Clockfort's Tech Blog

So, I successfully managed to broadcast a “cshnowires-psk” network from my makeshift router. However, the encryption of the tunnel between the networks is NOT making my router’s 200MHz MIPS CPU happy – in fact, it’s maxing out at around 50KB/s with a strong wind behind the back of the bits.

Looks like I’ll have to have a Real Machine (TM) to do the encrypt/decrypt of network traffic so I can see an actual 100mbit link. It’s not so bad, really; I think I’ll kill two birds with one stone and create a media center/VPN gateway box out of an old machine (A P4) using linux, mythtv, and either vpnc or openvpn.

Breaking weeks of blog-o-silence for this update…
I recently moved from RIT’s dorms to an apartment I share with some CSHers. Unfortunately, among the wide variety of amenities offered, wireless Internet is not one of them.
Unfortunately, I’ve been very spoiled in terms of networking hardware, having worked with Cisco’s product line, and I find it painful and miss the features when I’m using consumer-grade electronics. Unfortunately, Cisco wireless technology costs an arm and a leg.

The solution? I purchased a Linksys WRT54GL, a device specifically designed for people to use their own linux distros on. I put on OpenWRT, which gave me a variety of commercial-grade options for a pittance of the price.

I’m broadcasting a few SSIDs – a WPA2-Personal network for apartment mates to have their own little network (Opcom-Net-Internal), a WPA2-Personal network that ust acts as as WAP for my apartment’s wired network (Opcom-Net-External), and a WPA2-Enterprise network that uses OpenVPN and some kludging together in order to provide a seamless connection to CSH’s network (cshnowires-eap). (That last one isn’t quite working yet, but I’ll work on it more after I change some things that need changing on CSH’s own wireless; no use configuring things twice for a new setup) This could simply not be done without multiple SSID broadcasts, VPN, RADIUS, VLANs, and a variety of other enterprise-only features that one could simply not get for the $50 I paid for this network device. Amazing. Highly recommend this device; the only downside is that it’s wireless-G, and not N, and that there is not a whole lot of flash/RAM for programs, but this comes with the embedded territory.

Following my usual naming scheme, the hostname for this device is “Dr. Bob”, which fits especially well considering it’s plugged into my Cisco network switch “Dr. Pepper”. The good doctors are quite kind on my network :-)

Quotes: “IT’S A PUPPY IN A TEACUP!”
“WEASW-WEASW-WEASW!”
Video after the break.
Alex upon watching CuteOverload

My room-mate made a webpage of our dorm room for his class… wow.
http://people.rit.edu/~acg2802/webdesign/midterm/index.php

edit: He updated the page for his final project :-) http://people.rit.edu/~acg2802/webdesign/final/index.php

So, I, uh got angry at how slow backing up my virtual machine from the NFS server was going. So, I uh, upgraded CSH-Net. A lot. The image follows…

Awesome. I’m using my laptop’s fingerprint sensor to log into my server. Fingerprint Reader –> Laptop/Linux –> VMWare browser plugin W/USB device forwarding –> Server/Linux –> VMWare/Windows.

… makes me wonder why /everyone/ isn’t doing it this way :-)

Just replaced south side of CSH with a brand-new (well, used… but new to us :-) ) Cisco 2960G gigabit network switch.
It’s all configured now to work with our aging, custom/in-house web-based IP management and tracking system.

Stay tuned for next week, during our appointment with ITS to upgrade our uplink to RIT’s network (and thus, the Internet-at-large) to gigabit speeds!

OpComm got some new sexy items in this week – we now have a pair of 1000LX/LH SFPs (one a cisco official, and one a clone) which we’ll be able to use to patch a line from South network to North network. Now, all I need to get in are some meter-long single mode fiber patch cables, and those two Cisco Catalyst 2960G-24TC switches we ordered, and we’re in business. :-)

On a related note, I’m swaaaaamped with work, both thanks to RIT and due to my incremental upgrades to get everything ready for the big move to gigabit, plus an unexpected power outage that temporarily sent the server room back into the stone age.

OpComm got some new goodies in the mail today! 9 dual-gigabit PCI-X HP (Intel-chipset) server NICs for $5/each on ebay? Win.

It’s all part of OpComm’s current maniacal plans to upgrade the network (including uplinks to the internet) to gigabit speeds… and beyond!

Made major progress (between the hours of 12AM and 6:30AM) this morning on getting the most recent pull of Bell Lab’s Plan 9 sources to work quite right under CSH’s Xen cluster (running Xen 3.3). Ethernet interface not currently working. That’d be nice to have. :-/

After that, though, I hope to port some house services over to a superior operating system :-)

I also got a book on 8088 assembly with which I hope to enhance the capabilities of our IBM PCJr. My roommate (Alex Grant, webmaster for CSH) started a BBS-like service for it, which is running in our room.

My friends Bob and Will are still convincing me to learn IA64 assembly and work with them porting plan9 to this platform… they may be crazy. That said, I’m on page 48 of an IA64 reference guide :-) It’s a pretty sweet architecture, really, but there are quite a few “gotchas” for assembly programmers that I could see making writing compilers and kernels hard. Ah well.