bluh

Big damn props to the crooklyn ninja perdedor for pointing out a path he’s been down years ago – him with m0n0wall for his routing/filtering needs on an embedded PC jambox, a soekris, and for the pfSense tip (fork of m0n0wall) which is optimized for installing on “regular” computers.

This weekend got some crazy computer style action going. First of which was my special lady and I gutting two “busted” computers that were traded to us in exchange for one working computer. Then we happened up a sale flyer for our local Microcenter including a nice smallish case for $25 that indeed supported one of the mobos we just got. Returning back home we put together a P4-1.8GHz machine with a measley 384MB of RAM (already had all that on hand plus PC133 168 pin SDRAM DIMMs are fuckin’ expensive now but DDR is hell of cheap, way to go economies of scale), 30G of hard drive space and various bobs and bits laying around. My first linux desktop – shit.sammich.org!

Despite “running” my own machine on this very domain for going on 8 years, I’ve never had a linux desktop or a machine what ran X windows (unless you count the X11 I installed on my ibook, which I don’t). I really feel like I’m getting the full linux experience now, since the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn’t scroll at all and despite spending 4+ hours trying to fix it with various ZAxisMapping in my xorg.conf file and xmodmap blah blah blah, it’s still fucking broken. Way to go, linux!

But the biggest thing is I now have full separation of church and state in my house, in that the server (banana) is now just a server and the router (crapbox) is now just a router/NAT/etc bawx.

The exciting part about this is when banana crashes or shits the bed or whatnot, it won’t take the rest of the network with it. The routatron is Nikki’s old laptop, a craptastic Dell Inspiron 2650 with a second NIC in the PCMCIA (what, it’s called CardBus now?) slot. It’s got a couple 5 – 10 minutes of built-in battery life should the power go out and with a little bit of rearranging in the computer room everything will be right as rain.

Open issues:

1. You can’t ssh into banana with the default ssh information anymore. Email me and I’ll explain why and what you need to do. This likely affects perhaps two – maybe three – people, one of which may read this.
2. Ought to replace the 10BT 16 port HP hub that Mikex0r gave me years ago with an 8 port 10/100/1000BT switch.
3. I think I’ve got all the appropriate ports forwarded to the places they need to go but if you find something that’s not working, let me know.
4. It would be nice to seriously underclock the Inspiron 2650 so it uses less power and the fans never have to come on.
5. Eventually replace the hard drive in the crapbook with a CF card so it would effectively be diskless & fanless.
6. Reroute all the power cables and make sure the stuff on the UPSes actually belongs on a UPS.
7. Try not to suck.

And of course, get the damn mouse to work in X11.

Email is back up and running. Turns out it never stopped, but my ISP blocked port 25 for “spam or viruses”. Uh huh. They’ve unblocked it, email works again.

Still, I’ve put “replace banana as router with m0n0wall crapbook” on this weekend’s to do list.

The St. Patrick’s day parade was excellent, as usual. I think I left my Swiss Army Knife, though. It’s a black-handled lockback SAK, roughly equivalent to the Nomad. Had it for about 10 years. I’ve thought about getting the Centurion to replace it, but in all honesty, I’ll use a corkscrew more than a Phillips head screwdriver when I’m out and about.

It’s funny, though – I always used to make fun of corkscrews on SAKs. Then I got caught out and about with a bottle of wine but not corkscrew. I quit making fun of them that day. Since then I can count on one hand how many times I’ve needed specifically a Phillips head screwdriver and not been able to use the flathead to take care of it. The number of times I’ve needed a corkscrew? No idea… too many.

Email ain’t working on my machine for some reason. Reckon I’ll fix that in my ample free time real soon now. Uh huh.

Keith pointed out to me that the livejournal rss feed that was set up got bombed by a bunch of old entries.

HAW HAW AHAHHAHAHA.

i love it when web shit breaks.

Man alive, i hate spambots.

Started getting more junk this past fortnight – a couple messages a week, max. That’s a couple too much.

I edited some comments and entries to further obscure and obfusticate my email addy.

So just so they know what’s up, here are some addresses they should mail instead:

uce@ftc.gov
enforcement@sec.gov
president@whitehouse.gov
missed-spam@comcast.net

thanks.

As promised, pictures of my ibook disassembly to replace the broken reed switch cable. This has been well documented elsewhere, but let me assure you it takes a long long time to take everything apart. And i do mean everything.
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Not everything about the QMR bundle works like gangbusters on my box – i can’t get qmail-scanner to work on its own. It works with the test_installation.sh script, but not any other time.

Anybody else got a slackware box and got this jammy runnin? Drop me the postmaster a line. Email addy shouldn’t be too hard to figure out – postmaster – and this domain – sammich dot org.

Due to my el cheapo DSL, i kept getting more and more bounced email because i have a dynamic IP (everydns.net keeps us rockin till the wheels fall off). If your ISP blocks outgoing port 25 (and sbc does block outgoing port 25), you need to send your email through your ISP’s smtp host.

Running qmail? You need to patch it. Go here, download, rebuild, enjoy. Spread the love, as it took me a long while to locate this information.

Also, having just upgraded my plain vanilla qmail installation with the bundle of patches and action from qmailrocks, i can say it is far less painful than installing it manually, but it (can) install a bunch of stuff you i don’t need.