviously must-read story.
I also helped route some wiring at my brother's house. As he had these access points, he was trying to decide the best placement to mount one on the top floor. As we were deciding where to plug it in, we thought we had both remembered there being cables running through the attic for easy access. I climbed up into the rafters, searched amidst the fiberglass, but found no Ethernet. consequently, we had to make a separate drop for this new AP. I had been in the attic of this, my old house, many times, but in a different portion. In this part of the attic, it was a little smaller, but not too bad. Then things got more fun. The drop point was going to lead the wire from the very attic of the house all the way to the furnace room in the basement; but to get to the presumed drop point, one (in this case, I) would have to carefully climb across the rafters in this portion of the attic, and then, with little to support oneself belly-down through a hole about three square feet into a dark and narrow portion of the attic where there was a place I had made a similar wire drop some years ago. And then I would have to hope the wire dropped elegantly enough and fish it through a narrow hole in the ceiling of an inconvenient room. With the odds ever against my favor, I put on my favorite tarnished jumpsuit and climbed through the fiberglass into that dark hole in the attic. Before having to go very far into the hole, I then saw a blessed more easy solution to the drop I was thinking of- a straight, vertical duct that led exactly to where I wanted to guide the wire. And like that, it was done... except for the part where I had some RJ45 jacks that were garbage and didn't work, but hey.
And that was only some of the fun this week. So, if there's anything to be learned from this week, it's to bravely face dark, narrow passages with boldness and resolve, but run far, far away from IPv6... I guess. Valuable... life.... lessons? Well, this upcoming week should continue to be fun, as I attempt to setup a nextcloud server and possibly try to get my guest network working right. Until then, finish out your no-(whatever weird commitment you took upon yourself)-November with honor. Or don't. It's a free country, you do what you want, I guess. See ya!