Luke Sheldrick’s Blog

Today I ventured on the C2C train line,  well being bussled, in a tight seat, having someone fall asleep on my shoulder, and being bored shitless, all for a value £13.80 a day, bargain! Just confirms how much I hate public transport. Really makes me think that if we are to ever reduce our ‘carbon footprint’ they really need to make public transport a decent alternative, to my nice warm, clean, quick car.

I mentioned earlier about m0n0wall, and how impressed I was with it. Had the first problem with it the other day. Well m0n0wall runs of a CD (a linux live-cd) and keeps it’s xml config on a floopy. The problem is, (as I remember from yonder years) floopys tend to corrupt. Wasn’t a huge problem, a quick reconfigure with another floopy from under my bed, and away we go

Burgers: I have eaten too much junk, and neglected the gym for over 6 months, and oh it hit me today how much it’s caught up. Looked at the belly today, which was ab flat and getting a pack before, now well, it’s not. Back to the gym tomorrow. Gonna try and go as often as I can, as there is one on my route to/from work, so no excuse really. Am dredding it though.

One of my house mates, has been constantly uploading torrent type stuff for the last couple of days, and it’s getting to be a bit of a bore, as it is killing the network.

Mainly because the incoming tcp packets, require an ACK, which Unfortunately are getting muchous delayed due to the upload stream being saturated. Unfortunately both my cable modem, and hardware firewall are pretty crap at handling this.

Also my hardware firewall, has a 12meg throughput, which is rubbish when I am on a 20meg line.

Anyways someone on uknot suggested m0n0wall, a software / os firewall. Tried setting it up on a VM machine, and it didn’t really play nice there, so set it up on an old box (which happens to be party the said housemates, I just had to replace most of it), and after fiddling with my switch to get it to delete its vlan and arp settings, all started to play nicely.

I must say I am very impressed so far, it can cap the max uploads, set to about 85/90% to allow for ack’ing, so downloads dont grind to a holt. The interface is pretty sweet too. Would definitely recommend it, well saying that not sure how stable it is just yet.

Also throughput, much better, now easily max’s the line out (well almost)

Just got to wait for all the DNS records to update over ze internet, and then mail and web pages should be back up. Well if you’re reading this, then yours already have