While out running around Sunday (after Christmas sales), I picked up a replacement wireless router. An Apple Express which is 11n capable. We have an Apple Extreme right now that’s been on its way out for the past year having to be unplugged and plugged back in to reset it. We also stopped at Ultimate Electronics, which doesn’t carry network cards. A stop at Best Buy and check of the ‘net found me purchasing a couple of Dynex PCIGB gigabit network cards for the new linux system.
The current linux based firewall is Mandrake Linux (very old) running on a Pentium III 600B with 750 megs of RAM and three 100 megabit network cards. I have a pair of 80 gig IDE drives software mirrored for reliability.
My next system was available for use and was a bit more powerful. It only had the onboard 100 megabit network “card” though. Good enough for Comcast access. I installed Ubuntu and worked on mirroring the two 300 gig SATA drives. The system is a Pentium 4 2 Ghz with 1.5 gigs of RAM. I installed the two gigabit network cards (after writing down the info from the cards and their slot locations. I configured the firewall on the system, configured the new Apple Express and started moving files from the old firewall to the new system.
I had a couple of issues during the build. The mirroring process doesn’t seem to be all that intuitive. I worked on the command line process and read up on the ‘net to make sure I was doing it right but it still refused to mount on boot. Eventually I broke out the Disk Utility GUI and got it set up correctly. Still though it refused to mount on boot and I had to activate it through the GUI. So it’s up and running right now with the files but if it reboots there are a couple of steps that need to be done to get it working again.
I set the Express up incorrectly the first time so had to go back in. I got it going correctly the second time.
I also chased down an iptables masquerade script to get the firewall up correctly. I ran the system against the Gibson system check and there were no open ports.
So the new system is up. I still need to move some processes over for backing up the remote server and the script to push files out but it’s up and running.