Farcorfe

After almost 8 years sterling service, my old P3 500 expired earlier back in February, forcing a impromtu upgrade. I have taken the opportunity to update the OS to the latest FreeBSD release (7.0) and moved the box from the garage into the study, where it also runs KDE for standard desktop tasks.

The box now runs smoothly on a Duron 1.3Ghz, with 1Gb of RAM and a Nv 5500 G-card, so still pretty low spec to todays standard of dual or quad core, but as most tasks are achieved via the CLI, rather than the fancy KDE GUI, then most tasks still zip along.

I hope to publish my re-installation hints, tips and woes at a later stage.

Couple of techy updates. Bought a new Linksys router to replace the one that has given at least 5 years sterling service. Now that the kids are online I wanted something that was a big more robust and had some parental controls. As I host this website at home I wanted a router that did Loopback. (this is the ability of a router to apply a dynamic hostname back to itself and still present the content as the general public see it). It seems to be a feature lacking on a number of routers, especially all the ADSL ones I have had the misfortune to come across, so if you try and view your own domain name, all you get is your Router config page! Suffice to say, the Linksys WRT54GS does support loopback, (and on multiple firmware as I have already patched to the latest version).

By disabling the gateway mode on the old BEFSR41 and connecting it via the uplink port to the WRT54GS, I effectively have a 7 port router in the office to connect the upstairs and downstairs segments of my home network. The old Buffalo AirStation has been moved into the loft to provide a 2nd Wifi cloud, basically acting as another router and Access point for upstairs. This is probably complete overkill, but hey it works and cost me nothing.

The other key success was getting the reverse DNS working again on the server. Without RDNS you can’t run a proper caching server for the rest of the home network. With this fixed, my home pc’s have the local server set as their 1st DNS entry in their network settings. For sites that seem to pull content from multiple domains/servers for 1 page, like the BBC or some forums that host their graphics else where, I generally see webpages built in a 3rd of the time.

The only bad news is that my ISP (Virgin Media) appear to have introduced bandwidth throttling between 16:00 and 00:00, so if I download too much, my up and download speeds get capped. This could impact the speed at which this website loads during peak demand hours, regardless of how busy the actual server is.

Well, hopefully I have cracked how to add pics and video’s to the site. You will be able to tell by clicking on the link below, so see a short clip of the girls. Other than enjoying the sunshine, I have been busy trying to install and configure a secure FTP server, but still some way to go.

Nope.. that did not work.

Just testing, just click the pointy triangle to play!

The last 6 months seem to have flown by, but no surprise really after running around after the 2 munchkins and holding down a full time job. Not had a great deal of time to dabble on the PC’s but have managed to update the Server to the latest release of Freebsd, and re-organise the disc space. Suppose I have managed to land 2 key projects
1. Fixed the ethernet connections that service the upstairs rooms in the house. Which means streaming video off the Sky box no longer relies on Wireless, so drop-outs and lag are a thing of the past, plus full access to the music collection to each bedroom. Not sure if it adds real value to the house, but it keeps me happy!
2. installed Azureus onto the server as a headless service. Azureus is a popular client for file-sharing which is how I now view most of my rugby, but generally relys on the nice point and click interface of a GUI, running off a server that has no monitor attached is a bit more difficult. With a bit of research and no small amount of luck, I have managed to get it running on FreeBSD. I really must write up the process, even if only for the experts to tell me there is a much simpler way… but no-one seems to have done that yet according to Google!

The kids spent the weekend with their mum, so while it was quiet, in addition to a load of DIY I had been putting off, I had a few hours spare to do some of the more demanding techy bits, like format the spare drive and add it into my server.

I also managed to upgrade my freebsd desktop box to v6.2, as a friend very generously donated a new G-card for it, as its main use is as a media front end for capturing video and streaming it around the network. The Nvidia ports where no longer supporting the “ancient” GF3 that it was previously running on.

With the additional storage in place, I was also able to move all the download files and photos back into the website, so expect to see them linked soon.

Finally got around to rebuilding the server to the latest release after 18 months of solid performance. The main reason was to install more HD capacity, but I decided to juggle the HD’s around and update the OS to the latest secure build. However with all migrations I have several things left to complete, like

Hopefully most of these will be fixed this weekend, so check back for progress.