This week the router I have been using on the end of my own broadband connection (Fibre Broadband from UKFSN!) died but that was not a disaster as I had been planning to replace it and so already had it’s replacement on hand. The replacement is a Routerbox 750 from Mikrotik which I bought from Linitx.com

Setting it up was very easy. All I had to do was to configure the PPPoE client in the PPP section. Initially IPv6 didn’t seem to work so I checked and there is a firmware update available to version 5.12. That was easily applied – just FTP the files to the router and then reboot it.

Once I did that I added the IPv6 addresses to the router’s configuration which had to be done manually as the DHCPv6 client did not register the assignment however it’s trivially easy to do – I just set the link /64 on the PPPoE interface and added the /56 allocation to the internal network. Then when I restarted networking on my PC it picked up a /64 and routing just worked.

For just £32 these Mikrotik Routerbox 750 routers are fantastic although they do have far more features than I will ever use!

BARNET
CATFORD
HULME HALL
MITCHAM
OLDHAM
PORTSMOUTH
STAMFORD HILL

If you know anyone living in these areas and you like them point them to us. We’ll arrange the installation, including the BT engineer visit and supply of the Fibre broadband modem at no charge.

“MBORC declaration: This MBORC declaration for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Cumbria is issued as a special alert to all BT Wholesale Customers/Communications Providers.

Following the recent severe weather in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Cumbria, we have today carefully reviewed the impacts on our operations and network. Most of our operations are back to normal, but may be affected by any further severe weather.

However, the BT network has been affected. Some parts of our overhead network were damaged in the storm. We are doing all we can to make the repairs, but we will need time to complete all the work. Our fault stacks in the affected areas are rising as we receive fault reports.

We are therefore declaring this as a Matter Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) incident with effect from 14.00 today, Friday 9 December 2011.

This declaration will apply to all faults caused by the exceptionally severe weather on Thursday 8 December 2011 across Scotland, Northern Ireland and in Cumbria. It won’t apply to other faults and it won’t apply to provision jobs. The affected areas are:

Highlands & Islands
North East Scotland
Tayside & Fife
South East Scotland
West Central Scotland
South West Scotland
Cumbria
Northern Ireland

We are implementing contingency plans to bring in additional resources so we can recover service as quickly as possible.”

Not good at all.

UKFSN will not offer this TLD. The reason we wont is very simple – the .XXX business model is essentially a form of extortion.

Whether you believe that porn is iniquitous or not extortion certainly is so I have decided UKFSN wont have anything to do with it.

As it’s a new company there isn’t a whole lot of software out there to integrate with their service. They do publish a client library to interface with their API but it’s in Ruby and I don’t do that so I have begun writing a client library in perl.

The UKFSN github repository shows the work in progress.

Google didn’t provide a quick answer on how to do this however Class::DBI does provide a way to do this. It’s called set_sql and it allows one to declare a custom method on an object which can run any SQL statement. Using this is a 2 stage process – declare the new method and then execute it. The easiest way to show this is with an example:

MyDB->set_sql(“NextMonth”, << ”);
UPDATE __TABLE__
set field = DATE_ADD(field, INTERVAL 1 MONTH)
WHERE __IDENTIFIER__

my $obj = MyDB->retrieve($id);
$obj->sql_NextMonth()->execute($obj->id);

In the example above the set_sql statement creates a new method called sql_NextMonth which simply updates the field called “field” to increment the date by one month. Obviously it’s expected that “field” will be a date or datetime data type.

This method is then executed by calling sql_NextMonth()->execute($id) where $id is the record identifier.