R.I.P. Lappie

Last night, our new cat Soleil chewed through the power cord on my laptop. A month or two ago he did the same to The Missus's laptop cord. At the moment we have one functioning computer. It's a pain to say the least. It's not so much that he did it that upsets me as it is that he did it twice, and replacing the AC adapters is simply something we can not afford.

I have two desktops in the house currently not being used. One needs a video card and hard drive, the other a hard drive. I don't think I can afford to get either machine running.

But I'm going to try.

Looking at Amazon I can get both packs for roughly fifty dollars, if I can get an inexpensive hard drive then we can possibly make things work. I may even buy two drives and get both desktops up and running. You can never have too many machines after all.

If You're Going To Do It.....

Do it right!

I've been tossing around the idea of implementing a semi-intelligent network architecture in my apartment. At the moment my network, like most home networks is a router, and a bunch of machines plugged into it.

This works, and it works quite well. However if I want to do anything other then basic networking I run into some problems. So I've been tossing around the following ideas.

Phase 1:
I want to procure a white box, an old tower with low power requirements, preferably no more then a 150 watts. Now, this will be my gateway, it will be the machine connected directly to the outside network. It will function as my web server, most likely Apache, a file server, Samba?, as well as any other hosting and server tasks.

This machine will run a flavor of Linux. (Ubuntu Server) As I don't plan on ever connecting this machine to a monitor I'll most likely run either a strictly command line interface or run some sort of X-Windows environment that I can remotely connect to.

This machine will start inside my router, as part of my current setup. Once I am comfortable with Linux, and have a firewall and other server applications installed I will move it to the outside of my router and connect my router to the gateway machine.

Phase 2:
Once the gateway is up and working well I plan on Wiresharking all of the incoming traffic and evaluating my configuration for holes. Once I am satisfied with the security of the gateway I will procure more network cards and turn the gateway into a router/switch. This will remove the wireless router from needing to act as a DNS and it can now be used strictly to broadcast wireless.

Phase 3:
Once the above phases have been completed I hope t move away from Windows on my laptop and run a Linux environment (Xubuntu?) there as well. My desktop will remain a Windows box for gaming and C# development.

All in all I figure several weeks of work. Here's to crazy schemes!