"Human Shields Go Home"

A lot of stuff has happened that I want to write about and I don't know where to start. I really wanted to keep making entries but stuff just keeps coming up. Ya know? I mean I have everything all lined up and perfectly lined up when I'm jogging or bored in class. But now? How do I say what I want to say?

Here's an idea. Just pick a topic and start typing.

Although first of all I should mention I managed to screw up the whole blog thing. I can't get the archive to, well, archive the way I want. Mostly because I played around with the ftp server, apparently an unwise move. So the archive at left may or may not work and may or may not have working links, also.

Lets see. I would like to draw out how I set up my home network, overly complicated as usual for me. I didn't feel like taking the "easy way out" and buying one of those "broadband router" devices that do everything for you. Pffff. Too damn easy. So I took a spare Pentium 166 Mhz computer and put two network cards in it. Then I bought a switch. Next all I needed were a couple Cat 5 networking cables and a distribution of this free router/firewall package called LEAF, which stands for Linux Embedded Application Firewall . Which means, as you may have guessed, this is a firewall based on Linux. It's just a single-purpose program that runs from a floppy disk eliminating the need for a hard drive. All I did was uncomment out the appropriate driver in the relevant configuration file. LEAF includes a DHCP server, features NAT, and is supposed to be an impeccably secure firewall too.

So what is a DHCP server? I don't feel like going into details so lets just say it auto-magically gives all computers connected to a network address (an IP address, which stands for “Internet Protocol”, but lets not get technical). Pretty much all operating systems in existence have a DHCP client, or an "I'm looking for a network address" feature built in. So to summarize, my network has the ISP's connection going to the LEAF, the LEAF going to the switch and all computers connected to this switch. Basically when you try to connect to a site on the Internet you send a request to that computer which then sends back a response. Behind the LEAF featuring a "NAT" what is actually happening is your request is sent to the LEAF, which sends the request then the response is sent back to the LEAF, which then relays to the local computer.

The whole point of all this is to "hide" one or more computers behind one network address. This way if you only have one network address you can have lots of computers using it. It also helps protect you from the evil outside world.

Of course, if I just bought a device it would have a built-in firewall/DHCP/NAT and switch and would setup in mere seconds. But at least I've had the fun of hours of frustration trying to get the stupid Linux port rules to work. And it works. So there's that. In theory all it cost me was the extra network card (well two really) and the switch (which I need anyway for a home network), which is less than $100 or $80 or whatever. If that was $15 each for the network cards and $30 for the cheapest switch it comes to roughly $60.

Next time I would like to go into a little more detail and possibly get a little more technical. Hopefully next time will be soon.

Well I guess that's all for this sucky blog entry. By the way as promised the title pop-culture reference from the first entry is from one of the funniest shows on TV called Whose Line Is It Anyway?