dogcow

> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.

I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.

FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.

That's not really sufficient. It could still phone home if it falls back to IP addresses. You should be blocking it at the firewall level, not just with DNS.

But me personally, I wouldn't ever connect any of these devices to my network.

As a long time FreeBSD user, the Foundation has really failed to impress me in recent years. I lost faith in them back in 2018 during the "code of conduct" fiasco, when they wasted Foundation funds on a consultant for a code of conduct that nobody really asked for. Haven't donated since -- instead I redirected my donations to the OpenBSD project, which while less practical in many scenarios, is a technically superior product in my eyes.

That said, I am glad to see them focusing their efforts on something useful, like laptop compatibility. Regardless, this is a really dumb post. 10 minutes a day is not "daily driving."

Yes, same here. Very frustrating. It is almost as if the powers that be don't want lowly netizens controlling their own destiny.

Or, more likely, we're seeing the result of a generation growing up glued to cell phone screens and crappy social media every waking moment from their youngest years?

Luckily, this can all be achieved using a Wi-Fi or (even better) a Z-Wave thermostat that is 100% locally-controlled using something like Home Assistant or any number of other solutions.

This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).

There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.

As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.

Not really true on modern digital radio systems. They are AES-256, but the voice frames are encrypted right after the vocoder does its thing, then the voice data is dropped into the stream just as if it were clear voice. It's all wrapped in the same same digital protocol (like P25 or numerous others), so the signal is very distinct in that encrypted and clear communications both sound the same to someone listening to the raw audio.

Pre-shared, static keys are unfortunately quite common. However, the P25 standard does provide for re-keying over they air through a process known as OTAR (Over The Air Re-keying).

To put it very simply, radios communicate with a central Key Management Facility (KMF) using a special key (UKEK, Unique Key Encryption Key) to securely transport the new key material. There's more to it than that, of course, but these features are heavily used by the feds and also by larger state and local systems -- because manually re-keying each radio is a huge pain.

Yeah, I know about the workarounds, but that just kind of defeats the purpose for me. Also, I've read comments from folks stating they were having a hard time getting a larger prefix from Comcast using PD... don't know how universally true that is.

Using DNS to resolve everything solves part of the problem, but firewall rules are another issue. The router would need to have the capability to update everything dynamically when the prefix changes. I think this in the works for pfSense, but I'm not sure if its actually supported yet. It looks like you might have to mess around with some 3rd-party script to make it work.

I guess I'm just generally disappointed that the whole process seems unnecessarily messy. I don't have a v6-compatible ISP right now anyway. I was thinking about trying a tunnel, but I'm not seeing the benefit in it right now.

Thanks, I appreciate your explanation. I was aware that there are workarounds, but to me that defeats one of the core tenants of IPv6, which is that we're supposed to be doing away with this NAT and NAT-like nonsense by giving everything a globally rotatable IP.

When I was reading up on everything, I also learned that your router can request a bigger prefix, but I ran across several posts from various folks stating they could only get a /64 from Comcast no matter what they tried, so I'm not sure how universally supported DHCPv6-PD requests are.

Please offer a good TrackPoint keyboard. Please.

I recently decided that it was high time to stop ignoring IPv6 after 30 years of computing and actually learn how it is supposed to work.

So I started digging in, and there's definitely a lot to like.

But I see two big problems that are showstoppers in my opinion, at least for my home network (not even considering the fact that very few residential ISPs even support v6 at this point):

1. Generally speaking, the IPs of your LAN are based on the prefix assigned by the ISP. Most residential ISPs don't offer static prefixes. This means that every time your prefix changes, the IPs of all your devices on your LAN change. Seems like this "feature" was developed in a more idealistic era when people probably thought everyone would be getting static IPv6 addresses, since shortages would never be an issue. Unfortuantely, they failed to foresee the fact that most major ISPs are terrible, greedy organizations that either outright refuse to offer static assignments, or continue treating them as if they were scarce IPv4 resources, charging a premium or requiring business-class service to even get them.

2. The ISPs that do support v6, like Comcast/Xfinity in the USA, are only allocating one /64 prefix. This means you can only have one subnet (VLAN) on your LAN! Why are they being so stingy?

I would love to migrate to IPv6, but these two issues alone make it feel like a clown show for home users.