meddlingBanter

Tonight I finished setting up my new firewall/gateway based on the lastest Ubuntu server edition.  I actually finished this last Thursday but that machine crapped out on me the day after I had everything configured correctly.  It was an old P3 system with around 512 MB of PC-133 in it.  Not the greatest system but plenty for a home Gateway/Firewall.  The HDs I used in the machine were a couple I had laying around, 8 GB and 10 GB setup in an LVM.  I figured they might have had a little more life in them and 18 GB would be plenty of space for this system.  Well I guess they were a little too old as they both stopped working the next day, in fact the computer doesn’t even recognize them at boot time.  I’ve had trouble on that system before, sometimes detecting a drive, sometimes not, so it may just be the board as well.  I decided not to waste anymore time with that old machine and now I’m using Abby’s old emachine.

Things went rather smooth after my second install this afternoon.  I had installed it over the weekend at Abby’s (on her machine, not the machine that died), but her internet was flaky and wouldn’t work during the install of Ubuntu so I wasn’t able to configure some things during the initial install and that seemed to give me all kinds of errors this morning when I went to finish things up.  Also I spent a good amount of time troubleshooting a problem with one of my network cards, in that it would initialize but I couldn’t connect to the computer through the LAN to it which had me googling and scratching my head for some time.  I then decided to open up the case and try to reseat the NIC.  The card was actually not seated all the way so I pushed it in then rebooted and it worked perfectly.  Next time I won’t be in such a hurry and actually screw in the NICs.

After fixing that problem I had one more issue with that NIC after finishing up the second install. For some reason it would only register as a 10 Mbit half-duplex NIC, when it was capable of 100 Mbit full-duplex mode.  Turns out this is an issue with the card and certain switches.  The card just doesn’t detect the type of network its on properly.  I forced the card into the proper mode and now things are good to go.

Right now the f/g is pretty basic.  I have three NICs in it, one connected to my switches/OPEN-WRT AP, one to the cable modem, and the third will be used for another AP I plan to have an open wireless network on.  I installed smoothwall to configure my firewall as well as bind and a DHCP server.  I don’t really like all those services running on that box so I may leave bind on there and move the DHCP server back to the OPEN-WRT router or maybe to my other Ubuntu Server.  I really just wanted to install the dhcpd3 server on there to learn how to configure it.  With those minor hicups things are running smooth now.