I didn’t give you any fish!

I’m alone again, but I’m strangely not lonely… that must sound awful but and may not be made any better by me trying to explain. I suppose I should say first that I am sad Theresa is gone and I definitely feel the distance and wish we didn’t have to be so far from each other. That said… I’m not sullen like I was before. I think I can attribute that to some things that were said while Theresa was here. I’m not worried about certain things and I may have even gotten a glimpse of what is to come.

Work got a little boring again. I finished all of the major bug fixes last week and was supposed to start a new project this week, but my mentor hasn’t been able to get the right people together to get the requirements (I’d like to attribute that to the fact that I was done 3 weeks ahead of schedule… but it probably has more to do with the fact that we had an application blow up with week that needed to be fixed asap). Monday and Tuesday were almost dreadful… but then I got an idea yesterday morning… There is a list of books that I want to read that keeps growing without anything coming off it… I figured if I have 8 hours a day to myself (and the internet is NOT that interesting) I could knock a few off the top… After about 5 hours yesterday and an hour today… I read the whole of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (not impressive, but as far as eBooks go its what I could find the fastest that was on my list). I think I’m just going to finish off the series and hopefully before the end of the summer (I don’t know how much down time I’ll really have) I’ll get to the Lord of the Rings and the Sumerillian (although, Angels and Demons has been calling me and I was recently told of a series call Archangel… which I’m sure you all can understand catches my fancy). I’ve also decided to add The Wheel of Time to my list… despite Brian’s overzealous attempts to ward me off. After I get through my list… which I admit will probably take me the next few years… Theresa has a fantastic collection of Sci-Fi and Fantasy… many of the titles I know and more of which I don’t (and interest me).

I’ve also taken some time out today to read up on a few networking technologies (and brush up on a couple others). For anyone who isn’t familiar with OpenWRT (and the most popular of GUIs for it DD-WRT), they are fantastic tools for anyone with a WRT based device to learn on. In one of the latest releases they’ve taken a very simple concept (network bridging, originally applied in ethernet) and applied to virtual adapters making some very neat things possible. On my old WRT54G, I’ve discovered how to use up to 4 ISP connections and run fail over connections (unfortunately, I’ve been unsuccessful in load balancing so far) using bridges and VLANs. I’ve discoverd (using a very similar technique) how to use the old linksys as a full blown router controlling up to 5 separate domains (more if you want to do wireless domains) each having their own DNS, DHCP, and FQDN. I think the most interesting of all is the ability of OpenWRT to do virtual wireless interfaces so I can do tiered wireless security. Currently on my router, I have 2 wireless networks running of a single box… one with WAP2 (no RADIUS) that has access to the LAN and another using 128bit WEP that only has internet access and is even unable to access other wireless clients in its subnet (using what I think to be creative iptables rules).

My primary interest though was reading up on a fairly new technology called ethernet over IP which the beta version of DD-WRT supports. Basically, this just negotiates a TCP/IP connection between 2 endpoints (routers usually) that carries ethernet traffic (unfortunately over low cost unencrypted tunnels) – if you are more familiar with WDS then tunnels you can think of it like a WDS network just with routers and over the internet, in fact the encryption would be exactly the same… only as good as the medium is configured on.. This tech really isn’t anything special when you consider how PPP/IPsec/L2TP VPN tunnels work (basically the same damn thing just authenticated and encrypted). However it is a fun thing to play with and actually forwards all ethernet traffic (which is only important for ARP/etc – which is completely worthless since most VPN servers are on routers with a local DNS which every DHCP client registers with). In the end… for a home use this is nearly worthless since the firmware also supports encrypted PPTP and even if it didn’t you’d be much better off using Hamachi than fussing around with tunnels which may or may not be up at any given moment (which is true also for Hamachi, but at least you can see the status without SSHing to your router – although… DD-WRT does have a logging program available which allows you to poll your routers).

I completely didn’t mean to drone on that long… sorry. For those of you who skipped the last 2 paragraphs… I don’t blame you. If you didn’t, I hope your eyes aren’t bleeding and head screaming.