Damage

It has been a busy ten days, no lie. My wife and I moved into our new place with only minor difficulties. Tuesday, though, I came down with flu and spent the next three days lying on the couch, dozing through CNN Headline News (if you're gonna rot your brain, you gotta do it right) and gobbling Tylenol by the handful. So much for my plan to spend the week assembling all the Ikea furniture in the world...

The computers made it through okay, except for the XBox (used as a MythTV frontend). First the hard drive crapped out -- all sorts of hard errors during fscking, followed by scary looking errors about how it couldn't find init. Fortunately I had a spare 80GB Seagate Barracuda, so I installed Xebian v1.1.4. Worked well, and in fact it fixed the display-offset-an-inch-to-the-left-and-up problem I'd been unable to fix before, so that was good.

And then last night, it started behaving weirdly. First, it wouldn't play a program in MythTV -- it just sat there beeping whenever it accessed the drive. I tried power cycling, but then it just sat and beeped at the Cromwell BIOS screen without going any further. I tried searching for beeping hard drives/XBoxes, but this was all I could find. This morning it's fine, so I suspect overheating -- it is a little more enclosed than it was at our new place. We'll see if it happens again.

The new place has imposed some network changes, too. Our last place was an apartment -- all one floor, so it wasn't hard to snake cables around to hook up the XBox, my wife's laptop and so on. Now, though, my computers and the cable modem are on the second floor, and the laptop/XBox are on the first. And while this house is only about four years old, it doesn't have built-in CAT5. :-(

I had brief fantasies of just poking holes in MY drywall (pride of house ownership picks weird times to pop into my head) and snaking a cable down to the TV (which is almost directly underneath me right now), but gave up. Then I ran a cable from the second floor to the first, thinking I could just run it along the edge of the walls and hide it nicely. It was worth trying, but it really didn't work and even I thought it just looked ugly. Only one way to go: wireless.

Since the NWR04B's on hold, I decided to pick up a couple Linksys WRT54GLs and run OpenWRT on them. They arrived on Thursday, and w/in 15 minutes I'd voided the warranty by installing White Russian on them. :-)

Man, OpenWRT is nice -- it's exactly what I've been hoping to achieve on the NWR. I'm still working on the configuration for these things, but the basic idea is to have one on the second floor, running as an AP that the laptop can connect to, and one on the first floor running in client mode. The XBox will be connected to the client, and Hunsacker (MythTV backend) will be connected to the AP. The laptop will connect to the internal network using OpenVPN; probably the MythTV boxen will use OpenVPN as well. The AP will be sitting inside my internal network, rather than outside, but will be firewalled by itself and my gateway to only allow OpenVPN and SSH connections in or out. It's a bit more complicated than I've set up for a home network before, but it's starting to come together in my head.

Of course, I could just run the AP as the firewall itself -- Lord knows the thing could do it just fine. But I just ordered OpenBSD 3.9 a couple weeks ago (plus sent 'em a nice donation), and it'd be a shame to waste that.