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.