The Cute side of the Force

Silke and I wanted to have a dog for a long time. But in the past we never felt that we could offer a dog a good home. Things have however changed in the meantime. Silke is currently not working and we live in our own house with a decently sized garden. After some consideration we decided to get a Cocker Spaniel. They are friendly and beautiful dogs of a manageable size. Silke found a breeder not too far away online and we set off last Sunday to look at her Cocker Spaniel puppies.

When we finally arrived at the breeder’s home (the flooded A1101 forced us to take a detour) Silke selected a timid black dog from a pack of lively little dogs. He was a bit frightened at first but relaxed after a few minutes of stroking. As he was a delightful puppy we decided to take him home with us. We named him Vader because he is black and we are geeks. 🙂

And the Cute side of the Force is definitely strong with this one.

His favourite place is the bed that we got for him.

He spends a lot of time in there mostly to take one of his naps. When he is awake he really loves to play in the garden:

Vader likes to sniff everywhere, to chew on everything and to dig up all the unpleasant things that the cats from the neighbourhood buried in our garden. And with a bit of bribery (dog treats for puppies) we are even making progress in house-training him.

Although Silke and I get less sleep (but more fresh air) than we would like we are very happy with our little dog. Vader is a real enrichment of our lives.

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YouTube via IPv6

Google recently enabled IPv6 support for their popular video portal YouTube. This resulted in a significant increase of IPv6 traffic on the Internet. The amount of IPv6 traffic running through the DE-CIX e.g. grew roughly by a factor of four.

This is a big step in the right direction in my opinion. Finally a lot of popular content is made available to end users via IPv6. Thanks a lot Google!

I only wish they would admit more Internet Service Providers to the Google over IPv6 project. My ISP AAISP still cannot get access although they are among the few which offer native IPv6 connectivity to their customers. 🙁

Posted in IPv6 | 1 Comment

Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.

A few month ago I discovered that Cisco broke IPv6 support in the IOS (Cisco’s operating system) that is running on my Cisco 877W router. This was quite annoying as IPv6 support was the only reason that I bought such an expensive router in the first place.

As my support contract doesn’t allow me to submit bug reports I had to open a service request. It took Cisco’s support organisation four weeks to reproduce the problem and another two month to submit a bug report. I wasn’t too impressed by these delays especially as I didn’t get any status updates for extended periods of time. When the bug had finally been reported to their engineering department I got an experimental firmware build with working IPv6 support within two weeks.

Considering that Cisco is a huge company I should probably be happy that they fixed the problem within three month. But I guess I’m still annoyed that they didn’t find such a fundamental problem before they released the software. A ping, one ping only, would have been enough.

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