Especially when they release inmates early. Thanks Barn for the link.
Month: October 2005
Watchguard Firewalls Can Kiss My Hiney
For the last two days, I’ve been racking my brain on a port routing issue on my old Watchguard firewall. Folks were complaining that they couldn’t make online bookings. I ping the server internally, and it appears to be responding on the port just fine. I go off-network to a few different sites to test it, and the SSL port isn’t routing on the firewall, despite the firewall logs saying it was. So I resetup the port forwarding on the firewall, still wasn’t going through. Since you have to pay a great deal of money to get upgrades to an older Watchguard firewall, or even to look at the support pages I need, I just took the firewall offline and things worked again. Since I’m not about to let the network sit open without a firewall, I had to get a new one up and running fast (as we do a good deal of business with online bookings).
I scrounged around for some parts. I managed to find an old Slot1 Pentium 2 motherboard, and I had an old Celeron 333 sitting in a closet. Found a few sticks of ram, grabbed a couple of old network cards, found an old 2-gig hard drive and CD-ROM drive in my desk drawer (I really need to clean out my desk), burned the SmoothieMods Fix 1-7 ISO, grabbed an old Dell case from the closet and built myself another Smoothwall box (which I’ve had good luck with before). After about 45 minutes of building and installing, the thing was up and running, and ports were routing perfectly. After a few more hours of tweaking, I’ve got a bunch of modifications, tweaks, and features installed that my Watchguard never had, performance is great, and management is easy (and actually works in Firefox, which I can’t say about the web interface for my Watchguard).
So Watchguard, you’ll never be in this office again, or any other office I deal with. If it can’t be done with an Smoothwall box and a bit of hacking, it can’t be done, so I’m not about to encourage anyone to pay for those things again.
Oregon RIAA Victim Sues RIAA Right Back
This is the case peer-to-peer file sharers have been waiting for. Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage”, and deceptive business practices.
Read the full claim at the above link — it’s entertaining, and I hope the RIAA loses.
If The Olsen Twins Were Neo-Nazis…
…they might have been a little like this. Key quote: “But even before that, April had decided that Bakersfield was not “white” enough, so she sold her home, and hopes that she and the girls can find an all-white community in the Pacific Northwest.” Please don’t let them move here, please don’t let them move here. We already have enough racist morons around here, we don’t need more.
Sudoku Puzzle Solver
Personally, I’m not really into Sudoku, which is apparently really popular especially among morning commuters riding the bus or train to work. It’s so popular that the Oregonian now has the puzzle in their comic section. For those of you who don’t really care about solving the puzzle, need help with the one you’re working on, or just want to impress your friends, this Javascript-based solver might be handy for you. Source code and tutorial on how the script was created is available here.
Comments Off, Server Move Coming
Just a heads up to all folks who might likely view this site today (and possibly early tomorrow morning): I’m moving this site to a new server. Now, in theory, that should cause any problems, but you never know what will happen. In the meantime, I’m turning off comments on this site for the next 24 hours to make sure nothing gets lost in the move.
If there are any problems, or you notice something a bit whacky, e-mail me at utterlyboring strudel gmail punt com (huh?).
Update on 10/24 at 9:00AM: Comments turned back on, site move completed. So far, so good, though I’m still running into some oddball MySQL and PHP errors on one site and I haven’t tested to make sure my mailing list still works. But you can now comment, if you so desire.
On a side note, this server is MUCH faster than the old one, and rebuilds go stupidly quick. I’m in the process of rebuilding all my individual archives right now, and it’s just popping through them.
If You’re Ever Going To Get Abducted…
…make sure to have one of these around your neck so the aliens will be able to get you home once you start to drive them nuts.