Un mese fa, ho finalmente messo da parte il rame per la mia connessione a Internet per passare alla fibra ottica.

Come ad ogni passaggio, certe cose cambiano, altre rimangono le stesse.

La configurazione, grosso modo, è rimasta invariata. Fin dai tempi dell’ADSL Alice, TIM richiede l’uso del protocollo PPPoE, senza validare però username e password. Quelli che erano VPI 8 e VCI 35, sono diventati l’id VLAN 835 per FTTC e FTTH.

E proprio questo uso di VLAN rende un po’ più difficile la configurazione delle connessioni TIM.

Dopo la morte del mio secondo TD-W8970, ero passato ad un router generico con un modem in bridge connesso alla porta WAN. La VLAN veniva gestita dal modem, un Technicolor TG789vac v2 con firmware di iiNet.

Invece, con l’ONT fornitomi da TIM, un Sercomm FG1000R, la VLAN deve essere impostata nel router.

OpenWrt

Sul mio Cudy WR2100 mi è bastato modificare /etc/config/network in questo modo: … [Leggi il resto]

Nelle puntate precedenti…

8 mesi fa ho scritto come Fibercop stia realizzando una rete in fibra ottica usando gli stessi punti di riferimento della rete in rame di Tim. Stanno installando nelle strade degli “armadi riparti linea ottici” vicino agli “armadi riparti linea” esistenti. Da essi partono diversi cavi in fibra verso i vari “PTE” (punto terminazione edificio) posti in corrispondenza delle chiostrine del rame.

Io abito in una via circondata dai campi e la rete telefonica è stata realizzata in maggior parte in via aerea. Nella via ci sono 4 chiostrine, 3 facenti riferimento all’armadio 7 e una invece collegata ad un altro armadio. Del primo gruppo, le prime due sono state raggiunte dagli scavi il 9 febbraio e, verso fine marzo, sono state installate anche le scatole per i collegamenti della fibra. In corrispondenza della terza chiostrina, l’ultima di quel ramo di rete, non è stato fatto niente… e quella è proprio la chiostrina a cui io sono collegato.

Mentre aspettavo di vedere novità, mi sono iscritto al servizio di Fibercop per ricevere una email su quando la copertura risulti completa. … [Leggi il resto]

Once upon a time, the Tor Browser Bundle was an actual bundle. It included Firefox, the Tor daemon, and Torbutton, the extension to turn on and off the Tor mode in the browser.

This toggle model was not great and extremely confusing to some users. This and other problems led to the creation of Tor Browser: this article contains more details about this story.

From a technical point of view, Torbutton did not really go away. The visible button disappeared, but much of the related code remained.

Part of the state isolation code was not necessary anymore because Tor Browser always runs in private browsing mode or was dropped over the years thanks to Firefox improvements and the Tor Uplift initiative. However, the circuit display, the first-party domain circuit isolation, and other parts of the existing code were still needed. As a result, Torbutton continued to live for many years as a Tor Browser-only built-in extension on its separate repository and included in the browser with git submodules (even though the browser was non-functional without it). New patches and functionalities were written in the Firefox code that constitutes Tor Browser, and the Torbutton code was changed only to fix existing bugs or to keep it working in new versions of Firefox. … [Leggi il resto]

Motivation

A few years ago, I bought an Orange Pi Zero to run a Telegram bot I use to open and close my garage door.

It worked very well for several years. Then, when Debian bookworm became stable, I decided to reinstall the system, and the trouble began.

After more than one month of frequent crashes, I first tried to upgrade the kernel. However, apt was unusable, and the system reinstallation was my only choice. So, I decided to also check other distributions out.

First, I tried with OpenWrt. It was a good setup, except I could not use GPIO through /dev/mem. This was a big problem because memory-GPIO is more versatile and performant.

So, I decided to also try Alpine Linux. Before this adventure, I had used this distribution only for containers, but I felt this could also be a case in which it can shine. But the effort it took me to get it working as I wanted reminded me of the old days 😅️. It also made me appreciate how easy setting up Debian is these days. … [Leggi il resto]

A couple of months ago, Debian bookworm became stable and I decided to upgrade my Orange Pi Zero. I wanted to re-install the system with the smallest amount of physical access and that made the whole process tiresome and longer.

The new system did not work well. It often crashed, and I continuously had to reset the system by power cycling it. As stated in my previous article, physical access to that system is not easy, which made the problem even less bearable.

After one of the crashes, I managed to get some logs, and I saw they mentioned a “kernel bug”. However, I believe high temperatures were to blame, as July was very hot here. Anyway, I had a little hope that installing a more recent kernel could solve my problem, so I tried to run apt upgrade, which gave me this output:

Preparing to unpack .../base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking base-files (12.4+deb12u1) over (12.4) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb (--unpack):
 unable to stat '.' (which was about to be installed): Value too large for defined data type
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_12.4+deb12u1_armhf.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I do not have a minimal clue about what this means. It might be related to the Orange Pi being 32-bit and me having created its system from a 64-bit system. But the error is so generic that I struggled to find its cause. … [Leggi il resto]