So I’ve decided to take part in the 30 Days of Geek challenge after Jack Scott posted his day 1 blog. I think pictures explain more than words, so I’m going to try to answer most of the day questions with pictures with a little bit of text.

The number one reason I considering myself a geek is because I’m a networking freak. Not in the sense of social networking, but in the sense of data communications (Etherent, IP, ATM, DSL, ect…). While this makes up a large percentage of my geekiness, I do venture into other areas such as software and hardware development, VoIP, radio and photography.

I don’t believe their are too many houses in the world that run an OSPF network, with several default routes/ alternative paths to access the internet, and BGP running to link to other sites (friends and family) running over a combination of IPSec/IPIP and OpenVPN. I’ve always found it amazing how we can data from one side of the world to the other at insane speeds (yes, 9600 baud is still insane to me).

I’d rather hack something up (even if it costs more), than to buy a product to suit my needs, as the fun is in the challenge, rather than the end result.

I’m one of those people that live on IRC channels, and make use of an IRC bot to tell me whether it’s sunny or cloudy outside.

And also, have a look at the header image of my blog, it’s by far the easiest way I know that I’m a geek. If you’re not sure about the source of the image you can find all you need to know here.

So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right?

Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good.

Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I’ve decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it’s pretty damn good.

Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.

Other than that, I’m starting the last week of school, so I’m basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.

Zenoss is a wonderful piece of software (once installed) that allows you to monitor devices and programs. It’s really nice at keeping a history of events and the like.

It grabs data via snmp (or a few other methods) and monitors them, creating graphs and status reports. It’ll even map out your network for you. It’s fairly basic software, but it does wonderful things.

So I’ve wanted to do this for awhile, but now I’ve got all the bits together. A friend has given me a Nokia phone with a broken screen, and another a sim card. I was able to “borrow” dads bluetooth dongle that he never uses, and hook up gnokii up to my zenoss.

Now whenever a device dies, I can get a sms alert about it. Pretty nice stuff :>.

On Monday night I went to my first amateur radio meet up. It was really good to see some of the gear, and read a few books on amateur radioing.

I really want to get into amateur radio, however the cost seems kinda high. I’m strongly interested in packet radio which is basically like using the radio as a 56K modem. In some places they have routers, that route data between the radios and the internet, which is really cool.

John showed me IRLP, which links repeaters with internet voip, allowing you to basically call anyone around the world.

First I have to get my foundation lic. and then I have to get some gear. Seems like a very lengthy process, but I’m sure it’ll be fun.

73

Had a pretty decent LAN Party last weekend. We played TF2, BF1942, CS:S, Diablo 2 LOD and Warcraft 3 FT. The LAN started at 12:00 and went to 12:00 the next day, and the amount of people varied between 2 and 11, although the average was 9 (Damn people needing to work). The flickr stream starts here.

All in all it was pretty good, 8 pizzas, soft drink. Could have done with some more nachos, but meh. Pretty damn good.

When people aren’t playing games it’s a good chance to trade Creative Commons music and the like. I have 50gb of music now that I’m sorting through. This also gave me a chance to test out the new iTunes 8 and I have to say, it hasn’t changed much. It looks a little nicer IMHO.

The LAN also allowed me to test out my new Nvidia 8600GT graphics card, which done wonders. Since my computer naturally runs hot, I under clocked it, and still managed to get over 50 FPS in most games.

This is also the first LAN where I have been able to stop people from using all my bandwidth, by blocking all ports but HTTP, MSN and the like. This stopped torrents and people playing WOW (which I think is a stupid thing to do at a LAN anyway). To do it using my approach you must have a modem / router running and it must have iptables.

Yours will be different depending on the model and brand of modem, but you can have a look at the script I used to block everything but the stuff I wanted.

iptables –delete FORWARD 1
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 6667 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 6667
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 9002
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 9002 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 6697
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 6697 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 443 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 443
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 53
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 53 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 53
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 53 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 80
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 80 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 1863
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 1863 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 21
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 21 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 1863
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 1863 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 3388:3390
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp –destination-port 3388:3390 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 3388:3390
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 3388:3390 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 27030:27039 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 27030:27039
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 110
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 110 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 25
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 25 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 465
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 465 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 993
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 993 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 995
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 995 -i br0
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 5900
iptables –insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp –destination-port 5900 -i br0
iptables -A FORWARD -j DROP -i br0

Striped of resources and money, we tend to look at DIY and recycling to fund projects. In this case, I wanted a computer that could surf the net, pidgin, email, youtube and play music. I hoard junk like some old granny and her records, so I had some stuff laying around to make up a fairly old PC. What I ended up with was, 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 32GB hard drive, Geforce 2 MX 400 (32mb), RaLink RT2500 wifi card, cd burner (which has now failed after the install). I haven’t spent a cent on this box, it’s just pieces from PCs that would have been thrown out.

You’re thinking, 800mhz, that’s Windows ME old, there’s no way you could possibly do all that on such an old box. Well I can, and I’m doing it right now. Sure it isn’t a speedy box, but with Gentoo on it, it accomplishes all this with easy, I can surf, check my mail, IM, irc, and listen to music at the same time with absolutely no problem.

This is with the help of Gentoo. The way Gentoo is made, it’s made for speed and performance. No two Gentoo installs are the same, everything is compiled (with the help of emerge) for your PC and you choose exactly what you want installed. The smallest Gentoo install only includes the bear minimums, for the machine to boot.

Sure it’s a lot of compiling, but emerge does it all with a breeze, and you just set a few things to compile and goto bed. With the use of CCACHE you can speed up recompiles easily and if you’re lucky enough you can get distcc to use other computers to help with the load (I couldn’t do this).

The Gentoo install was pretty easy and the thing that usually takes me weeks only took me 30 minutes including compile. Wifi, the Wifi card installed a breeze and it only took me a bit of reading before I worked out howto hook it up with my WPA PSK enabled home network.

I’m using xfce4 as it’s lightweight and powerful, and is really nice to use. It’s like gnome without the fat. Xfce4 took the longest to compile but it was worth it.

If you ever have the time to setup a full blown Gentoo setup, I really suggest it, it’s a really good desktop Linux distro. I wouldn’t really use it for servers (I’m a FreeBSD fag) but I’ll be using Gentoo a few times in the future.

Now I wanted to share some of my favourite Linux apps:
- MPD (Music player daemon), I finally got around to installing this nicely and it’s great to use with gmpc. I also found impdclient (shown in picture), so I can use my iPod Touch to control the music on my nix box.

-gkrellm, As ugly as it looks, it’s really nice to have to see stats.

-xchat, has really picked up it’s game the last time I used it, and looks like a really nice client now. Still needs some stuff smoothed out

-Thunderbird, Very nice email client.

-Transmission, Perfect for torrents. (sharing linux distros)

-Gimp, great for image editing

A few more obvious ones that I use a lot are, Firefox and pidgin.

I’ve had a shit box laying around (800 mhz) for a little while that I haven’t bothered to use. I usually use it for a temporary server or to mess around with. Since I’ve started to get back into playing Americas Army, I’ve wanted to be able to IRC and MSN while I’m dead easily. Sp O decided to setup Gentoo on this box and mess around.

After a day or so of waiting for stuff to compile (<3 emerge, hasn't failed me yet) I have a working box, with xfce4 and that. So far I'm really like gentoo, everything has been easy to setup, and once you become patient and wait for things to compile it's really nice.

It's good having only the applications you need, and not any other junk