yoursunny blog
computer, Internet, and life

yoursunny.com is Served by Caddy

Junxiao Shi

The last rebuild of yoursunny.com was in Spring 2017, when I moved the whole website into git repositories. It's been more than 3 years, and I think I should share an update on a few changes in the stack that serves this website.

History of HTTP Servers Behind yoursunny.com

Since 2011, my HTTP server of choice was lighttpd. Then, I have PHP running in FastCGI mode to serve the dynamic pages. It works, but I don't really like the lighttpd's script-like configuration structure. Moreover, there were suspected memory leaks in my setup, so that I had to use a cron job to restart the HTTP server weekly.

I keep hearing good words about nginx, as well as the benefits of running PHP in FPM mode. In 2013, I made the switch to nginx and PHP-FPM. The declarative configuration of nginx is easy to understand and makes sense to me.

HTTPS came to yoursunny.com at the end of 2015. Like many other websites, the TLS certificates were issued by Let's Encrypt, and requested through certbot command line client. One problem is that, my VPS at the time had only 64MB memory, and certbot would not work in such a small amount of memory. I had to request the TLS certificate on my laptop, and then upload it to the VPS.

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Is ESP32 Big Endian or Little Endian?

Junxiao Shi

I'm programming network protocols on the Espressif ESP32 microcontroller, and I want to know: is ESP32 big endian or little endian? Unfortunately, search results have only videos and forum posts and PDF; the answer, if present, is buried deep in pages and pages of discussions and irrelevant content. So I quickly wrote a little program to determine the endianness of ESP32.

The Straight Answer: ESP32 is Little Endian

I have determined that: the Tensilica Xtensa LX6 microprocessor in ESP32 is little endian.

ESP32 is little endian. Many other processors are little endian, too:

  • Intel and AMD x86 and x86_64 processors are little endian.
  • Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black are little endian, although the underlying ARM processor may operate as big endian.
  • ESP8266 is little endian. It has Tensilica Xtensa L106 microprocessor, similar to the ESP32
  • nRF52 series is little endian. This includes the Adafruit Bluefruit nRF52832.
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Self-Hosted NDNts Nightly Build

Junxiao Shi
last updated

NDNts nightly build is a set of NPM-compatible tarballs compiled automatically from the development branch of NDNts, Named Data Networking (NDN) libraries for the modern web, distributed on https://ndnts-nightly.ndn.today website. Users can install NDNts nightly build following these instructions.

However, this website only stores the latest version of NDNts packages. This has been causing installation conflicts when NPM tries to look for previous versions. Moreover, as I have declared, I don't care much about backwards compatibility. With NPM, all published versions are stored indefinitely, so you can continue using an older version without being affected by breaking changes. On the other hand, once a new nightly build is uploaded, the previous version is overwritten and no longer available for downloads. You are then forced to cope with the breaking changes I introduce from time to time, possibly at higher frequency than you would like to.

Today, I'm introducing two methods for self-hosting NDNts nightly build. Both methods allow you to build a specific version of NDNts codebase from a checkout of the NDNts monorepo, and generate a set of tarballs that you can host locally on a server under your control. Afterwards, you can install NDNts packages from this server, without relying on my website and without being affected by my breaking changes.

Self-Hosted NDNts on an HTTP Server

This section was latest updated on 2024-03-06 to reflect latest changes.

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Geocaching in 2020

Junxiao Shi

I started geocaching in 2013 when I lived in Tucson, Arizona. I moved to Montgomery County, Maryland in late 2017, and became a Premium Member on Geocaching.com at the beginning of 2018 so that I can find thousands of Premium-only caches around here.

The Normal Months

Since 2019, I hooked up with Georick402, Maryland's top hider, to go geocaching together on weekends. I have no transportation, and he has no brain, so I solve the mystery caches, and he drives me to them; it's a win-win partnership. This relationship, of course, continued into 2020.

2020-01-26 yoursunny and Georick402 at GC2HT7Q

In January and February, we went out together almost every weekend. We completed a few high-difficulty Multi caches such as the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Challenge, found Virginia's top-rated Letterbox hybrid Roo's Runaway, took the Historic White's Ferry, and attended Leap Day event(s) on February 29.

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How to Host a Website in Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Junxiao Shi
last updated

Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation. Oracle Cloud has a generous free tier that offers two "always free" Micro instances with the following specification:

  • KVM virtualization
  • 1/8 CPU cores (AMD EPYC 7551)
  • 1GB memory
  • 47GB disk storage
  • 1 IPv4 address
  • up to 32 IPv6 addresses
  • 50Mbps Internet bandwidth

I signed up for Oracle Cloud, so that I can have some more free computing resources to play with. The sign-up procedure requires a credit card for identity confirmation purpose, but the credit card will not be charged. During sign-up, there's a choice of home region, which determines the location of VM instances; once selected, it cannot be changed in the future.

A common use case for a virtual machine is to host a website. Due to the firewalls, hosting a website on Oracle Cloud needs a few more steps. Here's exactly how to deploy a website in a Oracle Cloud Free Tier VM instance.

UPDATED 2022-01-27: Oracle Cloud now supports IPv6. Instructions are updated to enable IPv6 on the web server.

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Enable IPv4 Access in EUserv IPv6-only VS2-free

Junxiao Shi

EUserv is a virtual private server (VPS) provider in Germany. Notably, they offer a container-based Linux server, VS2-free, free of charge. VS2-free comes with one 1GHz CPU core, 1GB memory, and 10GB storage. Although I already have more than enough servers to play with, who doesn't like some more computing resources for free?

There's one catch: the VS2-free is IPv6-only. It neither has a public IPv4 address, nor offers NAT-based IPv4 access. All you can have is a single /128 IPv6 address.

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
546: eth0@if547: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether b2:77:4b:c0:eb:0b brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff link-netnsid 0
    inet6 2001:db8:6:1::6dae/128 scope global
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::5ed4:d66f:bd01:6936/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

If I attempt to access an IPv4-only destination, a "Network is unreachable" error appears:

$ host lgger.nexusbytes.com
lgger.nexusbytes.com has address 46.4.199.225
$ ping -n -c 4 lgger.nexusbytes.com
connect: Network is unreachable
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How to Select Default IPv6 Source Address for Outbound Traffic in OpenVZ 7

Junxiao Shi

I bought a few Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on Black Friday, and have been busy setting them up. Nowadays, most VPS comes with an IPv6 subnet that contains millions of possible addresses. Initially, only one IPv6 address is assigned to the server, but the user can assign additional addresses as desired. Given that I plan to run multiple services within a server, I added a few more IPv6 addresses so that each service can have a unique IPv6 address.

One of my servers is using OpenVZ 7 virtualization technology, in which I installed Debian 10 operating system. Commonly, OpenVZ 7 uses virtual network device (venet) that does not have a MAC address. venet devices are not fully IPv6 compliant, but still works if you statically assign IPv6 addresses. Moreover, every IP address used in a container must be configured from the host node, because venet would drop ip-packets from the container with a source address, and in the container with the destination address, which is not corresponding to an ip-address of the container. Therefore, I must use the VPS control panel, in this case SolusVM, to assign IPv6 addresses to my server:

IPv6 Subnet management in SolusVM

In the Add IP section, the IPv6 subnet prefix 2001:db8:f1c1:8454:0964: is already shown. Notice that I am putting a colon (:) in front of the suffix 1337, so that they concatenate to the full address 2001:db8:f1c1:8454:0964::1337. Forgetting this colon would cause "Invalid Entry" error.

After making this change in the SolusVM control panel, the /etc/network/interface file on my server is updated automatically:

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How to Select Default IPv6 Source Address for Outbound Traffic with Netplan

Junxiao Shi

I bought a few Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on Black Friday, and have been busy setting them up. Nowadays, most VPS comes with an IPv6 subnet that contains millions of possible addresses. Initially, only one IPv6 address is assigned to the server, but the user can assign additional addresses as desired. Given that I plan to run multiple services within a server, I added a few more IPv6 addresses so that each service can have a unique IPv6 address.

One of my servers is using KVM virtualization technology, in which I installed Ubuntu 20.04 operating system manually from an ISO image. Unlike a template-based installation, an ISO-installed Ubuntu 20.04 system manages its networks using Netplan, a backend-agnostic network configuration utility that generates network configuration from YAML files. Most VPS control panels, including SolusVM and Virtualizer, are unable to generate the YAML files needed by Netplan. IPv4 works out of box via DHCP, but IPv6 has to be configured manually. To assign two IPv6 addresses to my server, I need to write the following in /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml:

network:
  version: 2
  ethernets:
    ens3:
      dhcp4: true
      addresses:
        - 2001:db8:30fa:5877::1/64
        - 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef/64
      routes:
        - to: ::/0
          via: 2001:db8:30fa::1
          on-link: true
      nameservers:
        addresses:
        - 2001:4860:4860::8888
        - 2606:4700:4700::1111

I intend to host my secret beef recipes on its unique IPv6 address 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef, and use the other address 2001:db8:30fa:5877::1 for outbound traffic such as pings and traceroutes. However, I noticed that the wrong address is being selected for outgoing packets:

$ ping 2001:db8:57eb:8479::2

$ sudo tcpdump -n icmp6
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on venet0, link-type LINUX_SLL (Linux cooked), capture size 262144 bytes
00:44:48.704099 IP6 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef > 2001:db8:57eb:8479::2: ICMP6, echo request, seq 1, length 64
00:44:48.704188 IP6 2001:db8:57eb:8479::2 > 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef: ICMP6, echo reply, seq 1, length 64
00:44:49.704011 IP6 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef > 2001:db8:57eb:8479::2: ICMP6, echo request, seq 2, length 64
00:44:49.704099 IP6 2001:db8:57eb:8479::2 > 2001:db8:30fa:5877::beef: ICMP6, echo reply, seq 2, length 64
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Travis CI Pricing Change - Usage based Billing

Junxiao Shi

"Welcome to Travis CI!"

This morning I waked up to an email titled Welcome to Travis CI!.

Travis CI is a cloud-based Continuous Integration platform that automatically compiles and tests my code whenever I push a commit to GitHub, and warns me by email if there is an error. I started using Travis CI in 2014, so it feels weird to receive a "welcome" email today.

The email reads:

You are on Free.

You have 1,000 credits left - these will begin counting down automatically as soon as you run your first build. You can use your credits to build on both private and open-source repositories using Linux, macOS, and Windows OS. 1,000 credits will be replenished automatically monthly. Additional Credits purchase is not available for Free Plan.

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Where does GMT-0456 Timezone Come From?

Junxiao Shi

Recently, someone on the DCTech Slack community asked why the Date.prototype.toDateString function is having an off-by-one error:

new Date("2020-10-17").toDateString();
"Fri Oct 16 2020"

My immediate response was: timezone. The group then proceeded to discover that the Date constructor would interpret a date-only string as being in UTC timezone. Washington, DC uses Eastern Daylight Time that is four hours behind UTC, so the timezone of the constructed Date object is 20:00:00 local time on the previous date. Since toDateString uses local time, it prints as the previous date.

After that, I started testing some boundary conditions:

new Date("0001-01-01").toString()
"Sun Dec 31 0000 19:03:58 GMT-0456 (Eastern Standard Time)"

new Date("0000-01-01").toString()
"Fri Dec 31 -0001 19:03:58 GMT-0456 (Eastern Standard Time)"
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