UPnP & NAT-PMP for pf
January 29, 2008
A UPnP & NAT-PMP implementation that integrates with pf is interesting to me. I may very well try it, but it seems… potentially questionable.
Category computers
Address Cache Timeout
January 28, 2008
Do any of you know what is a typical timeout for the address cache on a switch? After some initial problems with the default 240 second address timeout, I’ve found that dropping the timeout back to 5 seconds clears up the problems I was having with moving machines to other ports.
That said, 5 seconds seems a bit low to me, as every time a machine starts to talk after that there will be a brief broadcast to all interfaces. So, I’m thinking 30 seconds, but I’m not sure…
Any idea what the default is on commercial network gear? I’m thinking that Cisco stuff is five minutes, but that seems a little low to me…
Interfaces Galore!
January 27, 2008
I’m going to hide this behind a cut because it’s just a bit of bragging / dorkyness about having lots of NICs in one box:
OpenBSD on PPC
January 26, 2008
OpenBSD 4.2 (macppc) on a Powermac G4 AGPOpenBSD on PPC, specifically
Well, at least it’s now booting…
It might be nice to shove a bunch of four-port NICs in here and use it as a firewall / hub / bridge / switch thing. Then I could do what is essentially per-port / per-device monitoring and firewalling. I think it would work well to have the Airport Extreme on one port, my Mac Pro on another, the workbench on one, the Xbox 360 on yet another.
I wonder if this thing can run without a video card…
This would be good for ACK prioritization which would really help me out when loads of photos are uploading. Hmm…
Oh, also, the nifty real framebuffer, high-res, serif font is kinda neat.
I think next I’ll try and clean it out (it’s full of cat dander), get it booting from flash, and get the noisy fans sorted out. Right now it’s only pulling 54 watts, but I’d love to get that even lower if it’s going to be a firewall.
Hmm, if I got an Airport card for it (anyone have one of these — the old, original one?) I could also have an open AP, with monitoring, which only has access to the public internet. That’d be handy.
Consolas
January 18, 2008
So, I’ve switched my terminal and editors to using a rather nifty new(ish) font from Microsoft called Consolas.
It’s a monospaced font designed specifically to look good with ClearType on, for code or terminals.
To be honest, I really quite like it.
HP LaserJet 5L
January 10, 2008
My On Christmas Eve of 1994 my parents gave me a HP LaserJet 5L. At the time it cost somewhere around $400 – $500, but was one of the most affordable laser printers for home use. Over the years it’s been particularly helpful to have a laser printer around home. With the wonders of toner (over ink) it’s been a great, reliable printer, except for back in 2001-2002 when I had to replace the rollers because they were no longer picking up paper. Tonight the pickup rollers stopped picking up paper again. I haven’t investigated if it is possibly something more than the rubber on the rollers, but I hope not.
I’ll probably first try to clean the rollers with alcohol, but I may just have to buy a kit like this one and replace them. I’m tempted to give the printer up to the gods, but that’d be a bit wasteful, so even if I give it away I’ll probably get it into a working state first.
It’s a great PCL printer and works great with Windows, but as OS X uses Gimp-Print / Gutenprint for its generic drivers, dithered images tend to look like poo. That all makes me want a PostScript printer, but one of those won’t be very cheap. It would be really nice to have one with a built in print server so that I could finally stop using the (as old as the printer) 10baseT / 10base2 JetDirect EX Plus. Although that thing works great too, and any OS which can do any sort of network printing at all can find a way to send data to it…
So, I’m not sure what I want to do yet, but I do know that I can’t quite afford a new printer. Ah well, at least it’s had a good run.
Best of Bootie 2007
January 2, 2008
So, those Bootie comps that I rather like? Well, the Best of Bootie 2007 one is out too.
For your (and my) convenience, I have put all the normal and bonus tracks together, applied the artwork to them all, cleaned up the artist/album/track number/whatever stuff on the bonus bits, made the bonus stuff disc 2, and uploaded it all.
Want this version with the more useful metadata? Grab it here: Best_of_Bootie_2007_iTunes_Bonus.zip
It’s all ready to drop into iTunes and sync over to an iPod or whatnot.
UPDATE: Sorry, I had to pull this as it was consuming too much bandwidth.
!!!
December 23, 2007
Well, there goes my working MAME machine. Things were going well, with Windows 2000 having been installed so that I could use the win32 binary of a new version of MAME. I wanted to change the BIOS logo, so I first ran the BIOS updater from MSI to get the latest BIOS on there (the version I was going to add a new image to), and things just stopped.
The damned MSI bios updater has killed this board. The on-board diagnostic LEDs simply light as all red, which is (supposedly) indicative of a defective CPU. Bah.
Also, I’ve noticed that for the last few days the power at my house has been running at 59.9 MHz lately, not 60. I find that odd.
UPDATE: I just remembered that I had another one of these boards here, but a bad one. I just swapped BIOS chips and poof, things work again. Damned MSI.
AWS?!?
December 11, 2007
Wow, I just received this piece of email:
Added the following hosts to /etc/hosts.deniedssh:
72.44.44.9 (ec2-72-44-44-9.z-2.compute-1.amazonaws.com)
Looking through auth.log shows 18 attempts before things were blocked. Looks like people have taken to using AWS for scanning. Great.
HELO
December 5, 2007
After not receiving the shipping notification for something I received last night, I have decided to try disabling Postfix’s HELO validations on my server. This will likely lead to far more spam being delivered, but it should eliminate odd rejections from non-compliant servers.
I had smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_hostname set, which can be referenced here. The problem was some sites wouldn’t send a proper HELO, leading to mail not being delivered as it should have been. Maybe it’d be best to have a SA rule which marks down improper HELOs instead of simply blocking them.
If spam levels get too high again, maybe I’ll go back to the old restrictions. They generally work fine.