Moved!... and back online

Recife, 16-mar-2006 14:26

Last month I moved in to a new, larger apartment, with decent space for my home office/lab.

Among the signs that Brazil isn't all that evolved just yet is that it took me quite a few weeks to get my phone and DSL lines transferred to the new address, and not without considerable time fighting Telemar. I just can't wait until they have real competition.

I also decided to scrap Monkey, my old Pentium-166 that served as my firewall, fileserver and printerserver and replace it with Melee, my aging but still cool Sun Ultra 10 running Linux for SPARC. It turned out not to be as easy as I thought -- the PCI USB card didn't work and I had to buy one from another brand; X used to work but not anymore... well, I surely can live with the console, but I wanted this machine to be fully functional as a desktop as well; since I have a quad ethernet board, I wanted to use bridging to avoid the need of having an external switch... and I did have some trouble with the bridge-utils.

Some of the delay had to to with the fact that I wrote a whole new set of scripts for handling things -- from bridge/firewall setup and ISP authentication to MRTG and vserver stuff. But now I have what I want: a multifunction bridge/firewall/proxy-cache/fileserver/printserver that needs near zero maintenance and has decent security. And finally the Wiki is back online for your reading pleasure.

The to-do list isn't quite empty though: I plan to buy batteries to extend the UPS life on power outages (they are quite rare, but some may take more than the 20 minutes the UPS can handle), I do want to get X working again (too bad NVidia doesn't release the source to their drivers; the binaries are for i386 only), I'd like to have Solaris emulation working as well, and I still have to figure out why TWiki is so damn slow -- there must be a way to speed it up.

But the important thing is: one at a time things are starting to get on track again.
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