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On Sat, 21 Jan 2012, Kai Hendry wrote:
I want my laptop to be always routable, whatever network it's on. Starbucks, home or office.
The more reliable way to achieve that is to use a VPN with the endpoint at a known location - e.g. a virtual (or real!) server, preferably hosted in a data centre somewhere. There is plenty of choice there with prices ranging from very cheap to ... well, lots.
Even an Amazon EC2 instance will do this for you.
miredo is packaged in Archlinux, but I'm not sure how to use it. I'm in Malaysia and I don't want to bridge to my Bitfolk VPS in the UK (IIUC), because that will be painfully slow surely.
Miredo is just an IPv6 tunnel. Not sure why it's needed as there is a tunnel built in to Linux (SIT) You still need a "host" who'll support it for you. If you want to use IPv6 and your ISP doesn't support it then you might as well use http://tunnelbroker.net/ and Linuxes built-in SIT network driver.
However having your Laptop globally addressable via IPv6, while "cute", won't allow joe-random user to access it as they'll probably not have IPv6 yet...
Additionally, like IPv4, IPv6 addresses are tied to the ISP - there is no concept of end-users being able to plug into an ISP and say "this is my IPv6 address, route it to me please". It's technocally fesable, but ISPs aren't interested for a variety of reasons.
So back to Plan A - VPN into a host...
I thought of the use case I want to solve. I write Web applications for Android. I want to demo them whilst they run on my laptop using an Apache config like so: VirtualDocumentRoot /srv/www/%0
Why not demo your web applications on a hosted server? (which will have a static IP address, both IPv4 and IPv6 if it's a half decent place) Then any android user can access it via whatever Internet connection they have. All you need is a reliable way to get files to/from it and that's not hard as it's no different from any other hosts - ftp/sftp/ftps/scp/rsync, etc.
So I want to setup an arbitrary sub domain name, mycooldemo.dabase.com and /srv/www/mycooldemo.dabase.com serves the content from my laptop.
To me, that's just asking for trouble - even if you can VPN to a remote host to give yourself a static IP, then you might end up "battling" with the local internet conneciton (not everyone allows VPNs!), lag/latency if you're geographically distant from the remote server, etc.
And on my Android phone I don't have to setup any special DNS and I'm able to connect to my laptop. I don't necessarily want to connect over WLAN since I might want to test it over 3G.
-Still dreaming :)
Sure - dreaming is good, but moving to a hosted platform sill solve most of your issues almost right away - especially if you have full control over your DNS to add subdomains, etc. Most hosts will provide control panels to help you setup the domains, FTP details, etc. (e.g. CPanel, Plesk, Webmin, etc.) which makes it all quite easy.
If you're demoing application which you hope to sell, then a tenner a month for a cheap VPS to host your apps on might well be worth it.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq