What's it all about, Alfie?

It's been a long time since I added much of anything to the journal, so I wanted to make the effort today to add a little bit. That's the real issue - making the effort to make this a daily task.

When I started the journal, there weren't weblogs/blogs and the standards that exist now for blogging software simply hadn't been conceived. So I built up everything from scratch and it works just like I'd like. I can do all the journaling that I need. But the one thing that's changed is the frequency that I insert entries into the journal, and I have to admit that if I had a tool that made the creation of journal entries easier, I might just leave it up and make simple, little entries as opposed to entering nothing.

So I'm starting again, and maybe I'll write a little app to make this even easier than it is now.

Hackers

OK, a few months ago I got hit by a hacker named "Spray" - as if that is supposed to mean something to all. Anyway, typical script-kiddie didn't have the first idea what he was doing, but he had enough tools to exploit my sun box, sparky. Sure, I had left it more open than I should have, but then again, I'm from a time that there weren't hackers - more correctly, when the word 'hacker' had an entirely different meaning in computer circles. Anyway, so he got in, and I went through the box finding all the little things he'd messed with. I got most of them, but not all, and so in a few weeks he was back. This time I got more, but then again not all.

On the third attack, I got everything, but at the same time I wasn't taking chances with Solaris 7 having unpatched holes and so I decided to put sparky behind a firewall so as to make my life a little easier. I just needed SSH and web access to him, and so with a little port forwarding I was in business. Well... it took a little more than that as getting the Linksys BEFSX41 working properly took more time than I had anticipated, but in the end, that's about all the real progress that was made.

Then I realized that I could put all my boxes behind the firewall if I wanted to and get rid of the extra IP addresses I had from Comcast. So I got a bigger hub and went about the job. Turned out that this job meant that I had to re-do some wiring in the house, and decided to upgrade to 802.11g so that I could get 54Mbps on my Powerbook and the kid's computer, but then everything was 100Mbps wired and 54Mbps wireless. Not bad. Not easy as it was a very long weekend to get it all working, but it's working now and that's good for me.

In general, get all the latest firwares for the routers/firewalls/access points and then start with the factory defaults and configure from there. Also, check your wiring. Yikes... that was a bad weekend.

Now I'm just in the mode of fine tuning the port forwarding parameters to make it possible for me to get the access to the machines that I want and need. For the most part, it's SSH and web, and thankfully Apache and OpenSSH can listen on multiple ports so I can have the boxes all stay on the default port numbers (22 and 80), but also have unique port numbers that the redirector can point to. Not a big deal, but it's details that all have to be worked out.