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After hours of struggling, I narrowed down my problem with my firewall… one of the NICs was dead. After painstakingly trying to see which one failed and which on was which, I got it running about 8pm today.

However, it works now, and all is well. I’m hoping to show off this custom solution to other people and develop these systems for them.

In other news, I played tuba at the cathedral for an ordination of 3 priests. Sounded pretty cool.

Tomorrow, graduation for 2008 and I’m gonna be there to play tuba again!!

Eh… screw it… good nite

Kevin

I dug up an old machine I had lying under my bed and decided to find a use for it. I have become ever so dissatisfied with my current store-bought appliance router wasn’t cutting it. It kept needing to be refreshed.

This machine is a clunker – 10gig hard disk, 256 mb of RAM, 800 Mhz processor, a DVD player, and some empty PCI slots. I dug around in my closet and found several network interface cards (NIC)s. So I popped those in, dowloaded a distro of Linux called Smoothwall, and I was on my way.

I had a red, orange, and green zone firewall up in minutes – (well hours, because I kept messing up the installation). But the installation only took a few minutes.

However I, being curious, messed around with some important settings… so I have to restart, and plus I think on of my NICs went bad… soooo back to the beginning… which isn’t bad, because I will learn to become efficient at install this software.

Check it out: google smoothwall.

Kevin

Hey everybody, I’m planning out my new summer project. I want to learn more about networking, so what a better way to learn than hands on?

So beings the quest.

I am planning on building a customized network solution.

• email server (just for the hell of it)
• firewall (the netgear box is scaring me, it keeps dying)
• i may make my webserver and my email box one thing….IDK yet

So once that is up and running, I will then offer email addresses out to people and host websites, until then it may be shotty… but we could give it a try.

I have a map drawn up, made during the absence of learning in a specific class during school…

Once done, I will photograph the event – I swear – and post the config and how I did it… roughly so no one breaks my beautiful system. I’m doing this low budget and as open-source as possible – wish me luck.

Kevin

My mom bought a new laptop recently – nothng fancy, just the one’s they’re getting rid of in the stores. You know the ones that cost $450 and such. It came with Vista on it. I sat down and seriously considered leaving it on, but after I finished making the ‘recovery discs’ in Vista, I changed my mind.

Everything went pretty smoothly in terms of finding drivers – except for the sound card driver… apparently, according to HP/Compaq there is no sound card in the laptop. It does not list one anywhere in the specs. After just 5 hours of Googling, I found it! But it only works a little. The sound output only goes all or nothing. It does respond to the volume of individual apps and changing the wave volume will damper the blaring noise.

All, in all I will put the drivers I used for the laptop onto my site, so if you have the same laptop and are wishing to do the same, you may do so a bit more with ease.

Kevin

Yea, I went with my sister and a bunch of friends to see Baby Mama. It was 1 hour and 40 minutes that I could have been studying for finals, yet I failed to do so. At one point in the movie I wanted to crack open my textbooks and let the words fill my head with something interesting. There were very small parts of the movie that made me giggle like a little catholic school girl, but other than that, I felt the plot was very predictable and unoriginal.
It was a good time with the (few) friends I have – quality not quantity so that made up for the loss of nearly 2 hours of my life.

On a tech note, I need a new firewall / router… the one I have is not cutting it. If you notice the site goes down frequently because I think it becomes too loaded at times… whatever.

Good night and good luck,
Kevin