Several of the machines here at home have IPv4 to the outside world disabled, simply to improve security and find every ancient service or program that still lives in the old world. Today I found one of those while installing dehydrated to automatically renew Let's Encrypt certificates.

Indeed, github has no IPv6 support. It tries to be a modern service, but lacks an AAAA record.

The one reason I still have a squid webproxy running is to be able to access IPv4-only services from those hosts, so setting the http proxy in the global git config helped. I'm just surprised github doesn't support IPv6.

Update: After some searching I found Github users have been asking about IPv6 connectivity since at least 2018 and the "solution" is that they currently don't support IPv6 and the request is on some list.

Yet another import from our snowboard holiday in Austria.

This time I'm drinking Frastanzer Gold Spezial. When poured correctly it looks very German with a big foamy head. Not too pronounced taste, a good beer to drink.

The beer details

Company	Frastanz
Beer name	Gold Spezial
Beer style	Pilsener
Alcohol by volume	5.5 %

Last weekend was the EAPSK63 contest and I participated on Saturday. Lots of stations from Spain active and I managed to work 29 unique Spanish provinces. A total of 82 contacts. I could only participate Saturday afternoon and evening so that limited my time in the contest.

I bought a few Frastanzer beers on our snowboard holiday in Austria.

The first one to try is "Frastanzer s'honig" which is a beer made from biological ingredients with indeed a bit of added honey. Not too much, it's not too sweet for my taste. The honey gives the beer a soft side in taste without losing the strength from hops completely.

The beer details

Company	Frastanz
Beer name	s'honig
Beer style	Honey beer/spiced beer
Alcohol by volume	5.1 %

I did some more testing with the HP power supply I bought last November. In previous tests the output voltage seemed to be limited at 13 volts and it seems limited to 13.10 volt at the moment. The RM Italy HLA300V plus amplifier I have will only output about 55 watts maximum in digital modes so that's less than I expect. A higher input voltage may fix this, but I'm not sure how to get the power supply to deliver this and keep running. The previous power supply gave up in a busy weekend but before that the HF linear amplifier delivered more power. I have seen it go over a 100 watt on digital modes. The difference in output from the linear amplifier with 13.10 or 13.27 volt power is quite large, which surprises me.

A while ago I noticed a mention of new firmware for the Fritz!box 7360v1. As I want a separate PPPoE process to have full control of my Internet connection I hoped the PPPoE passthrough option would become available, since this would be a firmware version later than 6.30, but no.

At least the upgrade went fine without having to use the recovery options. So the 'in case of emergency' settings have been kept forwarding the necessary ports via IPv4.

Sometimes the Dutch special beers need attention too. And there are other beers than IPA beers. Really.

This is a special beer from the Dutch Grolsch brewery. A blonde beer, with a somewhat bitter taste for a blonde. Not too hoppy, a nice tasty beer.

The beer details

Company	Grolsch
Beer name	Klassieke blond
Beer style	Blond
Alcohol by volume	6.7 %

I noticed the news about LetsEncrypt revoking a lot of certificates on 4 March 2020 and did some checking to find out eventually that one of my certificates is in that set. Users have been notified of this problem... when their account had a contact e-mail address. By default dehydrated doesn't set an e-mail address so none of my instances used one. I do like to get informed so I searched how to update the contact info. The data is in /etc/dehydrated/config field CONTACT_EMAIL but I needed some searching before I found the method to get the update passed on to LetsEncrypt.

Some searching later found Update registration email address - Issue #425 dehydrated which shows that a simple dehydrated --account does the magic.

During our wintersport holiday in Austria I also brought my Arrow antenna and handheld radios along to try a satellite contact.

Before the holiday I read on twitter that Peter Goodhall 2M0SQL has unconfirmed gridsquares which included the place I was going on holiday. So I prepared for trying to make the contact during the holiday. In the preparation I got a theory why I had problems with the satellites with a 2 meter downlink frequency.

During the holiday I soon figured out there wasn't a lot of time for contacts, during the day we were on the pistes and we went to bed early because we had a lot of physical activity. And the place we stayed was between the mountains so for satellite passes I was limited to high passes.

In the end I did listen to one Fox-1D pass which was high and long enough. In a serious amount of falling snow so that was a new experience in amateur radio: trying to make contacts in the snow. Reception of Fox-1D was quite good on the Baofeng UV-5R radio, but transmitting back up didn't work out, I never made a contact.

I did not hear Peter on that pass, so that did not work out at all. But I learned several things, including the fact that the theory about the 2 meter downlink frequencies and the Wouxun KG-UVD1P was correct so the result is positive anyway.

Last week we were on a wintersport holiday in the Montafon region of Austria. I went snowboarding and had fun. There was enough snow at higher levels when the week started and later in the week it started snowing giving fresh snow which I really like for snowboarding.

Driving to Austria and back home through Germany went fine, no huge traffic jams or really bad weather. There is still a lot of work on the German Autobahns but less than one or two years ago. The lane departure warning system in our car still doesn't like the mix of orange and white lines on the road when lanes are shifted for work.