For the longest time I’ve been using a craptastic stock Linksys wifi router to handle all my incoming traffic from the interwebs at home, a role which it performs adequately at best.  However, I’ve also got another hacked Linksys acting as a wireless bridge to a LAN segment on the other side of the house, which means that WPA or wireless security is out the window.  I also had no real firewall between my network and the internet, which can be a dangerous game when I’ve got some open r/w shares on the network.  Thus, my home network pretty much resembled a block of swiss cheese, where outsiders with any skills could get in, and neighbors in the apartment complex behind me could pilfer my wifi for internet access.  However, my mom had this ancient Dell Inspiron laptop that was sitting in her closet, collecting dust. Ancient, of course, is a relative term, since it’s actually got 512MB RAM and a 2GHz processor under the hood.  Nevertheless, it lacks integrated wifi and is about the same size as a medical textbook. A large medical textbook.  Tired of my porous network, and always ready to inherit old hardware from random family members, I decided that the best solution to my problems would be to build myself a little system which could handle firewall, DHCP, DNS, printing, and web serving duties.

The laptop has an integrated NIC, but in order to do firewall duties effectively, I knew it was a good idea to have another card installed.  A quick trip to Fry’s and I found myself a gigabit PC card to plug in for about $20.  Having used OpenBSD at an earlier job, I figured that would be the route to go as far as an OS was concerned, but unfortunately, a fair slice of hardware was undetected on installation.  While I could probably have rooted out the problems and installed all the right stuff, I’m lazy, so I just opted to try FreeBSD for the first time, knowing that it offered OpenBSD’s pf firewall, which is what I was really after in the first place.  After installing the OS from a memory stick, I was pleased to find that all my hardware was detected, so off I went.

Step 1: Installing FreeBSD

So installing FreeBSD over the network sounds a lot harder than it actually is.  While I could have burned it to CD and installed that way, I opted for a memstick installation, since I had one sitting right in front of me, and I’m lazy. The documentation packages are provided but no other packages, which is fine, since I was planning on doing a network installation.  After downloading the 8.0 image, I followed the instructions verbatim and used dd to image the memstick:

# dd if=8.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/sdg bs=10240 conv=sync

If you’ve never used dd, I’d strongly recommend reading the man pages, and triple checking that the of= field is your destination device. Otherwise you could nuke something you really didn’t want to.  After imaging the memstick, I unplugged it, jacked it into my laptop, fired it up, chose the USB device as the boot device, and viola! Installation prompts!

If you’ve ever installed anything other than Windows, the installation prompts should make a fair amount of sense.  The first important question had to do with HDD partitioning, but since I had no idea how a BSD system would sort its apps, I simply let the installer choose. Given that my intent was to use this as a server-class device, there was really no reason to install x11 or xorg stuff at the beginning, since a GUI is useless if it’s going to sit in a corner with the lid closed all the time. I installed essentially everything else, except the source code, since I didn’t think I’d be needing it.  I was wrong, but nevertheless, I learned later how to go grab sources when I needed them.  Network transfers went smoothly, and in no time I was up and running with FreeBSD.  Woohoo!  Now, how do I make this do all the stuff I want??

So my musical tastes have been wandering again – I was in a serious downtempo groove for a while, fixating on Bonobo and Kings of Convenience for about 2 months, plus a little quantic to spice things up from time to time. For whatever reason, I’ve kicked back into House & Afrobeat something fierce. If Fela Kuti had shorter songs, he’d be higher on my Last.fm profile! Still, I’ve been rocking out to some Tony Allen projects, King Sunny Ade, Daft Punk, Nick Warren, and a couple of other Global Underground albums I picked up. Good times in the sonic landscape!

I’ll just go with your sister instead! Hello, FreeBSD!

Damn you OpenBSD, why won’t you recognize my hardware! #$%#!

So I called US Airways early last week to redeem an about-to-expire free ticket I’d earned by giving up my seat over Xmas in 2008. I booked a flight to Denver to go skiing with my brother and gave the woman on the phone all my information. Upon completion, she said she’d email me my confirmation. Well, I never got the email, so I decided to look up the flight online. Lo and behold, they misspelled my last name. Normally, in the pre-9/11 world, this would not have been a big deal, since you never had to show ID at the security screening points, but now, even a single letter aberration will at the least get me a full cavity search, if they even let me past security. So I called up US Airways to get the ticket changed, and was informed by the nice lady on the other end that the airlines are not able to change tickets. Evidently, the TSA has taken over that function, and any issued tickets are essentially fixed in stone. In fact, the TSA controls a good portion of the back office ticketing systems. And I thought republicans wanted smaller government and less intrusion!

So I came back to blogging, which I seem to have a on/off relationship with. I do it for a while, then stop for a few months, then come back around to the idea. Since my last post was in March, it’s been 9 months since my last confession. In that time I’ve managed to retain the same girlfriend, buy a house, get promoted, and see Mexico City. Not too bad of a year. I’ve also ran all around my musical palate, moving from NIN to Bonobo to psytrance to Bluegrass to Kings of Convenience currently. I’ve been a last.fm nutter, logging all my listens on there, and it’s been interesting to see how it’s tracked over time.

Anyways, i’m back for a few months on this blogging thing. I’ll have a flurry of posts up over the holidays, i’m sure, and then I’ll get all busy with life again and forget about it for a while.

So I put an offer in on a home, but I’m concerned that the relative inexperience of my realtor will hamper my ability to complete the purchase. He’s new at this, but is backed by his Brother’s brokerage. However, I think their involvement is fairly limited, and his lack of knowledge is troublesome now that I’m nearing the jumping off point. In addition, his general demeanor and apparent lack of confidence in himself is also worrying. He says he’s confident, but his actions aren’t reflective of this. I’m having lunch with both him and his brother later this week – hopefully I can convince his brother to take a little extra time in overseeing his actions in regards to this purchase in the coming days.

I think I’m in love, and it’s really awesome!

So, since the world is facing a serious population issue, both in energy and food consumption, I vote that every employee of People, TMZ, Entertainment Weekly, US, The Smoking Gun, and all other tabloids be shot in the face and buried in a vegetable garden sans coffin, so their decomposing bodies can actually provide more value to the earth than did their more ambulatory years.

So it seems that official support for EVE on Linux is ending by next month. Personally, I think that the small corps of EVE players on Linux probably have enough combined skills to support EVE on our own. We just need to work something out. All those interested in doing so, please post!