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Home firewall of death
Jul. 12th, 2006 05:16 pmAfter the memorial service we went to Rob’s parents house. Paul and I were offered to spend the night, which was much better than staying at a hotel. We got to spend time with Rob’s sister (Beth) and the four of us talked. We got to learn a lot about Rob’s last few weeks, which contained many surprises and many mysteries.
One of the problems of the day was that their internet connection wasn’t working. Rob had built up an needlessly byzantine home network. One PC has a fan that hangs by a thread to point it at the CPU, and another was beeping every 15 minutes for the last few days. The one that was acting as the firewall was displaying a Blue Screen Of Death. Paul and I traced cables and figured out how things were connected.
[ I’ve ranted before about this. Why have a $1500 PC be an unreliable firewall when you can get a $60 box with no moving parts (to break), very little configuration (less to misconfigure), no big operating system to crash, no disk to get corrupted, WiFi base station built-in, and very little power consumption. In fact, the power consumption is so low that it will pay for itself in very little time. Anyway, I’m adding another reason to my list of reasons to go the $60-box route: It’s more standard thus, when you die your parents will have a useable network!
We took Rob’s mom to Staples and bought a Linksys home router and Wifi box. Back at the house, it was installed within minutes. It took longer to test every machine (wired or wireless) to make sure they were working fine, and futz with his Mom’s AOL configuration (can’t they get anything right?).
We also powered down all of his old PCs, which will most likely be erased and recycled.
His Mom felt all the important information was on his laptop, which we couldn’t guess the password for. Thus, she gave it to me to take home and see if I can get in other ways. I’ll burn her a DVD of the files I find and then send the laptop to his sister in Maryland. (Looks like I’ll finally get to run Knoppix!)
At night we took his parents out to dinner to thank them for the hospitality. (I thought Paul and I were going to split the cost, but he insisted that he pay.)
In the morning we went to the airport and flew to Boston to get our connecting flights... Paul to California and me to New Jersey.
I’m writing this in the airplane, which has been sitting waiting to take off for 4 hours. Weather is a bitch.
One of the problems of the day was that their internet connection wasn’t working. Rob had built up an needlessly byzantine home network. One PC has a fan that hangs by a thread to point it at the CPU, and another was beeping every 15 minutes for the last few days. The one that was acting as the firewall was displaying a Blue Screen Of Death. Paul and I traced cables and figured out how things were connected.
[ I’ve ranted before about this. Why have a $1500 PC be an unreliable firewall when you can get a $60 box with no moving parts (to break), very little configuration (less to misconfigure), no big operating system to crash, no disk to get corrupted, WiFi base station built-in, and very little power consumption. In fact, the power consumption is so low that it will pay for itself in very little time. Anyway, I’m adding another reason to my list of reasons to go the $60-box route: It’s more standard thus, when you die your parents will have a useable network!
We took Rob’s mom to Staples and bought a Linksys home router and Wifi box. Back at the house, it was installed within minutes. It took longer to test every machine (wired or wireless) to make sure they were working fine, and futz with his Mom’s AOL configuration (can’t they get anything right?).
We also powered down all of his old PCs, which will most likely be erased and recycled.
His Mom felt all the important information was on his laptop, which we couldn’t guess the password for. Thus, she gave it to me to take home and see if I can get in other ways. I’ll burn her a DVD of the files I find and then send the laptop to his sister in Maryland. (Looks like I’ll finally get to run Knoppix!)
At night we took his parents out to dinner to thank them for the hospitality. (I thought Paul and I were going to split the cost, but he insisted that he pay.)
In the morning we went to the airport and flew to Boston to get our connecting flights... Paul to California and me to New Jersey.
I’m writing this in the airplane, which has been sitting waiting to take off for 4 hours. Weather is a bitch.
