Better Off Binary

General Geeking

2008-04-05T18:42:00.004-04:00

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.

FiOS!

2008-01-29T10:42:00.001-05:00

On Sunday the FiOS installer came and completed the install. I kept asking him questions. I wonder if he got annoyed with my pestering him all the time. Got the 3-in-one package (with a 19" HD LCD on the way). The 3-in-one includes:
-internet 15d/15u
-Direct TV premium package
-phone (with battery backup) -- no it is not VoIP

The install took around 6 hours. After he leaves, I of course start with the tinkering. The edge device (a MI424WR) is an embedded modem/router. It has a very nice web interface, 802.11G, coax/Ethernet (WAN), and 4 10/100 Ethernet LAN ports.
I had wanted to keep my set up with the IP Cop as the primary edge device and the MI424WR as a modem only. A quick Google search quickly found instructions on how to do this, and I tried it out. It worked very well - or so I thought. IPCop got a Verizon IP Address no problem, and I was off and running.
Then - later that evening, when trying to look at some TV, it is discovered that the direct TV, and on demand features are powered by the internet, and routed by none other than the MI424WR that I disabled as a router and turned into a modem only. So I go back and undo everything. But it is not working. I'm not getting a new IP Address. Device status is red and the admin page says "Waiting for DHCP Lease..."... and so I wait. Nothing. I'm thinking "Oh no! I broke my FiOS in less than 4 hours!". I phone tech support (now it is about 12am) and they help me out. Turns out the IP Cop didn't communicate with Verizon's DHCP server and release my IP. So the Verizon tech released my IP and boom, the MI424WR picked up an IP after a power cycle. The TV service was working again.
This is kind of annoying to me, because I have a lot on the IP Cop that makes it a good edge device, things like DynDNS updates, port forwarding, etc. I _can_ do that with the MI424WR, but I'd really prefer not to. It just isn't as feature rich as IP Cop. It's got great features, don't get me wrong. The web admin interface is very thorough and easy to use. But it still is just an embedded device.

Hmm. Upgrades.

2008-01-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

Well - I've been slowly building up. I just put a 24port gigE vLan switch on the rack. Should work well with IPCop & the several LANs I have running. Also should cut down on the crowding. I am looking into getting some Draft N stuff. Turns out you can put DD-WRT on either a WRT300 or a WRT350. One or two of those combined with an unmodded WRT600N for the access point should speed up playing uncompressed DVDs over the wireless.

Also cannot wait for FreeBSD 7.0 to be released. New features will include ZFS and XEN. I use ZFS currently in a 5TB raid-z2 on OpenSolaris, but I am switching back to FreeBSD as soon as I can. I have been downloading and testing the Betas and Release Candidates - trying to get my feet wet with BSD again. Ports are a thing of beauty.

Also been learning screen, and rtorrent. I have slowly but surely been switching misc daily tasks to command line just so that I can use them with Screen. I imagine soon I will be using Finch with screen as well.

Current programming projects include something I am very excited about and am nearing completion on a v1.0 on. It is called TimeFly. It is a simple, quick and easy to use time tracking software. Project goals are:
1) Learn Ruby/wxRuby
2) Cross Platform
3) Simple to install and use
Along the way I have learned about YAML, and SQLite3. It has been very educational, and once released I hope it will be useful as well.