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Article posted on Sep 29

fo0bar in "The Adventures of fo0bar's home network!"

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 29, 2003, 10:13 pm

I built a new central router from a donated P2 266, it's currently up and running smoothly. Here's some MRTG statistics if you care.

I went to Home Depot today and picked up some network accessories. Actually, I went to Lowe's, but the only cat5 they had (which was the primary reason for going) was 500ft plenum at $85. At Home Depot I picked up 1000ft cat5e for $50, a nice crimper for another $50, some crimps, and a stand-out jack and cat5 port. The port/jack were used to create a port on the back of my tivo. Basically it's just an extension cable, but it makes the installation look better, and only cost me $4 in parts. I also did a run from the TV area (PS2 & Tivo) to the main computer area. Previously, it was connected via a wireless bridge, but since I've actually implemented security on my home network, I decided the tivo being in an untrusted zone wasn't a good idea.

DNS/DHCP has been updated, nearly the entire network is now on DHCP, and addresses are handed out via mac address. Today, I also found out about an undocumented feature in the Cisco 806 (which by the way has been end-of-life'd, damn) which allows you to accept PPTP/L2TP incoming connections, sort of a poor man's VPN concentrator. That led to a minor network reconfiguration, as shown above. The wired network still has full access, and wireless is the same (can still get outside, but can't see wired), but the VPN server has been moved from the linux box to the 806. It works pretty well.

I also nearly finished the database of working computers that I threatened myself to do one day. Here it is. If you are cool at all, you're instantly recognize the naming convention.

Speaking of which, I have an SGI Challenge S series machine at work that I plan on taking home. What should I name it? No, I'm not going to name a machine fry, leela or bender... instead I'm focusing on the non-main characters.

(LiveJournal Poll #186019)

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Article posted on Sep 23

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 23, 2003, 10:35 pm

The EPA just rated the '04 Prius as 60MPG highway/51MPG city. Wow. If only I had $23k lying around...

And no, I will not trade in my '02, I think. I'm perfectly happy being part of the Prius thing before it became a commonplace thing.

But the '04 is damn sexy....

ARGH!

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Article posted on Sep 13

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 13, 2003, 8:05 pm

Safeway brand Wheat Thins imitations taste like ASS.

That is all.

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Article posted on Sep 12

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 12, 2003, 12:21 pm

Google News RSS Feeds has been updated, after the last subtle change Google made to its layout. I wish they would provide RSS feeds themselves. Oh well.

Also included are country-specific feeds. They are:
* Australia
* Canada
* Deutschland
* France
* India
* Italia
* New Zealand
* U.K.
* U.S.
However, all other feeds (World, Business, etc) are U.S. Engish, as grabbing each feed for each region would add up to 72 feeds to monitor, as opposed to my current 16.

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Article posted on Sep 10

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 10, 2003, 11:27 pm

Blah blah pics. Operation Organize Computer Crap" is coming along nicely. Granted, "Operation Clean Up Your Fucking Apartment Before You Decide to Bring In Even More Crap" should have occurred first, but oh well. I bought a wire frame shelf unit from Sam's Club last weekend for $70. I tell you, with wire frames and zip ties, you can do nearly anything. Power strips are attached to the undersides of each shelf (and are organized so strips on one side of the unit are attached to UPSs, while the other side is plain power strips), the KVM and switches are secured (before the weight of all the cables plugged into them would tip the units over), and the print server device actually has a place of its own, dangling above the printer.

Cable management still leaves something to be desired, but at least all the wires are now dangling, instead of being balled up under the desk with the rest of the components. But it's great that the shelf system holds everything, even the Mac monitor. By the way, I only plan on keeping one of the three G3 towers shown in the pic. However, the Ultra1 will never leave me, and I don't care what people say, the Emachine makes a great windoze gaming machine.

Logically, my network used to be set up like this:

Intarnut -- WRT54G
              |
              |
            Switch
           /     \
   Everything   Canned
      Else       Yam

Of course this meant that my entire network was open to the world, meaning anybody could sniff my wireless or print to my printers (fo0bar doesn't believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, or WEP). My new setup is like so:

Linux router:
  eth2 -------------- WRT54G*
  eth1 -------------- Intarnut
  eth0 ---------\
                |
             Switch
            /   |  \
           /    |  Doomsday
  Workstations  |  Device
                |
              Printer

* 802.11g AP only, routing stuff is disabled

I'm doing PAT from eth0 (wired) and eth2 (wireless) to eth1 (outside). However, eth2 cannot directly reach eth0. To do that, you must authenticate to an encrypted PPTP server on the machine. The result is people can still steal my bandwidth (does it look like I care?), but need to authenticate first to get to printers, workstations, etc. Now, in addition to reducing the threat of random people printing to my printer (never actually happened, but I've had friends threaten :), I can set up a static tunnel between home and work on the protected side. Now I know what you're thinking... why PPTP? Yes, I know ipsec would have been easier and better, but a long time ago I promised myself that one day I would get MPPE-PPTP to work in linux. Today that happened.

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Article posted on Sep 10

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 10, 2003, 9:15 am

I refuse to post to my journal just to get girlvinyl to respond.

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Article posted on Sep 2

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 2, 2003, 5:25 pm

Every once in awhile, I see a "fact" that states that Black Rock City is the Xth largest city in Nevada, where X is usually 3, 4 or 5. Sorry, it ain't. It's the 7th largest:

Las Vegas - 478,434
Reno - 180,480
Henderson - 175,381
North Las Vegas - 115,488
Sparks - 66,346
Carson City - 52,457
Black Rock City - Slightly over 30,000
Pahrump - 24,631

All counts except BRC were taken from the 2000 census. I had the exact 2003 number for BRC lying around somewhere, but it currently eludes me. But it was slightly more than 30,000.

While it would be nice to say "Black rock city is the 3rd largest city in the state", a population of over 175,000 would really scare me. Personally, I think most people think Nevada, think Vegas and Reno, and figured every other city in the state was a one-horse town (hey, I thought that before moving here too), and just assumed BRC would be #3.

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Article posted on Sep 1

Yaaa Burning Man

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 1, 2003, 11:26 pm

Burning Man was great, and I may post the upsides of the week later, but for the moment I will explain the various injuries of the week, mainly because I'm getting sick of telling the stories already. Don't get me wrong, the things I'm about to list are small in the grand scheme of things, and are more than offset by the great experiences.

On Sunday afternoon, I got a bit dehydrated from helping to set up the shack (stock photo from last year), but a lot of water, a dose of Emergen-C (mega vitamin C and electrolytes) and a half-hour rest later, I'm fine.

Wednesday evening I lost my voice, which was probably the worst part of the trip, since it resulted in a lot of "what? what?". It's still pretty grainy.

On Sunday I took down the grey water evaporation system, and managed to scrape my leg. Nothing serious. However, about 5 minutes later, I tripped in the mud (ewwww, grey water mud) and it managed to cover the scape, among other things (namely, half my body). When all the mud dried out and fell off, I noticed that the scrape was almost completely healed. Wow, playa mud must be medicinal or something.

And here's the big one... Monday morning, as I'm helping to load the truck, a shackmate accidentially lowered the moving truck's hydraulic lift gate on my left foot. The base of the lift hit at an angle, going from slightly below my pinky toe's base to the top of the 3rd toe. After hearing me scream bloody murder for a second (which seemed to last a lifetime), he lifted it back up. At that point I went into shock and started saying things like "I'm fine, it doesn't hurt, hand me a box, I'm ready to start loading again." Thankfully nobody believed me, and they helped take my shoes off and get my leg propped up. Thankfully nothing was broken. However, after about 5 minutes, the shock wore off and I felt a pretty intense pain coming from my foot. There was some decent swelling too. After a couple hours off my feet, the swelling had gone down and it only hurt when I put pressure on the toes, which made walking pretty amusing/annoying. Now (about 12 hours later) it's just very uncomfortable to put pressure on the toes, so I walk around without a left shoe.

So that's me... We probably should have gone to the med tent for that last one, but looking back, I doubt anything would have happened differently. There were, however, two incidents that required trips to the med tent. Banjo Girl got severely dehydrated after she arrived Thursday, and ended up with 3 IV bags of saline. And yosemitesam got a head cut that required butterfly bandages, but no stitches, thankfully.

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