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.

I wanted to take a few minutes and post about Tomato Firmware which I’ve installed on my Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. Since my router much like some of the linksys routers uses open source technology these baby’s are able to be hacked with better software, all which is totally legal. Of course this voids any warranty one might have but when you pay $40 for a router I don’t think you’re worrying too much about a warranty. With the Tomato Firmware installed my $40 wireless router turns into a $600 wireless router. It provides things like VPN capability, DDNS, bandwidth monitoring/Usage Graphs, QoS, various wireless and general lan tools, and enterprise grade wireless security. I’ve also found it to be much more stable than the DD-WRT firmware most people, myself included, have been putting on their routers.

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The other day I posted about JediConcentrate from AnAppADay.com. If you read the story on Digg article about that website you know what I’m talking about, but basically the guy has promised to write an application each day for 30 days. A week ago he posted an app called RDPManager. From anappaday: Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight I decided to make a few adjustments to speed up my website, though I’ve not actually taken any speed measurements to see if the speed has actually improved.  I’ve shortened the amount of posts I display on the first page from 10 to 5.  I don’t update all that much so I figure making 5 posts the default would be fine, and that’s less time to load my page.  The second thing I did was to edit some of my posts and use the “more” feature built into Wordpress.  All I had to do was insert the <!–more–> tag into my posts and Wordpress does the rest. If you look at the tool bar in the online editor there is a button which will insert the tag as well.  Last but not least, while looking for a plugin to implement the “more” feature automatically to each post I ran into a plugin which adds some AJAX to each “more” link.  Instead of clicking more and being directed from the main page to the single post view, the page expands revealing the rest of the post.  A feature which makes viewing each post much easier.  The name of the plugin is called Ajaxified Expand NOW and can be found under the Features sections here.

Note: Since writing this up I’ve been running as a limited user for a while so I think I’ll be writing another follow up post to A) revise some things that are incorrect in this post and B) comment on the troubles I’ve been having. Running as a limited user on my linux box is much easier. Hopefully Vista will be better about that sort of thing.
A couple weeks ago at work I got to attend the Microsoft Security Matters conference at The Rock Financial Showplace in Novi. As the name suggests it was all about securing your Windows environment using technologies built into Windows. I must say I was quite impressed with the various discussions ranging from securing your wireless with WPA2 to using IPsec to secure communication between clients and servers. In addition to the talks given they provided a lot of literature and resources to start implementing the various technologies into your network. This was a side of Microsoft I never thought I’d see. One of the speakers even went as far as to say Microsoft is a lousy operating system, at least in the past. He did suggest however that it can get better, and they were there to show you how. Read the rest of this entry »