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 Frontend Article Published on Linux.com
Here is a link to my article on Linux.com. It is my first effort, and while it turned out pretty well, I think I’ll do some things different next time. And there will be a next time. http://www.linux.com/feature/144179 Give it a read and let me know what you think!
Smart Home Media Project – Xebian
It’s been a little too long since my last post–apologies. Here’s what I’ve found out since: The pre-built Xebian/Myth distro seems to have trouble finding my backend server. Which is strange, as they are both on the same 100MB network segment. It complains about no UPnP sources. Apparently no one can watch live TV on the XBMCMythTV script…I am giving up. This will apparently be folded into the next major release of XBMC–the script developers are working directly with the XBMC team. The 1.3 release of PFSense will include support for OpenDNS via their DNS-O-Matic site. This has nothing to do with XBMC…just thought it was cool. All firewalls should be doing this! My PFSense firewall might be...
MySQL Authentication Woes – MythTVDB and XBMC
Well, this little issue hit me with a brief feeling of deja-vu. It is the exact same trouble that I faced trying to get Nessus security scanner frontend to write data to a MySQL database. I don’t know when exactly it changed, but new versions of MySQL writes passwords in a hashed table (and perhaps a new location, too) so that older apps trying to connect simply cannot read (or find) the password to authenticate the transaction. In other words, the biggest issue I was having with the XBMCMythTV script was this authentication issue. And that was only after finding the sneaky place that Mythbuntu recorded the actual password in the first place! The setup never asked me to assign one–it just popped a random password on the MySQL mythtv...
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