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GRAFFITI -- April 19, 2004 thru April 25, 2004 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 19, 2004

0655 - Good morning. Another early starter, since I'm headed off to Gaithersburg for the day. When I ran out of steam yesterday at about 1730, I crawled into the shower, screamed while I scrubbed the dirt out of my blisters, crawled out of the shower and cleaned out those blisters with Hydrogen Peroxide, screamed some more, and finally dressed myself. (That wasn't a sure thing - it was hot yesterday, over 80 for the first time this year, here - and just laying about nekkid had it's temptations.) Instead, I got in the car and headed over to the supermarket to pick up some of that paint-on bandage stuff. There are a couple of different brands, I don't even know which one I got. Back home, I painted some on the first blister ... and screamed. There's an antiseptic built into the liquid, and it drys quickly too ... can you spell A-C-E-T-O-N-E ? I knew you could! Actually I didn't really scream, much as I thought it might help. People in the same ... zipcode ... have issue with the kind of Yosemite-Sam-has-to-be-nice-to-Bugs kind of yelling this called for. So why all this ruckus?

To see why those pictures are special, you need to look back to Saturday, when I posted the before pictures of the two nasty builder's hedges that it was my goal to eradicate. Before the light was gone on Friday evening, I'd sheared every boxwood off to stumps, and pulled the two pine stumps out. By late Saturday afternoon, I'd gotten all of the root balls out (think PAIN, and broken yard tools) rototilled and amended the beds, and got our first batch of plants laid out, framing the new planting beds. Shots of that showed up on Sunday morning.

I headed out to do the Sunday shopping and hit the nursery for some annuals while Marcia went to church. By the time Marcia got home, I was finished with my second breakfast of chocolate frosted donuts, and I was ready to hit the ground running. But the new gloves looked to cause more pain than not, so I passed on that (a big mistake). Planting in phases, we laid out our new front garden, adding more decorative grasses along the back, petunias for splashes of color, and marigolds to frame the areas where Marcia's planted the rest of her birthday bulbs - gladiolas and tiger lilies. It's nice now, and it's going to be gorgeous soon. Then I spread out 14 bags of red-dyed hardwood mulch (yeah, red. I know, but the alternative was to remulch everything, and I wasn't up for that. Besides, the green plants are a standout against the red). I added a few spare petunias to the area around the mailbox, and my day was done. Now we're caught up to the screaming bits... nah, I won't put you through that again.

Next weekend I'm reserving for something relaxing. Yeah, right! So, nothing computerish to report - I hardly touched them over the weekend. A few minutes ago the radio said we're headed into the nineties today. Time to close up the house and turn on the airconn. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming soon. Have a great day!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 20, 2004

1813 - Good evening. A busy, productive day. Yesterday evening I bagged up a majority of the hedge massacre for pickup this morning, thus taking care of any spare energy I might have had. This morning I slept in until it was time to go, then went. Got lots of stuff done, including applying the latest MS Critical Updates to the last two of my regular clients. Then we spent a bit of time this afternoon at a new client site that we're just getting started with. In between I took care of assorted administrative dross, checking for updates and problems with assorted Linux boxen I administer. A good day. Hopefully, I'll have more for you tomorrow. Have a nice evening.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 21, 2004

0633 - Good morning. After that brief evening post yesterday, I noticed that the small tree in the front yard had come into bloom. How pretty! It had been looking pretty dead and pathetic, even by winter standards. We really weren't entirely sure what was going to come up, since Fall was well along by the time we saw and offered on the house. There are lots of little nice surprises popping up, as they come into bloom, I will show them to you.

After snapping that picture, I checked the forecast for the next several days. Seeing rain, I decided I'd best mow the back yard now. Once into the job, I realized Marcia was right the other day - I'd mowed in front out of cycle. The grass was so long that it was hard to mow. But it's done. I'll have to keep a closer eye on things and setup a schedule that makes it not so hard to get the job done.

The other thing that's on my mind is a new game. I met another neighbor, Tim, over the weekend, and he's a fan of FPS games, and a little RPG from time to time. He says that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is pretty compelling, that reviewers say this game is the movie that Lucas should have made. I'm looking for input here, folks. Is it a good game? Will I have fun? Is there another game I should get instead, given my predilection for RPGs and SciFi by taste, and FPS games for playability?

When Tim and I were talking he asked if I played PC games. My first observation was that I used Linux. In many ways, I suppose it's the same thing. I install new ones all the time, I struggle through the beginning stages, sometimes using walkthroughs (HOWTOs), but generally conquer at the end. So yeah. And of course I have a gaming partition on Goldfinger that boots into the gaming OS, one of those from Redmond, neh? Recently I finally got around to playing Deus Ex, more than a year after it's release. Not bad, but now life is scary every time I'm told to be in a meeting with someone from FEMA...

You can see from the timestamp that I'm making an early start of things. The good part is that I'm doing so anyway. I was a good boy and headed to bed early last night, just after 10, as I have been really active the last few days and a bit of sleep catch-up is a good thing. So of course it was too hot to sleep well. I tossed and turned for about 2 hours, realized what was going on, and went downstairs, turned on the airconn. Better for sleeping, but late by the time it cooled down. Now I'm running ragged. Such is life. I'd best be on my way. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 22, 2004

0740 - Good morning. In all the system and disk changes that have been going on around here in the last few weeks, I lost track of my gaming partition. Yeah, the one that runs Win2K. I'd left a little over 32 G on the front end of Goldfinger's drive for the purpose, but somehow never dd'd the data into it. And frankly, it's not worth looking for among all the old drives. I'd probably wiped it, and just forgot to take a note.

So last night I went at it. It turns out, of course, that Win2K won't install in a logical partition, even one at the front of a drive. So I booted into Knoppix, used dd to grab the first 512 bytes off the drive (for the primary partition table backup), and sfdisk to get a full partition table listing, including logical partitions. I copied both of those over to Garcia via scp. Then and only then did I use cfdisk to extricate 32G out of the logical partition and put it to use as hda1. I left a little behind, and made a small hda5, since I'd already restructured all of the setups in my various linux installs to work with an hda5 in place. Otherwise I would have had to go back to re-edit those grub.conf, lilo.conf and fstab files all over again, and that wasn't happening.

Once the partition was setup properly, installation was a breeze. Of course, all those careful ops with the partitioning ate my evening, when there was other work to be done, but so be it. And the windows install itself took some dozen or so reboots, between the basic install, drivers for motherboard components, and drivers for add-in cards (SB Live! and Radeon 9700). When I was done, everything was working fine. Then I called it a night.

I'm still looking for input on game recommendations. I didn't hear from anyone yesterday, but then we're all working hard, aren't we. Speaking of which, I have to build a platform to get a couple of client servers up off their floor today. So I'd best go get the saw and assorted other tools into the back of the car, and get on my way to work. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
April 23, 2004

1214 - Good afternoon. I slept until it was time to drive, so here I am now. Barbara Thompson wrote to say that her coworker Kirsten recommended Knights of the Old Republic, too. That's two votes to none, so that's what I bought last night. But by the time I did some lawn work and a bit of client web work and actually installed the game, I only had time for about an hour's game play. It's not bad. More when I've formed more of an opinion. So now back to work with me. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
April 24, 2004

1010 - Good morning. My friend Mark writes:

Brian,

I connect to my existing box with windows boxes, linux boxes, and a lone
apple!

Would like to have a mail server, web server, web mail, print and file
server, DNS, ssh, ftp (inside only).  I'd like to run an anti-virus and
anti-spam on the box.  Should I think about spf for the mail?  I'd like
to have an sql package available.  Am I missing anything?  

I've downloaded the debian, made the iso, and will install if you give
me the WORD.  

The box I intend to install on is a virtually unused dual 650mhz Asus
motherboard...if that makes any difference.  Running ide drives (I think
it has 2 40 gig drives) and a cheap video card.  

Mark -

Oh. Okay. Slowly, slowly, now. Do you REALLY want to provide external services on the same hardware as you do internal services? Me? I think that's a really bad idea. On our first pass through this, you talked only about outside services, and I asked you about putting this box in a DMZ rather than inside. You haven't replied to that.

Here's what I'd do:

Internet ---\
            |
          (wan)
            |
        Firewall -- (dmz) -- External box
            |
          (lan)
            |
      [Inside Computers including home server]

Alternatively (if your ISP allows you to connect multiple computers, like I do):

Internet ---\--(wan)------ External box
            |
          (wan)
            |
        Firewall
            |
          (lan)
            |
      [Inside Computers including home server]

Either way, here's what I'd install on the external box for these services:

• Mail Server (MTA): Postfix
• Mail Server (MDA): Cyrus
• Web Server: Apache 2.x
• Web Mail: SquirrelMail
• SSH: OpenSSH
• A/V (free) ClamAV
• A/V (commercial) Vexira
• A/S SpamAssassin
• Database: MySQL

On the home server, I'd run these services:

• File/Print Sharing: Samba
• File/Print Sharing: Appletalk??? (I don't know if we can do this)
• Printing: CUPS
• Web Server (preview): Apache 2.x
• FTP: PureFTP
• SSH: OpenSSH

Question: What's the DNS for? Are you planning on being authoritative for your domain? THen we put Bind out on the external box. If all you want is a caching nameserver for inside, then we'll put it there instead. Only run services on the outside box that you need to run there.

Let me reiterate, if you only have ONE box you can dedicate to this purpose, put it outside, and only have on it outside services and outside data. Letting a box serve both inside and outside needs is insane - one configuration error or unpatched vulnerability and your home network and all of it's machines are owned. If so, then we can also put pureFTP out there too. I was suggesting staging your work on the inside box and using Apache to preview it there, then using rsync/ssh to push it up to the external box. That makes the need for FTP outside go away. Less services == better, when possible.

Think about this stuff before installing. Planning pays for itself. Now say "Happy Birthday" to me, and don't expect to hear any more from me this weekend. I'm going to relax - it's been a while.

Yeah, it's my birthday. I am no longer the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. If I were standing in the wrong (right?) place to smell Tree of Life root, I'd be eating it now, and transitioning into a much more focused being. Of course, what that also means is that evolution is done with me, neh?

Anyway, I'm going to try to relax. I haven't done very much of that for a long time. This morning I got up, went downstairs and took a nap for 1.5 hours. That's a good start to this day! Maybe a haircut next... Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
April 25, 2004

1848 - Hullo. I've been waiting to see if anything interesting was going to happen. But no, just shopping, laundry, water plants, pay bills ... blah, blah, blah!. The minutae of everyday life consumed me today. No use boring you with details. Check this out instead: Da Vinci 'car' is brought to life. That should lead to plenty of good surfing. See you next week (or tomorrow morning, your preference).

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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