|
||||
Featured Articles           To a degree, I still actively work on my high school soccer team's website (which I created back in 2005). I started working on it on and off since summer 2008, and 71 hours of development later, I finally pushed my changes to the live server in January 2009. I went to send an email the other day and I was halted when I discovered that my key had expired. I can't believe that I've been using GPG for 6 months, but the time had come to generate a new keypair. This post outlines the process to gererate a new keypair once your old keypair has expired. Jesus. It's only the second week of school and I've already pulled my first all-nighter. This time, however, it was not for school. I was determined to get my OpenVPN server properly setup so that I could finally browse the web securely from the dorms. I only expected this to take a few minutes, but I ended up spending over 7 hours of research, troubleshooting, and configuration changes. This post will contain a slew of information about smoothwall, zerina, openvpn, and iptables. I'm mostly just going to throw all of my findings here without much of any logical flow. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to downloading and installing 4 updates to my smoothwall box. Unlike Ubuntu upgrades, this process was farily painless except for one thing: my Zerina OpenVPN 'plugin' broke. 
In Ubuntu--and most gnome-based linux distributions, for that matter--the default PDF viewer is Evince Document Viewer. However, a much better alternative PDF viewer exists: xpdf In my experience, xpdf uses only about 5% as much RAM as evince! As stated in my last post, my server died several months ago, and I decided to take that unfortunate opportunity to gain some Unix experience by installing FreeBSD on its replacement. Although this server has been installed for several months, the main reason that this weblog has been down is because of multiple configuration issues with FreeBSD that, frankly, I think should have worked Out Of The Box. A friend of mine who is adamant about FreeBSD told me to name this inevitable post "FreeBSD from a gentoo user's perspective." It's true that my desktop's distro of choice has been gentoo for several years, but I'm no ricer. I love gentoo because I love portage--the gentoo package manager which is, in fact, a derivative of FreeBSD's ports package manager. I don't care much for any package manager that doesn't give you the option to change compile-time options. Anyway, I'm going to try my best to leave any bias-ness I may have behind me as I work through the multitude of flaws that I encountered with setting up a FreeBSD webserver. As a gentoo user, I can understand the expected perils of using a system that is designed to have both 
Well, my old server died (I think the processor fried itself somehow). Due to school workload, I wasn't able to properly configure a new server until now, thereby this blog has been down for months (and, surprisingly, I've actually had people comment about it being down--mostly because they were unable to flame me, though *shrug*). Anyway, I've finally got a new (actually, it's quite old) rack-mountable server (minus the rack) running FreeBSD as a replacement. Moreover, I've changed the theme, so this site had both a different software and hardware look! In light of the whole world going crazy because the we're running out of IPv4 addresses, I did some calculations. 
My senior year of high school, I was preparing for probably the hardest exam I'd ever have to take: my Anatomy and Physiology final exam. In order to make an A in the class, I had to make >92 on the exam. Our teacher gave us a pool of 500 questions; of those 500 questions, she would pick 100 to make up our exam. So, I set to work on memorizing the answers to those questions backwards and forwards. Instead of using note cards (writing the question on the front and the answer on the back), I spent just as much work (maybe less) in writing a small PHP script that would import a list of 'note cards', prompt me with a random side (front or back) of a random card, hesitate (allow me to think of the answer), give me the answer upon my request, and allow me to mark whether or not I got it correct. At the end of this process (2 prompts (one for each side) * the # of cards = a long ass time), it gives me a list of the 'note cards' that I got wrong so that I can re-study them and I've wanted to setup a serious linux-based firewall for my home network for some time now, and I finally got around to it yesterday. There are TON of linux router distros out there, but instead of spending 8 hours picking & choosing, comparing & contrasting, nitpicking & debating, I asked someone else ;). Two buddies of mine have a similar setup at their homes: one uses Smooth Wall; one uses IPCop. I arbitrarily chose Smooth Wall (after actually setting it up, though, I think IPCop would have been a better choice--c'est la vie. The installation is supposed to be quite painless, and it was--for the most part. The documentation and install process was intuitive and easy to follow, but it didn't work OOTB. I probably only had so much difficulty because of hardware issues (fried NICs?) which is by no means Smooth Wall's fault. Nevertheless, it took ~5 hours of bang-your-head-against-the-table troubleshooting 'till I could finally unhook the monitor & keyboard, shove it in a corner, and get some sleep. I was also disappointed with two things that didn't work as I had expected OOTB: DHCP DNS VPN |
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2024 Michael Altfield's Tech Blog - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||
