Walking on the Moon

Apparently Taser, Inc. has made Greg Leyh change the name of my favorite thing.  Behold the Taser Cannon  Lorentz Gun.  It remains the best thing in the world.

I’ve reviewed Rory Stewart’s excellent The Places In Between and started The Weather Makers in Bell, Book, and Candle.

This weekend I finally put the Moon here onto a sound network footing. I pay some phone company for 3 bits of Internet (8 addresses less one for broadcast and one for network number). Until recently my desktop/server has been also doing duty as a router/firewall, meaning I really had 2 2-bit subnets each of 2 addresses.

I actually used more of the address space by doing various bits of network black magic, which I don’t condone.

Last weekend I picked up a WRT54GL wireless router and VLAN switch. I’d burned Linux on a couple of these for work and decided it was a good piece of hardware to help straighten out what I laughingly called my network “architecture.” We won’t go into the 10 Mb/s hub that was still central to the thing.

At any rate, the router came last week and I spent a few hours this week burning OpenWRT onto it and configuring it. Now I have a sane network architecture that has the new router doing:

• Proxy ARP to keep my DSL provider confused
• Firewall
• Single IP address on both sides of the firewall
• ssh access
• and a gratuitous use of cron and ntpclient to keep its date correct

None of that was rocket science, though it was good clean fun. And I’m delighted to have a more orderly and sane network layout that lets me use an extra address and reboot my server without kicking anyone else off the LAN.

I’m so happy with it I decided to share.

I have recently learned that if you type “origin snail mail” into Google, my name is associated with the number one hit.

You may wonder how I’ve come to know such an odd fact. Well, I’ve been contacted by some fellow who is claiming that he came up with the word “before there was an Internet.” In 1990. (I have internet code that’s older than that and I’m no great shakes.)

I’m not worried about this whack-O, of course. I’ll just send him off with a hearty shove. I’m just worried about more in the woodwork.

Sigh.

If anyone out there would like to write a nice long essay on the origin of the phrase “snail mail,” I’d be delighted to Google bomb it for you …

I finished Sharpe’s Rifles, and there’s a review up in Bell Book and Candle.

My review of The Polysyllabic Spree is up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

My review of Team of Rivals is up on BBC.

The righteous have already seen Warren Ellis‘s latest comment on the presidential race, but for those snoozing or living in Japan, he’s talking about McCain.

Ylum (the machine that is www.lunabase.org and several other names) was up and down a bunch this evening.  I added a Gigabyte of RAM, which should be a straightforward operation.  It’s not so straightforward when you slightly dislodge the motherboard power connection.  If you’re curious, on ylum’s motherboard the first service you lose when you do that are the cooling fans.  It took a while to figure out why the machine was suddenly intermittent, but the firmware seems to have saved all the hardware, and now all is well.  In fact, better than well as ylum’s got twice the memory it had this morning.
You learn something new every day.

It’s not often I disagree with Warren Ellis, but this is awesome.

In other news, I know two out of three.