06-14-09
A while back I decided to take advantage of some deals on 1TB disks and bought myself 5TB of storage with the intent to build out a NAS that could serve files and streaming media using RAID5 with hot spare. The adventure took a turn as I did more research after having purchased the disk and RAID controller.
05-24-09
I finally had enough of 802.11g speeds. I use wireless almost exclusively at home and averaging around 10mbit for drive mounts was driving me absolutely batty and the obvious fix was 802.11n. The spec is still in draft at this time, however it’s widely available and I have some amount of faith that anything I purchase will be firmware upgradable to the final spec release.
Today, I finally got around to opening an XBox 360 game(Rainbow Six: Vegas 2) I bought from Circuit City two weekends ago. Only to find that there was no DVD in the case (well, other than the demo of Endwar that was supposed to come with it). Having read http://www.digitalbattle.com/2009/01/27/boy-gets-redneck-shit-instead-of-madden/ a couple weeks back, I immediately pulled the cellophane from the trash. I didn’t notice any signs of tampering when I opened it and I didn’t see any signs of tampering after pulling it from the trash.
02-22-09
I had loads of fun last night with the FreeSWITCH package on pfSense. All the fun was directly related to my VOIP provider BroadVoice and what was likely a bad initial config. It ended up taking me somewhere on the order of six hours messing with it, taking tcpdumps and analyzing them (thank you Wireshark!) to decide to try another provider (duh, why didn’t I do this an hour in?).
Interesting. Ultimately, I expect Psystar to lose, but I’d certainly like to legally run OSX on a white box, so I can only hope.
February 8, 2009 (Computerworld) A federal judge last week ruled that Psystar Corp. can continue its countersuit against Apple Inc., giving the Mac clone maker a rare win in its seven-month-old battle with Apple.
He also hinted that if Psystar proves its allegations, others may then be free to sell computers with Mac OS X already installed.
Mac clone maker wins legal round against Apple.
02-04-09
Many thanks to Scott who put together an official Avahi package for pfSense. You will need a release based on FreeBSD 7.1 for this package to work (I’m on 2.0 alpha, so this is easy). Go to the System->Packages menu, look for the Avahi package and click ‘+’ next to it to install it. Once installed, in typical pfSense package fashion, you’ll need to navigate to another page (I usually just go back to the packages screen) for the menus to get updated. Afterwards, you’ll have an Avahi menu item at the bottom of your Services menu.
In this post, I talked about setting up Avahi on pfSense as an mDNS reflector. Looks like the Avahi guys released 0.6.24 on December 12th which allows you to specify interfaces for Avahi to listen to mDNS requests on. Naturally this won’t have become a binary package for FreeBSD just yet, so I’ll have to work on compiling it. Might get to that tonight – I’ll attach a binary package to this post (assuming I can figure out how to in Wordpress) once I get a chance to get it compiled. That update solves the main issue I have with running Avahi on my firewall. While I don’t think it’ll be visible to others on my cable connection – I’ve got static addressing and it’s unlikely that the multicast will pass the router (and I’m running CARP, so disabling multicast on the egress interface isn’t an option) – it’ll be nice to feel better about it, plus I have a couple DMZ interfaces that really don’t need visibility into this.
12-29-08
I moved my iTunes library to my NAS tonight and setup Firefly to serve the library (another post). All was working great until I moved back to the wireless network which happens to be on a different subnet. My firewall is on the development branch of pfSense (currently slated for 2.0) and I’ve been bitten by some of the new interface code enough to not have the stomach to try and bridge the two interfaces (I actually tried that at one point and spent a fair amount of time fixing it), so I decided to look into Avahi some.
Not exactly what I was expecting to be my second post, but I ran across ‘glTail.rb – realtime logfile visualization‘ tonight and was quite impressed. While I probably won’t end up doing much with it, it’ll be a cool toy to play with initially. I’d love to make it a screensaver, at work I’ve got a machine on my desk that I usually SSH into, but has a console on it. Could be neat to run there. At any rate, I wanted to share this and the fact that it’s written in ruby is just a bonus for me 
Looking forward to trying this while waiting on installs and compiles tomorrow!
12-15-08
After spending days rebuilding network stuff and wishing that I was sharing the info, I decided that it was high time to resurrect this site and start blogging again. hitormiss.ucsecurity.com is no more, I’m not bringing it back, nor am I bringing back the old content, it seemed appropriate to finally use the www subdomain for this as I don’t see myself ever using this domain for anything more useful. I’ve got a few posts festering in my brain right now that I’d like to put down, but it’s too late tonight to start on them, just wanted to get the “first post” on the blog.