technology at home

November 26, 2002 &bull technology

Here’s some stuff that I’ve been working on at home lately, mainly to keep myself busy enough so that I don’t have to study for my next MCSE test. (I’m avoiding the “design” test like the plague — I’m burned out on Microsoft tests big-time.)

I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon/evening trying to figure out how to use Samba to print from my Linux box to the Deskjet that’s hooked up to my Windows XP box. I didn’t have any luck and ended up getting frustrated after a couple of hours. A few days prior I was able to get Samba working both to and from my Linux box so I’m happy about that. I had never really tried my hand at a Samba configuration before; it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Of course, I’m not using a super-secure configuration because it’s just for testing purposes at this point. I think it can get a bit complicated if you’re shooting for a really secure configuration. Maybe I’ll tackle that at some point.

Speaking of secure configurations, I started using a piece of open source software called Shorewall. It’s a Linux-based firewall configuration utility that provides a nicer way to manage IPTables. I’m currently just using it as a personal firewall on my Linux server, but have been thinking about setting up a “real” Linux-based firewall for some time now. I might have to do this when we move into our new place in March. Our new location doesn’t support DSL yet, which completely sucks. Hence, we have to move to cable service, which I’m not very happy about for security and performance reasons. Anyway, if you are running Linux and want to mess around with IPTables without a lot of hassles, check out Shorewall.

I’m currently bidding on Nero 5.5 Burning ROM software on Ebay. I just got a Yamaha USB 2.0 CDRW drive at work, which included a free copy of Nero 5.5 Burning ROM. (By the way, the Yamaha drive is awesome.) Nero seems to work a lot better than the Roxio CD Creator software I’m currently using at home. It looks like I can snag a copy on Ebay for about $15.00 so I figured it was worth placing a few bids.

Speaking of Ebay, a few weeks ago I bought a USB 2.0 PCI card and a Maxtor 120GB USB 2.0 external hard disk. The whole setup costs about $280.00 retail, but I got it (all brand new) for $200.00, shipping included. I’m using the Windows XP backup utility to backup my entire system to the external drive. It’s really fast with the USB 2.0 interface (capable of 480Mbps versus Firewire’s 400Mbps) and was a snap to set up. I feel a lot better now that I have a more reliable backup and restore process in place.

If you would like to chat about anything tech-related, drop me an instant message or an e-mail.

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