ROD TCP/IP Stack 7.04 released

In my student days, I made a film that pointed out that advertising was everywhere and inescapable

In some respects the lack of RISC OS browser capability for the whizz-bang features used in a lot of advert rich pages is a boon.

If you’re browsing on Windows, check out the browser add-in called Ghostery
End.

Anyway, it’s just more evidence that IPv6 is important, and will be increasingly so, so we’d better embrace it.

For work (still, but less) mainly I need to embrace IPv4 <—→ IPv6 because the chance of medical equipment suppliers doing IPv6 has to be judged by their current products often using 1990’s tech/config.

Home? Possibly time to play with the OPNSense install and experiment.

Steve, you’d probably be the best bloke for this… My web hosting provider doesn’t make IPv6 access available to shared servers. I’m interested to know why. I am, of course, buying a very cheap service because it’s just for my hobby, I need very little space, and nothing but web hosting. For just that, it would seem easy to provide IPv6 because the HTTP header includes a Host: line so the correct target can be identified. But is that how it is or should be done, and does it work for other services typically offered alongside literal web hosting? What extra infrastructure is needed?

I have to assume that each customer’s stuff has to be accessed via a unique IPv6 address, so there would have to be something in the way to arbitrate and forward.

I think your shared service is probably using SNI (quick checks¹ – yeah) to be able to host multiple independent sites/domains on one host instance.

It can be fiddly to build and install SNI TLS certificates for both IPv4 and IPv6. I would assume all sites on the one host are going to need to have certificates that match that requirement.
Larger providers would likely just migrate your site to a host box supporting both, while some hosting providers are yet to master the use of TLS and only have HTTP. If it was an easy change by the user³ I’m sure www.riscos.com would have an HTTPS config.

The question would be: do they allow IPv6 only servers that are not shared? Is the restriction on sharing of an IPv6 with IPv4 or two domains on one IPv6 host box?

Off to relax on non-tech, the last three days have been increasingly “challenging” – fortunately it’s now the four-day weekend :)

¹ User server gives:
Starting Nmap 7.94 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2024-01-17 19:21 Co-ordinated Universal Time
Nmap scan report for davehigton.me.uk (84.18.207.61)
Host is up (0.0090s latency).
rDNS record for 84.18.207.61: dragonfruit.active-ns.com <===

To keep this thread up-to-date, v7.04a of the stack was released last week, resolving the issue with sysctl requiring a newer version of SharedCLibrary.

I gave in a run on my old Pi3 today and activated ipv6.
It works, I even found an internet radio using ipv6 and could play it.

On the down side, since it was compiled using ROOL beta TCP libraries, inet_ntop, which translate ip adresses to text, gave out garbage. I suspect that it’s because AF_INET6 is defined as 24 on the ROD side and 28 on the ROOL side.

I did not manage to find an an https + ipv6 ShoutCast/IceCast radio so that remains to be tested.

Speaking of tests, I download an ffmpeg test sample file from my Pi3 (ROD stack) and my Pi4 (ROOL stack), the speed difference is impressive 1800KB/s versus 300KB/s.

Have just loaded this on RPi Zero W (1.1) and seems to be working well. Have tested Netsurf 3.11, NetRadio 0.51, Avalanche 0.22 and Lanman98 2.08 without any apparent problems (only short duration – approx 30 minutes so far). Thanks ROD !

Also with EtherUSB from Dec2023

Using ROD Direct with RO 5.28 ROM