Safeguarding Family Internet – Overview
(Haven’t posted in a long time–sorry for that. Been busy. Having twins unexpectedly (as if there were any other way) will do that to a guy.) Home Networks My wife and I home school our children using excellent videos from Abeka, and it works out very well. They can travel with me when the opportunity arises, work from the dentist’s waiting room, or whatever. Except for the problem of how to let the kids get to the Internet safely. Well, there’s all kinds of thoughts out there on the subject. Everything from “Don’t” (absolutist) to the school of thought that says “They’re Going to See It Anyway” (defeatist). Then there are the people who say, “My kids would never do anything like...
Linux.com Article: Protecting Networks with SmoothWall Express 3.0
Originally published at www.linux.com on December 09, 2008 at 09:00 AM; reprinted with the author’s permission. Corporations and home users alike need firewall protection. Many choices abound, including some expensive, commercial options that only run on specialized hardware. Others, like SmoothWall Express, are freely downloadable, built on the same technology as the commercial solutions, and even deliver some superior features. SmoothWall Express 3.0, from August 2007, is an open source firewall distribution released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It provides all the features commonly found in a modern system, but also a few that you might not expect. Stateful inspection, dynamic and static NAT, egress controls, demilitarized zone (DMZ)...
New Article Published – Protect Your Network with SmoothWall 3
Once again, I have pestered the editors at the ordinarily refined Linux.com into publishing an article. I had a harder time getting this one right. I was stuck in a fiction writing mode–half of the sentences I wrote were in passive voice. Very frustrating–probably more so for the editors. http://www.linux.com/feature/154568 In any case, go check out the story–SmoothWall is an excellent choice for network border...
MythTV – Final Wrap Up
I’m very happy with MythTV up to this point. It is no where near as fragile as I feared it might be–in fact, it seems to be quite robust. A recent power outage knocked its pins out from under it, but by the time I checked, the machine was already back up and running. Part of that is the BIOS setting “Last State on Power Restore,” but if the software wasn’t up to the task no hardware setting is going to help. Which reminds me, I need to get a separate UPS for all of these machines that will form the backbone of my home network. I found this website for refurbished APC units, that has great prices, but will add shipping charges. However, for the savings on some of the larger models, those fees would be negligible. For the 300VA...
New House Blues (MythTV, FreeNAS, and PFSense)
It has certainly been a busy month. We just moved to a new house–which wreaked havoc with my technology. What kicked it all off was that we couldn’t get a line-of-sight with DirecTV. So, that made me switch to Cable TV. And if I’m going to switch to cable, I can save money and get higher speeds on cable Internet (fortunately, I canceled my Dry Loop DSL the day the turned it on, so no charge). Funny thing is, I was more prepared for this move than I ever have been. I had everything scheduled well in advance. Unfortunately, it all either didn’t work, was ignored, or had to be changed. Even the trash service didn’t process my change request. The whole thing has put me two weeks behind on a big announcement...
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