2006-01

I’ve tried and tried to build my own custom kernel over the past year or so, usually only to stop in frustration because of some small part of the process not working.

This is all different now.

I found out that using the took make-kpkg makes things way easier. In fact I configured, compiled, and installed kernel 2.6.15 in about 30 minutes including the time that it took me to build it.

I love the word uber, but before today I didn’t know how cool the word really is.

From wikipedia:

The word

This semester is going to be crazy.

I just got done with my first morning class in more than a half of a year and I thought that I was going to die. I didn’t really care about the fact that it was a morning class, it was more about the class itself.

My 9:30 class on Mondays and Wednesdays is Intro to Logic. The class seemed like it would be a good choice (plus it was required for my degree), but I didn’t think that it would be as boring as it was today.

I’ve been messing around with iptables a bit more than usual the past week or so. Through this process, I decided that it wasn’t worth it for me to keep creating / tweaking all of my rules by hand. So.. I found an Excellent (with a capital ‘E’) frontend to iptables.

For me the frontend had to meet some strict requirements.

1. It must have a curses graphical user interface
2. It must be easy to use

Something called Jay’s Iptables Fits these requirements perfectly.

I found a few cool things this morning.

The first being a way to install a rpm file in Debian. You do this using the alien command (apt-get install alien).

To convert a package from an rpm to a deb run the following command:
alias --to-deb

To just install a rpm use the following command:
alias -i

It's that easy.

Also, I was looking at some stories on the front page of Digg, and found a Great New Library for use with Google Maps. It has the features of the one that I was messing around with earlier (I forgot the name of it). It even includes the features that I had to add inot the other library.

If you’ve got more than one computer running Debian that packages are downloaded through apt, then apt-cacher should help you a lot.

Apt-cacher is actually a cgi script that is run by apache. Using apt-cacher is very easy, and installing it is even easier.

Step 1: Install apt-cacher.
(Run this on the proxy computer)

apt-get install apt-cacher

Enter the webpage : http://localhost/apt-cacher
to see that the proxy is running.

Step 2: Backup and Convert Clients sources.list.
(Do this on the computers that you want to access the cache.)

I did get something good out of this whole fiasco. When I think of it, this blog being down for a day or so is a small price to pay for the amount of knowledge that I gained relating to setting up apache, mysql, and php… Over and Over Again.

Let me know if there are problems that you see.

I’m pretty sure that mail is all screwed up because I have no mail server, or at least I hope that I don’t (I uninstalled it).

Well that was close.

As you can probably tell, my server’s been down for about a day. A day during which almost all of my time was spent getting this server back up.

I decided to switch from Redhat based Centos 4.1 to Debian Sarge (3.1). The operating system install was extremely easy as well as the *first round* of server app installs.

I have to finish up getting the rest of this site working, but I’ll definitely post more later.

The Tor Network uses something called Onion Routing. Tor’s functionality is pretty simple. You run a daemon on a computer on your network (the tor client) and it connects to a server inside the tor network. Once your transmitted packets are inside the tor network they are routed through the different servers in a way so that no server knows the complete path that a packet takes. On top of this, all transmission inside the tor network is encrypted in order to prevent Man in the Middle Attacks.

This tutorial works with squid versions < 2.6

Many companies find proxy servers useful for a number of reasons. For example, if a company has fairly low bandwidth and needs a cheap way to streamline the distribution of frequently accessed content, a proxy server, such as squid will help a lot. Another use of a proxy server in the business world is for what I like to call, “Employee Management”. In other words, this is for companies that want to see what their employees are viewing on the internet. They can also be used by companies that have less than perfect infrastructures and need to have a way to take one connection to the internet and spread it to many computers.