General Geeking

Cable management - how do I hate thee - let me count the ways....
Heh
Well - I am staring at my rack - or rather the spachetti wires going of in all kinds of directions and thinking - I should do something about that. And so today - I am going to try.
I was disappointed to discover that FreeBSD 7.0's support of the ZFS filesystem was at best. So I opted to upgrade my OpenSolaris box to a newer version.
Also I changed from IPCop to pfSense. It has been quite a learning curve. The hardest thing was discovering (after two weeks of failing at vLan) that some of my network cards don't support vLan tags. DOH! Aside from that I find pfSense to be very fun to set up and powerful to use. I am still learning its feature set. It is based on m0n0wall - which is based on BSD.
We like BSD.

In other news I went to a seminar at the National Geographic center in D.C. It was by a fellow named Doug Fine about his book entitled "Farewell, my Subaru". I highly suggest checking out his website and picking up a copy of his book. He talks about moving to a carbon neutral lifestyle. Things like running his vehicle on veggie oil, and powering his home on solar and wind power. Things I have been looking into for years now.

Ok - enough stalling - I am off to do some cable management.