I bought a new wireless router (TP-Link N750 TL-WDR4300) that had fantastic hardware specs. It was to replace what I had been using, an Airport extreme, that was having problems dealing with the number of DHCP leases on my network. I also didn’t like the lack of flexibility in firewalling, DHCP options, and on and on. Basically the Airport worked great, but sticks to Apple’s design philosophy: user’s don’t really know what they want, so we’ll tell them. One thing I really liked about the Airport, however, was that it worked great with IPv6.

The new TP-Link router didn’t support IPv6, crashed a lot, would randomly stop routing bridged traffic between the wired and wireless interfaces, and did a pretty good job of pissing me off. It’s OS was based on an older version of either OpenWRT or dd-wrt; and this was the source of my problems. Since it wasn’t really working I decided to go ahead and drop OpenWRT’s latest snapshot on the router, I figured what do I have to lose.  (I am super happy with the results, what a great community project!)

I’m not going to cover how to install it, that’s well-enough documented at the OpenWRT site.  I am going to give a couple of pointers to getting IPv6 working on Comcast’s network.  It’s actually pretty easy once you install the right packages.  There are  different ways to get IPv6 working in OpenWRT, and this is the combination I got to work, I tried a lot of things.  Other setups might work better or not at all, I don’t know–I stopped once it worked.

opkgs you will want: Wide DHCP Client, and the route advertisement daemon. (You don’t need wide-dhcp-server.)

opkg install wide-dhcpv6-client radvd

First a couple of gotchas that tripped me up.

• Comcast only delegates a /64 prefix (standard ISP practice is a /60,) which means a few things that at first tricked me …
  • You can’t subnet a /64, so at layer 3 you will talk to the upstream router using link local addresses.
  • The br-lan interface will get the delegated address.
  • The default config for wide dhcp6c assumes a /60 delegation, if you don’t change this you won’t get your lease.
• By default the native IPv6 stack is configured to listen for route advertisements and send route solicitations.  This conflicts with what dhcp6c is doing. I’m not sure, but it might be possible to use the native IPv6 settings in /etc/config/network but I’m not sure if it works as expected with the /64 delegation; I was seeing the wan interface get the address assignment and not the internal layer-3 interface we would use as the default gateway.
  • If you are seeing strange behavior on your network this might be the cause … when I didn’t know better and had both native and dhcp6c enabled I would restart the network, or reboot the router and IPv6 would be working great.  A few hours later it would stop working.  I would also see that my clients had been assigned new network prefixes.  But they had not disabled the old ones (marked as deprecated but still listening.)  And I could’t route IPv6 anymore.

Here are some of my settings that got my OpenWRT routing IPv6 on Comcast (sorry, just config files I didn’t even install the web gui.)

Continue reading »

EC2 Micro Instance Limitations

EC2 offers a lot of advantages over many web site hosting options.  I am a bit of a control freak and like having full control over my web server.  This has advantages and disadvantages of course, meaning more work but more flexibility.  Running a WordPress blog on a micro instance can be a serious challenge.  I have fought with getting my site to have a minimum level of stability, and here are some of my notes on what helped.  Amazon offers a free EC2 micro instance for a year to new users, so it is a very attractive option for hosting a web site.

The EC2 micro instance is pretty cheap compared to the other system options that Amazon offers, but there are some caveats that may shock you after using it for a while.  There are a couple of major problems with using this option for hosting a website:

• CPU Usage restrictions: If you use 100% CPU for more than a few minutes, Amazon will “steal” CPU time from the instance, meaning that they throttle your instance.  This can last (from my observations) as long as five minutes, and then you get a few seconds of 100% again, then the restrictions are back.  This will cripple your website, making it slow, and even timing-out requests.
• Limited Memory: The instance is limited to 613MB of RAM, and does not have a swap partition.  If you run out of memory the system will panic and reboot.

If you have more than 1000 visitors or so a day, a micro instance probably isn’t worth your time.  But for many small sites (like mine) it does make sense.  I wasn’t aware of these limitations before setting up my site, and I very quickly ran into site reliability issues.  Here are a few of the things that I did to make my site more stable.

You can save a lot of money by purchasing a reserved instance for a year, but my advice is to run for a few months before making the leap.  If you find that your micro instance doesn’t cut it, you have just thrown away a chunk of cash.

So, let’s look at a few of the things you can do to make a WordPress site run reasonably well on a Micro Instance:

• Configuration:

• Tune Apache to run the correct number of threads.
• Use the minimum required memory for MySQL.
• Pre-cache your web pages.
• Use a content distribution network (CDN) such as CloudFront.
• Setup a swap partition.

• Configure alerting for CPU usage and network traffic.
• Be ready to rent a larger instance if you get a big traffic spike.

• Use a 32 bit operating system.

Continue reading »