Month: July 2008

While I’ve always loved and used Smoothwall for years, I’ve been having trouble getting it to recognize a Compaq DL320 that I had sitting here in the office. I intentionally bought the IDE version of the server (which I got on eBay cheap) because I figured it would be more compatible than the SCSI version. I was try to find something that fits nicely in the rack-server setup I’m building. But Smoothwall, no matter what I did, could not recognize the IDE controller. So I decided to give Endian — an IPCop fork which was originally a Smoothwall fork — a try. Endian is basically a version of IPCop with all the cool modifications and add-ons already built in. And lo-and-behold, it just worked — and I didn’t have to monkey with it other than setting up my firewall rules. And I now have a speedy little firewall that takes up far less space than before (1U versus a tower).

I still love Smoothwall’s community as it’s full of tons of useful folks and great modifications, but if I ever need to install a firewall system on Compaq server hardware again, it’ll be on a Endian box.

There’s a really ugly DNS security issue that’s affected pretty much everybody, you need to make sure you’ve patched everything you can. While nobody really knows what the problem is, considering that the domain name system is the Internet’s backbone and if it gets broken, it’s a bad thing.

Thankfully, OpenDNS isn’t susceptible to the attack, so you can use them safely (and encourage your ISPs to patch their DNS servers, too, or at least forward all DNS requests to somebody like OpenDNS until they can patch their BIND implementation). I’ve used OpenDNS for quite a while and have set it up at the office, and it’s worked great.