Category: Jake

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.

October 25, 2005

Well That Sucks

I busted my butt this evening to get some things done around the house so I could get some links posted tonight. I went through all my RSS feeds during my lunch break at work, so I had lots of good links. So I get home this evening, I sit down to hook up my laptop and discover I left my AC adapter in Sunriver. While that wouldn’t be a problem for most people who own laptops (considering they’re built to run off batteries) it is for me as my battery connection is shot and I haven’t had a chance to RMA the thing to get it repaired.

And since I haven’t had a chance to setup the online sychronization in FeedDemon yet, I’m pretty much out of luck here.

So (hopefully) links coming tomorrow, assuming I don’t take a bat to my laptop.

(Oh, and I know my e-mail contact form on this page is broken, giving ugly PHP errors. I’ll fix that tomorrow as well, as I’m on my wife’s computer right now, and doing PHP work is tricky on this system. Notepad just isn’t that clean and easy for me as I’m not a PHP whiz like some people and need my editor’s color coding. Update on 10/17: E-mail form fixed.)

October 16, 2005

Finally

We’re finally going to hire another full-time staff person here at the office so I won’t have to man the front desk more than I’d care to (which is why I’ve been busy as heck today — when I’m running my own schedule, I’m able to take a few minutes out of the day to blog, but not when I’m at the whim of the front desk staff, guests, etc…). Meanwhile, if anybody’s interested in working here in Sunriver, pop me an e-mail.

On top of the craziness, our recent new hire called in sick today, so I had to run the front desk by myself for about three hours today, so that was a barrel of laughs. Hopefully I didn’t screw anything up. Usually, I’d say tomorrow’s staff can fix whatever I screwed up, but they’re under trained, too. So maybe I’ll go double-check my work really quick….

October 11, 2005

DNS Troubles

I’m having some issues right now with my server that’s hosting this site (and many others). It’s affecting domain resolution on the machine. I’ve posted a support query over here (also copied in the extended entry for this entry in case people don’t want to register) that’s much too geeky for much of this site’s audience. But if you’re getting bounces when using my e-mail form on the left, this is probably causing it.

If I don’t get an answer soon, I’m probably going to have to reboot my server, which I never like to do as a server should never have to be fully rebooted (usually services can be restarted to fix most problems).

Update on 10/7: It actually ended up being a host problem. They changed some things on their routers and/or firewalls that required more declarations in our resolv.conf file. So after lecturing the host about notifying me about those minor little changes, things are up and running again. I’m changing the post time on this post so it goes below my videos post on the front page until I can get up more entries.

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October 6, 2005

How I Spent My Day

Yes, I know that headline reads like a cheesy Xanga/MySpace/MSNGroups entry, but bear with me, as I don’t have any intention about telling you about what I ate for breakfast, how I slept, what kind of shampoo I used, how long it took me to get to work, what my kids watched this morning on TV, or any other stupid thing (but if you care: Cinnamon Life, fine, whatever was in the shower, far too long, The Wiggles, and I need to buy new shoes as these things are falling apart). If you want the blog randomness, there’s plenty of that locally already. But if you’re interested in some Qwest stupidity and tax collection lunacy, read on….

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October 3, 2005

122 And Counting

That’s how many blogs I now have over at Bend Blogs after coming across a pile of LiveJournal folks in this public directory (thanks to this ORTalk post). I’m still working on a way to better index all that content so it doesn’t bulldoze my server (as aggregating all that content is a bit of a processor hog with off-the-shelf solutions, and I’m not cool enough to be able to home-brew my own software like Paul did at ORblogs). I know I need an RSS feed for it as well, and that’s on my never-ending to-do list. At some point, I’d like to integrate a rolling Bend Blogs file that I can include into the “Bend Blogs” links on the right side of this page (which hasn’t been updated in a long time) that will show that latest 15 or so blogs that have been updated.

As always, pop me a note if there are any sites that I’m missing (or if you want to suggest a fairly simple but robust aggregating solution that I can actually tweak fairly easily).

October 2, 2005

Free Stuff

I’ve got some stuff that needs to go, and I just don’t feel like putting it on eBay. The items came from our lost and found here at the office, they went unclaimed for three months, so they’re going in the garbage if nobody claims them (and I’m certainly not giving them to Goodwill).

Here’s what I’ve got sitting here (all “as-is” as I have no idea if any of it works, and I’m linking to a site-customized Google search for reference on each part that I have a model number for, just to experiment with the custom Google search). Either you come pick it up at my office, or PayPal me the shipping to ship it somewhere.

  • An X-Box Remote pending
  • A Canon Camera Battery Charger (Model CB-2LT)
  • A Motorola Phone Charger (Model PSM468OA)
  • An iPod Power Adapter (Model A1003).

If you’re interested, pop me an e-mail at jake [at] this site’s domain [dot] com.

September 27, 2005

NEED: Basic, No Frills, Dial-Up Service

I’m setting up a computer for a friend of mine who wants dial up access where she’s at (she’s not online much, and can’t get DSL, etc… where she lives). It’s been a long while since I’ve shopped for Dial-Up service, so I post here: I need a cheap Dial-up service that has local phone numbers in Bend, Oregon. I don’t need any of the fancy crap that gets installed with many of the providers (I’ll install my own pop-up, spam, virus, and spyware blocker, thank you). I just need good, reliable, dial-up access.

I have a back-up account through Surf Best that my in-laws mostly use (and I use it when I’m on the road and can’t pirate a connection from somewhere), but I just wanted to know if there was anything else out there that might be cheaper.

Any recommendations?

September 27, 2005

Unplugged

If you wondering where I’ve been the last few days, here’s my story. It’s something every wired person should do: Just Unplug. That’s what I did the last couple days (my weekend). After I left the office on Thursday night, I locked my laptop away, turned off my cell phone, and didn’t get online for my entire two days off. (OK, I lied — I got on my wife’s computer to check the TV Listings when the TV Guide channel was running that concert on top of the listings. But that was it).

It was therapeutic, actually. After checking my voicemail and e-mail today, I probably should’ve paid attention a bit more, but you know what? It can wait. Every geek needs a break, and considering all the things I have to do today that are due in the next couple days, I really needed it.

Now, back to work.

September 11, 2005

Transfer Succeeded

As I mentioned earlier, I was trying to get my five-year old into a closer school via a district transfer. Finally, one week before school starts and after several phone calls and meetings, it’s official: The transfer is going to happen. I’ve gotten confirmation from both schools, and my daughter is, needless to say, excited and can’t wait to go to school (and they even had an opening in our preferred morning time slot).

August 30, 2005