Wow, things have been really busy lately.
Google is ticking along nicely, though I need to get my teeth more into the production stuff than I have done so far.
No date set for the wedding yet, though it’s almost a certainty that 30th August 2002 will be the date that lives in infamy.
We finally got DSL last week. After 18 months in the USA, with nothing more than dial-up service (and poor dial-up service, at that), I finally have a fast connection to the Net again. What a difference this makes to one’s quality of life.
In the wake of recent events, it seems almost absurd to find happiness in something so trivial, but it really is nice to have this little luxury.
So, I’ve installed one of my servers with bind 9.2.0rc4 and configured that securely. Next in line is Postfix, followed by Apache.
Once those are optimally configured, I’ll start pointing to my own box for Web and e-mail, moving it away from The Netherlands for the first time in 7 years. The end of an era.
I’ve already modified my whois information to point to this new box for DNS, but that DNS currently just points back to The Netherlands for Web and e-mail. I’ll migrate those services one at a time over the weekend. My Netgear MR314 arrived yesterday. This really is a nice piece of kit, though I was disappointed to discover that, unlike the RT314, it has no selective packet filtering capabilities. I guess I’ll fix this by placing my RT314 in front of it.
The MR314 also doesn’t have the ability to syslog to a log-host and its Telnet interface is very limited, requiring most duties to be performed via an admittedly very easy to use Web interface.
There’s also no serial port, which is a shame.
Still, the main reason I wanted it was for its wireless capabilities, and it seems to be performing very well in this area. A firmware flash to the latest version added the ability to restrict on MAC address, which is a nice security measure (though not infallible). So, the net result of all of this is that I can now hermetically seal off the computer room (which now sounds like there’s a DC10 taking off in there) and sit on the couch with my laptop, obtain a DHCP address and surf away, protected behind the NAT of this clever little gateway.
The only thing wrong with the MR314 (and any product like it) is that it’s not open source, so it’s a trade-off between trusting Netgear’s code and not having to purchase another computer with moving parts for the purpose of firewalling my network.
Anyway, time to go to work…