Blatant self-advertising on the IPv6 Canvas

Yesterday, the IPv6 Canvas was pushed to the public.

Of course, as soon as I learned of this, I threw together a script to place my domain ewpratten.com on the canvas for all to see.

Screenshots

How I’m doing this

The code is public for anyone wanting to do this themselves, and the process for getting everything working was pretty simple.

1. I designed the graphic in a random online pixel art editor
2. The design was converted to a bitmap
3. I have a Python script that can read an arbitrary bitmap and convert it to a list of IPv6 addresses
4. Hundreds of ping -c 1 processes are spawned in the background to write the image to the canvas

This script is executed via a Cron job on one of my edge routers for maximum IP nerdiness.

Why ping?

I considered doing this with some clever mtr commands, or even crafting the ICMP ECHO packets straight from the script, but that was slightly too much work for the 5 minutes I had before work this morning.