Jacques' Brain Drain

About 3 years ago, I set up a router at my parent’s place. It was basically an old 80486 box with a pair ef ethernets in it, and it ran OpenBSD. Today, they got Vonage and I ended up SSH’ing into the box to find out why the Vonage box wasn’t hitting the rest of the world.

Silly me, when I configured the machine, I used static IP addresses on the inside of the firewall. The new machine was sending DHCP requests to the firewall, which was just ignoring them. The old setup worked fine until this thing needed an IP address and I wasn’t around to give it one. Oh well….

I ended up configuring a DHCP daemon on the machine, and setting up a few firewall rules to allow it access to the network. Once that was out of the way, the rest of the work went vers smoothly. It’s a good thing, however, that I installed SSH on that box – or I’d need 2000 mile arms

The only hard part is that the DHCP daemon by default wants to listen on all ports. There’s a command line option to fix that, but to make that work with stock OpenBSD requires a bit of patience.

1. Edit /etc/dhcpd.interfaces to set the device
2. Edit /etc/dhcpd.conf to set the IP addresses, DNS info, and other nonsense. Set the DNS server to the inside address of localhost – in this case 10.0.0.1
3. Touch /var/db/dhcpd.leases or its non-existence won’t let the daemon start
4. Edit /etc/rc.conf to turn on the DHCP daemon
5. Set the firewall ruleset to allow the DHCP service to send and receive packets to the inside network
6. Verify the named configuration in /var/named/etc/named.conf to ensure that it’s properly set up as a recursive caching name server
7. Reboot the box
8. Profit

I’m finally getting ready to replace the mail system on the server set I’ve been managing. This time, I’m going with citadel instead of one of the PHP or .net based solutions. This is mainly because it’s a whole lot smaller and faster than the competing solutions, as well as being far easier to install. The basic installation took me less than an hour, and that included ssl support for IMAP and POP3.

Not only does the beast have POP, IMAP and webmail, but it also has calendar, notes, chat, and shared message support. I can’t believe that it’s as obscure as it is. Oh well… Here’s the link.

I’m doing a bit of python work with the Django application framework, and thought a picture might be in order…

Have a good day

The Olympics on the web really annoys me. The main problem I have is that there’s no continuity. There should be, optimally, one site for the entire Olympics. That site should have information on all the modern games – going back to their reintroduction in 1896. You should not, under any circumstances need to use a list like this one to find information on past games.

I like Archive.org. I really do, don’t get me wrong – but you shouldn’t have to use it to pull up old Olympic homepages. It’s not like there has been a giant break in management here. Anyone putting in a moment’s thought would have known right away that those pages would be of enduring historical interest. So why, then, did they get junked? It’s certainly not the cost of maintaining a web presence. Practically every business, small or large, manages to do that. Realistically, the cost of maintaining these websites is insignificant compared to the other costs in running the IOC and the Olympic games.

Ultimately, I think the problem is one of foresight. Electronic media is naturally of such short duration that historic preservation is an afterthought. That’s really too bad, since it can lead us to forget our past, and without our past we can’t really tell where we’re headed with our future.

I seem to be having one of those nights where you’re down for no discernable reason, and things just don’t go well because of it. Today has mostly been dedicated to cleanup – both online and off. On the good side, I got a fair bit of housework done, and I’ve laid the groundwork for more server setup and improvement. On the downside, I feel lousy and don’t know what exactly to do about it.

Right now, the next significant project on my server agenda is to finish preparing Sekhmet to move some of my hosted sites back. I’m investigating mail server software, since I haven’t yet found anything I’m really happy with. Right now I’m using a bastard hybrid system which works, but not very well. It’s a stone bitch to maintain, and gives me hives every time I have to work on it. For this reason it’s about 90% likely that I’m going to try out something cleaner and more efficient and see if I can get something to work in a more stable way.

The major thorn in my side is mail vertual hosting. I do not want to have user accounts on the machines for each mail user. I’ve had it with that solution. I think that I’ll end up with courier backed by some kind of database – probably Mysql. Well – that’s for another day…