Right, I think I've now done the magic to OpenID enable comments. Thanks to Slarti for the basis of the Blosxom support to do this. If you've got a Livejournal you already have an OpenID and if not then you can just a service like that provided by ImperialViolet, which is what I'm doing at present until I find time to knock a server up for earth.li.

This post is mainly for Chris, but also because it too me slightly longer than expected to remember the exact link to The Fear. I have a copy of the Preacher cartoon stuck beside my computer.

Rar. I've finally got the Netgear happier. I grabbed an OpenWRT 2.4.30 kernel and hacked that into my OpenEmbedded image. That stopped the init panic messages. I've also done some work on faking up a /etc based on the values from nvram - this should hopefully mean I have persistent data over reboots as well as meaning you can upgrade from a stock Netgear DG834G image and keep your settings. I think I'm going to have to write a very basic bit of C to crypt the password though, as there doesn't seem to be any existing tiny utility in OE that'll do so.

Anyway. This post is done from my desktop sshed to the Netgear which is connected to the ADSL and doing IPv6, and I'm then sshed from there to the via IPv6 (I could have setup the routing so I just sshed directly from my desktop through the Netgear, but this was quicker). Yay! That proves the ethernet, ADSL and IPv6 works. Haven't tried the wireless yet.

I think I'm at the stage where I need to pull the OpenWRT kernel into the OE framework so I can build it all easily, and then I'll commit it and be able to provide an image in case anyone else is actually interested in this warbling. :)

I finally found some time to devote to hacking on the DG834G. Given that it seems the bootloader checksums almost the entire flash on each boot a writeable flash file system doesn't seem to be an easy option. This rules out vanilla OpenWRT unfortunately, which is a shame given the AR7Port. However as I'm familiar with OpenEmbedded (which seems to be non working at present, but is behind OpenZaurus which I run on my C3000) I decided to have a look at getting that going. So now I have an image that boots, creates a ramfs for /, pivotroots the flash round to /media/realroot, creates a bunch of symlinks and should give me a basic filesystem to play with.

Except it's not very happy, producing INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation! sleeping for 30 seconds. messages. Booting to just /bin/sh works fine, but various things won't run. I'm currently blaming this on the fact I haven't changed the default Netgear kernel from 2.4.17, so the next course of action is probably to use an OpenWRT based kernel and see how that goes.

Dear World,

ping is a very useful command. It lets me see if a host is up. If you block ICMP ECHO/REPLY then I instead have to play the "Guess what service might be listening" game. Or I assume your machine is down and might worry (because I care). So please don't do it. I really don't see what you're trying to gain; it strikes me as firewalling without actually thinking about it. Are you by chance ignoring things like destination unreachable as well? And breaking PMTU discovery? Well done you.