Since the freeze has slowly crept in, now is the time to revisit my pet peeve with Debian's release process: to publish a new Debian release as soon as GNOME published a new X.XX.0 version. This is an extremely bad idea: X.XX.0 releases tend to lack polish, their translations are not up-to-date and several silly bugs that hamper the user experience (what the Ubuntu guys call "paper cuts") exist. Those issues tend to be fixed later when GNOME X.XX.1, X.XX.2, etc. bugfix releases are published. However, Debian has a policy of not pushing non-security releases onto a stable distribution. In this particular case, there are only two valid alternatives: either release Bullseye with GNOME 3.38.X or change the Debian policy to allow pushing 3.40.X bugfix releases via bullseye-updates.
2021-02-15
OpenWRT: WRT54GL: Backfire: IPv6 issues
While having a Debian boxen as a router feels nice, I kept on longing for something smaller and quieter. I then remembered that I still had my old WRT54GL somewhere. After upgrading the OpenWRT firmware to the latest supported version for that hardware (Backfire 10.03.1, r29592), I installed radvd and wide-dhcpv6-client. Configuring radvd to deliver consistent results was easy enough.
The issue I keep on experiencing is the external interface (wan) dropping the IPv6 address it received from the ISP via router advertisement, which in turn kills the default IPv6 route to the outside world. Logging in via SSH and manually running "rdisc6 eth0.1" restores the IPv6 gateway. I just honestly wished I didn't have to do this every time I need to reboot the router.
Does this issue sound familiar to anyone? What was the solution?
PS: No, I won't just go and ditch this WRT54GL just because new toys exist on the market. This is obviously a software issue, so I need a software solution.
PPS: IPv6 pretty much works out of the box on the Debian boxen I had been using as my router. I previously wrote about this on my blog. Basically, it's unlikely to be an ISP issue.