networking

After experimenting with Solaris 10 for a bit, I thought I'd get iStat on there so I can see it's activity on my iPhone. After getting down and dirty with Solaris for a bit, I definitely learned some things. Since iStat needed libxml2, I grabbed that from Sun Freeware and installed it fine. Next thing was to, of course, install the iStat client. When I ran ./configure it was complaining about not being able to create a C++ executable. And with gcc already installed, libraries were the issue. /usr/bin/crle -c /var/ld/ld.config -l /lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/ssl/lib did the trick.

 One of the servers that are at my disposal has a very low CPU usage percentage (if that makes sense). On my way to set up a PPTP VPN server on the box, I realized my router running pfSense could do it out of the box. In this short tutorial, I'll show you how to get a PPTP VPN working so that you can connect to it anywhere.

Head under VPN -> PPTP

Next, click on the Enable PPTP server radio button. For the Server address put in your WAN (public) IP. For the Remote address range, put in a local IP of which the range will start at. Near the end of the page, check Require 128-bit encryption.

I recently swapped out my router (a PIII) running Smoothwall with pfSense. I'll say that I'm glad I switched. Anyway, what I found is that Smoothwall wouldn't let me add another LAN interface, making it a real router.

So, once you get pfSense installed, go to Interfaces->(assign) 

 For the last week or so, my server(s) externally have been slow as hell. Now, me being not so investigative didn't check my routers logs. Well, let's just say someone was DDoS'ing me. Oh no, not the web servers. Just the tracker (Torrentino's tracker). Not someone, but a crapload of IP's. Still, making it virtually impossible to access the webserver. So naturally, me being a dumbass didn't have iptables configured....at all. Long story short, fixed it up with some iptables rules and blocking the offending IP's. The router is reporting that it's dropping the [bad!] packets, but I'm not so sure on that.

When I purchased my Linksys BEFSX41 I had two spare wireless routers a D-Link WBR-1310 and a WBR-2310 respectively. What to do? Turn them into wireless AP's (access points) of course! Increase your wireless coverage, look cool!

First thing's first, set up DHCP on your main router. For me it's the BEFSX41. Set your DHCP range, for example 192.168.0.150-199 giving you some room for wireless devices.





Now login to your router (most likely 192.168.x.1) which is converting to an AP, the WBR-1310/2310 for me. Turn DHCP off and set the router IP to below or above the DHCP range. So for example, 192.168.0.149, 192.168.0.200 etc.

A new router wasn't really necessary, but I thought I'd get one anyway. I ended up purchasing a Linksys BEFSX41. Pretty cool router, it includes a firewall and VPN end point. What I thought was (for some reason) that the router would act as a VPN server. That's not the case. I'd need to run a server in my LAN for it to be accessible WAN wide.

Since you could do a round robin setup with a DNS server, could you not do the same but with a web server?

I have two spare wireless routers, which are now AP's around the  house.

Comments or aaaanything at all are appreciated.