The authoritive nameserver on the homeserver 2017 is using bind9 version 9.10.3 (from Devuan packages). I wanted to look up something in a secondary zonefile and noticed it was a binary file.

Using 'file' to determine what to do next wasn't much help:

$ file secondary.domain-zone
secondary.domain-zone: data

But a search found an explanation at Reading a binary zone file from Bind - The Linux Page. With named-compilezone a zonefile can be 'uncompiled' to a readable file.

$ /usr/sbin/named-compilezone -f raw -F text -o /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt secondary.domain secondary.domain-zone
zone secondary.domain/IN: loaded serial 2018122523
dump zone to /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt...done
OK
$ file /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt
/tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt: ASCII text

Which is a readable zonefile.

Time for a new plot of the number of radio contacts. Months with contest(s) stand out again as they elevate the number of contacts. In July 2019 I participated in the DL-DX RTTY Contest 2019 and the IARU-HF Championship 2019. That last one has added a few countries to my list of countries confirmed in phone modes.

IPv6 is growing up: I saw an ssh attempt to an inside machine, reachable only via IPv6. The source was a Chinese IPv6 address which had not tried anything on any other public service.

Jul 30 18:39:02 ritchie sshd[27454]: Bad protocol version identification '\026\003\001' from 240e:d9:d800:200::212 port 44926

This evening had scheduled Amateur Radio on the International Space Station slow-scan TV transmissions so I took Arrow antenna, the new FUNcube Dongle Pro+, cables and laptop outside.

I found out gqrx crashes when the dongle is on the righthandside USB port of the laptop, so that one is out. On the backside port everything was working, and audio routing worked routing the analog output audio (created by qgrx) to the recording by audacity and the image decoding with qsstv. Gpredict was set up to control the reception frequency in gqrx, and this whole setup was working ok.

But the signal from the ISS looked very very weak in gqrx, just a small rise in level above the noise when I pointed at the general direction of the ISS. No idea why. No images were decoded from it.

After the pass I tried receiving some other sources with this setup and receiving the PI2NOS repeater went fine. But that's on the 70 centimeters band. I saw no activity on PI3UTR which would have enabled a test on 2 meters.

This needs more testing. Maybe something to hold the antenna cables so they don't get pulled from the laptop/radio during a pass.

Update: Most likely culprit: interference in the 2 meter amateur band. With a handheld radio that has received ISS packet sounds before I could now only hear them very faint in the noise. The local 2 meter noise is killing weak signal reception.

I just noticed in Network Info II that my android phone does get an IPv6 address from t-mobile. The address is something like 2a02:498:1fe1:9a02:2:3:xxxx:xxxx which is indeed in IPv6 address space allocated to T-Mobile Netherlands.

% Information related to '2a02:498::/29'

inet6num:       2a02:498::/29
netname:        NL-T-MOBILE-20080609
country:        NL

So I tested directly whether I could make an IPv6 connection to my website, but it fell back to IPv4. Network Info II saw no IPv6 route on the phone, but in later checking I also saw no IPv6 route when connected to the wifi at home, where IPv6 works fine. And doing a traceroute to that address from home shows that a core router at xs4all says network unreachable:

 3  0.ae22.xr4.1d12.xs4all.net (2001:888:1:4032::1)  6.105 ms !N  6.063 ms !N *

So T-Mobile has activated some IPv6 address management in their network, but stopped at that point.

I was looking at some onewire temperature stats and noticed the first stats being aged out. I started monitoring temperatures with 1-wire sensors in January 2007 using rrdtool. I set up round robin archives with an expiry in 11 years, and those 11 years have passed now for the first measurements.

Another random find in the 'special beers' rack in the local supermarket. I usually like IPA beers, so this one sounded good to me.

Not as strong a taste as I would expect from an IPA. The influence of hop is just a mere touch, not as strong as some other IPA beers. On the grand scale of beers it's a tasty but not too complex.

The beer details

Company	BrewDog
Beer name	Indie Pale Ale
Beer style	IPA - India Pale Ale
Alcohol by volume	4.2 %