The Screaming Viking

For the past couple of years we’ve been getting the kid a “trip” for her birthday.  Last year we did a taylor swift concert in the cities, for this birthday she wanted to do some water park thing.  Sara looked around a bit and found a decent water park pretty close to the mall of america.  The Fargo school system decided to give the students a month off…so we decided we’d have her pick a friend and take off on the trip of a lifetime!

I was dreading this trip.  Not like you dread Monday…I was flat out dreading it.  Going places with the family is a hit and miss ordeal.  Sometimes it’s fun (vegas was a good time) and sometimes is a problem (lots of trips to the farm).  The huge disconnect the wife and I have over this stuff is how we get going.  I decide that I want to leave town by X time and it’s a ridgid deadline that I get mad if we miss…the wife, on the other hand, views that time more like a guideline than anything else.  In her defense she has gotten way better over the past 5 years.  When we first started this crap, if I said “on the road by 4″ we’d be lucky to get out of town by 7…and that’s with me pushing people out the door.  Now it’s more like 430.  That’s fine…and I need to relax a bit.  Read the rest of this entry »

Man, this thing has been irritating me for the past couple of days.  I ran an update on it a week or so ago, that turned out to be a mixed bag.  Some aspects of it were running better, the system over all seemed more responsive…but other parts of it didn’t work.  Some dns stuff was screwed up, the adzapper stopped working and dansguardian wasn’t functioning.  I was able to get dansguardian working without any problems, but the adzapper proved to be a bit of a challenge.  I messed with all sorts of things, dug deep into the configuration…and managed to really screw the pooch.  In the end the thing wouldn’t even come up anymore.  I suppose I could have continued to screw with it, but the easiest option was to just roll back with the backup I made before I ran the upgrade.

The rollback was going to have to wait until the next day (this was sunday night) because the box is so ridiculously slow…I didn’t have time to baby sit it.  In the mean time, I thought it would be simple to flip the linksys router from switch/dhcp server mode into router mode…man was I wrong.  When I first set this conglomeration of stuff up it took me quite a while to get the router configured to handle dhcp.  From what I’ve read the smoothwall is suppose to be able to handle dhcp, but for some reason I haven’t been able to get that configured.  With my setup, it was easier to set the wrt54g to hand out dhcp…I think I need to revisit this setup.  I screwed with the router for around 30min before I got irritated enough to say it’s not going to work till tomorrow.

The next day I start reloading the firewall.  There is a mod that allows you to make backups of the entire setup and burn it to a cd.  It reloads the firewall software via the smoothwall installer, then somehow drops in your config files.  It seemed to work pretty slick.  I would like it to be a bit more automated, I think there were 2 points where I had to interact with the install.  I hooked it back up to my network…nothing…nadda…can’t get out.  Can’t even ssh in to the thing.  After cussing and hollaring for a little bit, I finally decided to switch the network cables around…yep, works fine now.

I am getting some strange redirect message when I tested a ping to google.com.  It redirected from my router to the firewall.  I don’t remember seeing this before…and if/when I use smoothwall’s dhcp server this should be resolved.  If I had the chance to go back to school for one thing it would be networking…there is so much I don’t know about this stuff.

For the past few weeks there have been periodic issues connecting to the IMAP server on techno.  I’ve not made changes and haven’t been made aware of changes on the host’s side.  The issue seems to get worse and worse as the day goes on, with the pinnacle being between 1500 and 1900 central.  I submitted a ticket to the hosting provider and they are “monitoring” the situation.  Oddly enough, after I submitted the ticket the server itself seems to be running more snappy than it has in a couple months.

When midco comes to town I’m going to consider bringing techno back in house.  We’ll see how that works out.  I am fine with paying a provider a few bucks to run it for me.  Then I don’t have to think about power outages or keeping my server up all the time to make sure I get all the mail that should be coming in.

I noticed the other night that my smoothwall had a couple of updates that were waiting to be installed.  I had tried to install them once before but it was not too happy about downloading the tarballs.  I’m not sure when the newest patch came out, but I assumed the server was just busy and I’d come back to it later.  I had time last night to take a look at this again, this time instead of just trying the update right away…I ran a backup and then ran the update.  I have a good backup I could revert to, but I can’t remember if I made any changes since then.  I knew it would work, but I’m not sure if it would have all the adjustments I’d made.  I hate running backups on this thing when I’m waiting to do something…it’s an -old- desktop and the disk is ridiculously slow.

I finally got the backup made and copied off, then ran the update.  Much to my surprise it went through really quickly…no errors or hiccups.  I can’t remember for sure if it prompted me to reboot or if I just decided to reboot it…but I restarted it after wards.  For something like this, it makes sense to me to restart it after an update.  She came back up without an error…and everything was rolling..or so I thought.

For whatever reason, external dns that comes back in to the house doesn’t work internally, make sense?  If I’m inside my network and I try to ftp in to the address that external users hit to connect to my ftp server it fails.  Everything resolves properly…for whatever reason things just fail.  I’m not sure what is going on.  Everything works fine from an external machine, and works internally if I hit the internal dns…weird stuff.

I’m hoping to get a faster machine for my firewall.  Initially when I was setting this up I didn’t want to spend any money because I didn’t know if it would work and solve the issue I was having.  For a specific application I was getting so many external connections that my linksys router was dying trying to manage it all.  Setting up this cheap desktop took care of the issue.  Now I’d like to spend about 100 or less, get an older 2.5-3ghz/2gig box with a SATA drive.  If I step up to the SATA drive I think I would be able to run some real time virus scanning.  Right now that kills my connections.  Sometimes even just dansguardian (content filter) kills the connection.