Joe Crotty

For the last seven years running I have been in overkill mode with my home firewall.   In my desire to learn more about networking I went overboard, as usual, and immersed myself into my own DIY home firewall project.  The objective was a solid firewall built on the tenants of modern network engineering. Basic hardware/OS setup was as follows with number one being the exterior and bigger numbers moving towards the LAN:

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I plan to upgrade and simplify  my current firewall stack and am selling off three Soekris Engineering net4801s. All machines are working and undamaged.  I would prefer to sell all three at once if possible.  $300 and all of them are yours!  Buyer pays shipping.  Pictures of them in action below the specifications.

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As promised the site was down for a few days and now back up!  I have decided to go with bluehost.com which was very easy to get set up and rolling.  Their fees are cheap due to the bulk hosting and I am hopeful the pipe throughput is decent however long I stick with this host. Ideally I would buy my own rack mount hardware and have it collocated at a data center.  This gives the greatest control (i.e., I am a known control freak) but adds the usual system administration headaches.

An example of the upshot of having your site on a host like bluehost.com with a tool like CPanel is typical OS, CMS, and various other software updates are all handled automatically behind the scenes or at the most with a mouse click. Not to mention that they take care of all the hardware, redundancy, faileover, etc… issues.  Sometimes, it’s just easier to pay for it and be done!

Later today around 3-5 PM I am dropping my current ISP Speakeasy ADSL internet connection and switching to Comcast cable internet connection.  I was on Comcast from 2000-2002 which was a good service until late 2002 when the service badly degraded due to an influx of new users.  That’s when I jumped ship to Speakeasy which has been solid for almost seven years running.  However, lately I noticed Speakeasys’ excessive latency and a few days and phone calls later I have made the decision to return to Comcast (i.e., long story and I am tight on time currently).

The upshot of all this is I will have better speeds with Comcast for daily surfing which is important to me the software engineer.  The downside is Comcast does not allow open ports and my web server, sitting behind me on the floor in my apartment from which the page you are reading is hosted at, will have to be moved to a data center somewhere.  In the intern my website will be down. Probably take a few days so be patient, please!

Ah, the summer that was not how I long to kiss you good bye.  One would think that my being laid off March meant the start of a prolific new period of athletic activity wherein I would dip my toe feverishly into every pool of enjoyment that had been denied me these past five years of toil.  But alas I was stricken physically nearly from the beginning.  A very intense two month training period indoor rock climbing set the stage to emerge from what was a three year string of injuries and all around poor performance.  Turning forty had been a boon to my mental and work skills, but I suffered physically like never before. On my last day of serious indoor training at the end of April I managed a brilliant .12c red point and then two routes later it began – that nip of pain in my right elbow that signaled things were not well. I took two weeks off and the pain resumed slightly abated as I launched into a first ascent project in Eldorado. No sooner was the project complete then I left for a two week non-climbing vacation/pilgrimage in Europe with my lovely wife.

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