I finally set up that firewall…
…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.