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.
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[...] this thing has been pissing me off 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 [...]
Posted on October 26th, 2010 at 10:13 am