IPv6 tunnel
Some of the time spent last week was to prepare for the IETF meeting in Berlin. I explained previously that I use a secure IPv6 connection to my mail server to send and retrieve emails, which creates its own set of issues when travelling. If on one hand the IETF provides a great IPv6 network on site, there is very little hope to find something similar on the various places one has to stay on his way to and from this event. E.g. hotels and airports generally are not IPv6 enabled, so a tunnel solution is required. I had a very good experience with Hurricane Electric before Comcast went IPv6 native, but their technology does not help much when the laptop is behind a NAT that cannot be controlled. So in this case I use the service provided by gogo6 (aka freenet6). I use their gogoCPE behind my AT&T NAT and their software client on my laptop, at least since last week when I finally found the solution to the problem I had configuring it. Probably because I was using a WiFi connection instead on the wired connection, the gogoc daemon got stuck until I ran the following command and answered the prompt:
sudo /usr/sbin/gogoc -n -s wlan0
Backup restoration
A full backup is obviously useful when something terribly wrong happen to your disk (in the 90’s I lost a disk full of code, and as I define stupidity as doing the same mistake twice, I am very careful since to always have multiple levels of protection for my code), but having it helps also in the day to day tasks, like for example when some code modification went into a wrong direction so restoring the previous day backup saves multiple hours of work.
Another benefit I discovered some time ago is to prepare my laptop before a travel. I like to carry my whole email and development history with me, so that’s a lot of data to copy from one computer to another. Initially I created a giant tarball on a flash drive, and then uncompressed it on the target computer, but that took forever. Now I just reuse my backup. On the day before I leave, I restore on my laptop the directories I need directly from the last full backup (i.e. from the last Sunday). The improvement I made last week is that I then change the configuration of my mailer so the emails are no longer deleted from my mail server. Then during the night, the incremental backup saves my new emails and the new configuration and it takes then less than 5 minutes before leaving for the airport the next day to restore the incremental backup, and with the guaranty that during my trip all my emails will stay on the server for when I am back to my office. That means less wasted time, and less stress.