PhilipLawlor.com

I must say I am impressed by the SmoothWall firewall. It has a fantastic interface and it was an easy install. A little reading ahead of time and an understanding of firewall zones helped get my firewall knowledge converted to Smoothie talk.

I started with a PIII-400c Compaq, 256 MB RAM and a 1.5 GB HD (I will replace that with a CF card when the IDE-CF adapter comes in), 1.44 Floppy, a CDROM and 3 NIC’s. After a video card swap (AGP1 not AGP 2) and a few CDROM swaps, I found one that worked…why do I keep the broken ones…and the install went with out a hitch.

Since I have web/email servers, wifi and hardwired clients, I choose the GREEN + ORANGE + RED configuration. This was probably the hardest choice of the install. (more…)

Now that the Web server is running and the database is being backed up it is time to create a failover webserver. I had grandiose dreams back in 2006 when my main web server took a dive and I needed to buy a new server. Why not get 2 identical servers and run them in parallel, I don’t have that kind of money that’s why! So along came this tiger catalog (I wont say their full name…) Look I can get 2 computers for the price of one Dell!!! BIG MISTAKE!!! One system went up w/o a problem, but the other has a new power supply, memory, MB and CPU and still it sits in my closet, I believe the MB is giving another error code, I will never buy an ABIT MB again.

After investigating the how to create failover systems, I came upon 2 articles below that are good foundations for the principle. Linux-HA is a great website that reads like a dictionary, not a how to site. So I am looking for a few articles that will guide me through the process. Here are a few: (more…)

The next task for me is to put in a real router, I have 5 IP addresses and I am currently running with 3 off the shelf Linksys Home routers. I would need to buy 2 more to use all 5 IP’s, the cable router is a 4 port Cicso which makes it impossible to use all 5 IP’s. The capabilities of these home routers are extremely limited and I have maxed out each one with how many rules they can have (20). One old PC, LRP and webmin can solve this issue for me. I have been “Mind-Planning” this for some time and this article from Linux Journal gave me the inspiration.

FYI: LRP, Linux Router Project, went off-line in 2005ish. I used LRP disks for years (1998-2006) as Seti@Home clients. I booted old computers from the floppy and loaded a Seti client from another disk and let them do all the calcs in memory. When ever the power went out I had to re-launch all systems.

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