thisStrangeEngine.com

…and things are going to start happening to me now!

I spent my whole evening today setting up the Linux-based open source firewall/router IPCop with an old machine my brother gave me and some NICs I had lying around. I actually first spent about an hour rearranging my computer room. I decided it made more sense having the firewall box and my server boxes on the same side of the room as my computer, which was not true in my previous configuration.

I struggled for a while to get the firewall set up the way I wanted it, and even now it’s not 100% perfect. One of my NICs seem to be faulty, so I currently don’t have an “orange” zone for the webserver. Instead, I’m poking a hole for port 80 into my “green” zone where the server currently resides. I hope to rectify that little issue soon. I also spent about an hour and a half figuring out why I couldn’t get my wireless to work, only to discover one small but crucial step needed to let my wireless router talk with the outside world. It’s always the small stuff.

Another thing currently bothering me is that I can’t seem to get it to pick up OpenDNS as the DNS servers, even when I specify them. It still assigns the DNS servers it retrieves from my ISP’s DHCP. I’m thinking it may be a bug. It’s not a big deal, but I liked using OpenDNS as it made web browsing just a little snappier.

But all in all it looks good. I have a firewall now that acts as an awesome router with different subnets for my wired and wireless machines and just enough pinholes between them to do the things I want. Hopefully, we will no longer see a port 80 forwarding issue, so the website should be much more available now. It now also serves as my personal time-sync (ntp) server which itself syncs with the NTP Pool Project once daily.

Technobabble aside, all you really need to know is now the site should be up regularly and hopefully you should see more posts from me soon.

Tags: firewall, ipcop, Linux+GNU/BSD, router, webserver

Usually, big announcements of exciting new technologies don’t get me particularly riled up. Usually I only read about things like a new release of Windows or the iPhone with relatively passing interest.

But Microsoft announced something today that got my attention. It’s called Microsoft Surface.

It’s one of those ideas that seem simple in concept, but it really pretty amazing in execution. The videos on the page really show off the possibilities. These bad boys will probably cost several thousand dollars at first, but it will be really cool to see these around and then see them in the home when they become reasonably priced. I just hope that it will become easy for the open source community to take advantage of it as well (I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t.)

Here’s an interesting article in the Austin paper the Austin American-Statesman about a tech company called Forgent and their sue-everyone-for-patent-infringement business model. Their revenue for the past few years have almost totally comprised of patent settlement money based from a single patent that claims to cover the JPEG compression algorithm, but that whole process is now starting to lose steam.

Why am I talking about this? I know these guys. When we were still our own company and no more than nine employees, Metreos squatted in their offices. We actually took up more of their office space than they did - there was only an administrative assitant and two or three executives. The whole time I was there, though, I had no idea what they did. I just think it’s interesting that all of this was going on in the background of where I was working for a while.

Something is up.

In the last three months, several major components of my computer have suddenly failed on me (I suppose it’s not often that they gracefully and slowly fail on you, though).

Just before the move, my computer would power up for about 4 seconds before it would shut itself down again. I thought maybe the power supply was bad, but a power supply tester confirmed that it was okay. I figured it had to be my motherboard. Replacing the motherboard pretty much rebuilding the system, so I ended up doing a full-on upgrade: motherboard, processor, and video card. All that cost me about $300.

Then, about a month ago, I found my computer wouldn’t even turn on. Interestingly, this happened while trying to diagnose a problem with my internet connection. Strangely, it was somehow linked to the fact that I had my coaxial internet running through my surge protector. I decided I wanted to try and see what happens if I reset my protector, so I shut off my computer. Then when I tried to turn it on again, it wouldn’t. After checking cables and all, I decided to test the power supply again. My worst fear was right - my power supply gave out. It was a nice name brand one, too, and I had it for less than a year. Incidentally, it was only the 5V+ that was no longer giving for some reason. So I went to the store and bought a replacement for about $80.

I came up to the loft this evening to do some stuff on it, and I saw something I did not care to see. The computer looked like it had rebooted sometime today or maybe even last night, but Windows did not boot up. Instead, on the bottom of the screen was message saying that it could not boot the OS. Of course, that is never good.

I tried rebooting and, sure enough, it was the same message. I opened up my computer to see what was going in there. I heard a tell-tale “click-click-click” that could only have been the final death throes of my hard drive. It seems my luck with components haven’t been that great.

I also noticed while I was in there that everything seemed pretty hot. I wasn’t sure if it was normal or extreme, but it seemed like it was more than I was used to. The thing is the loft in my new apartment has this window that is in a peculiar position where it is impossible to mount any blinds or curtains on without, maybe, a sturdy ladder and someone to hold the other end down, and even then, you risk falling down to the living room below. All the heat in the apartment already rises up to the loft, but then the window lets in the pure sunlight all day long, so it gets really hot up there. I have a feeling it could very well be having a considerable effect on my hardware.

So, I’ve got this thing called a “temporary shade” which means it is less elegant than a blind, but it’s stupid easy to mount and it’ll get the job of blocking the sunlight done. Getting to the window to put it up is still a task that I’ll probably have to leave to the complex’s maintenance crew, but I hope that this will help things out. Maybe it’s also just bad luck, but I hope that my components aren’t dying out because of any one faulty component I keep overlooking.

Anyways, hard drives are stupid cheap these days, and luckily Best Buy happened to have a good sale on some Seagate drives this week. You can pick up a 120GB for $50 or $200GB for $80. I originally was going to get the 120GB, but I decided to spoil myself (again). Fortunately, I’ve been doing regular backups, and most of my important day-to-day stuff is on the laptop, so there are no real setbacks. My only fear is that since my backups are only weekly, I may very well have lost the pictures I took from the last day of the Austin City Limits Festival this past weekend, although there may be some hope in restoring them from my currently-empty flash card.

So those are my current adventures in tech.

Coming up: how to get any Linux+GNU/BSd distribution running in a virtual machine on your Windows desktop.