A while back I wrote about the worst cabinet ever.
Maybe this one isn’t as spectacular to behold, but there is a Cisco switch under all that spaghetti. There are also two PoE power injectors for wireless access points. All this is in a wooden cupboard and it was roasting hot.
You can see that they also haven’t bothered to install a patch board – instead there are just wall sockets covering the side, and a few lying around not attached to anything.
At the back, there’s a telephone patch panel too.
New worst cabinet ever
This is a +1 for Easy Firewall Generator for iptables.
Of course any self-respecting sysadmin should be able to set up iptables, but sometimes starting off can be tricky. So I use the this website, which lets you define the basics using a handful of checkboxes, and it generates a script that configures your computer’s iptables firewall.
It works for single hosts and servers that do NAT, and includes protection against a great many nasties.
Once you have this, it’s then an easy task to hand-configure the result to your heart’s content.
My home server seems to have developed a problem where its internal-facing network card “jams up”. It still keeps its IP address and everything looks normal, but in actual fact no traffic passes through it, cutting all my LAN hosts off from the Internet.
Restarting iptables, network services or anything else doesn’t help. The only cure I’ve found is to reboot the whole box.
This is OK if I’m using the computer at the time, but a pain if it breaks overnight or while I’m out, as things like my folding@home client, Vista Media Centre TV listings and overnight BitTorrent downloads need Internet access.
So I wrote this bash script to periodically check if it’s broken, and reboot if it is. The only gotcha is that it tests if the interface is working by pinging another LAN host. This is by no means a concrete test!
#!/bin/bash
HOST=192.168.0.10
if ! ping -c 1 -w 5 "$HOST" &>/dev/null ; then
logger ZEUS REBOOT
/sbin/init 6
fi
I ran a speed test from Namesco on my PC at work. It has a gigabit Ethernet connection but more importantly, it is served by JANET – the high speed academic network.
As you see in the screenshot, it achieved 215 Mb/s download!
The best Internet connection in the world? I think so.
