Sure... they are more fun ways to spend a sunny sunday afternoon they toying around with your computers at home. However, as my kid is having chicken pox, I am stuck home today.
I have a simple set-up: a broadband connection at home, linked to 2 SMC home routers performing dual NAT (=Network Address Translation). I defend myself that way vs. outside hackers and friendly 'visitors'. Indeed check my router's log in the past minutes:
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:16:31 Unrecognized access from 200.247.27.64:4248 to TCP port 135
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:16:34 Unrecognized access from 200.247.27.64:4248 to TCP port 135
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:16:55 Unrecognized access from 162.83.120.22:2796 to TCP port 445
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:16:57 Unrecognized access from 162.83.120.22:2796 to TCP port 445
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:17:04 Unrecognized access from 162.83.120.22:2796 to TCP port 445
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:17:40 Unrecognized access from 219.113.119.251:1035 to UDP port 1434
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:17:41 Unrecognized access from 82.226.132.97:3897 to TCP port 445
Sunday, June 13, 2004 18:17:42 Unrecognized access from 216.55.155.11:30598 to UDP port 1026
Kind of non stop right ? The majority of attacks are stopped there. A small program on my laptop then checks regularly my second router for additional attacks (none so far :). One of those routers is Wi-Fi enabled and allows all laptops at home (3 of them, including two old ones by Toshiba and Compaq) to connect seamlessly to the Internet. I have also attached my 2 HP printers (a color one and a b&w one) to the routers that act like print servers (using unix lpd queues). One of my laptops is also connected to the phone line with a fax software, allowing all 3 machines to send faxes over the air; received faxes are forwarded to me by email, and printed wirelessly on the laser printer.
Finally, although my professional laptop runs Microsoft Windows XP with a recent Microsoft Office suite purchased with the computer, I didn't want to keep on running Windows 98 on the other 2 laptops (which was the OS they came with) and refused to pay the Microsoft tax for a modern OS and software. I went the open source way, and both computers are running today some flavour of Linux (it changes according to my mood and tests) and free software on them. I hence invested in some extra memory for both laptops and Wi-Fi PCMCIA cards to connect them to my W-LAN (from Orinoco and Belkin).
One of my setups includes a Fedora Core 1 linux OS, running OpenOffice 1.1.1 and a number of goodies, such as the gaim multi-IM client, and a Citrix client for linux to connect remotely to my wife's office. I am currently upgrading to the latest release, Fedora Core 2 (should be finished in a couple of hours) and will blog my impressions then.
The other laptop runs sometimes a gentoo setup, or a yoper setup, as I try to give a 2nd chance to that old hardware by recompiling the software with all optimizations on.
Why would this be of any interest on this blog ?
1) well because you can save money by installing open source environments at home very easily and give a 2nd life to your old machines (great for the family)
2) because you learn also by doing, and understanding the pain or the ease of installations, maintenance and upgrades; this allows us to advise our companies (at RISC Partners) with the best options on how to cut costs, or on how to bet on the future. As an example, the glowria.fr back-office and warehouse terminals all run on linux and/or freeBSD distributions. It represented for us a big savings in license fees from Microsoft when we hosted our machines on the Internet and protects us to some extent better than the Microsoft-OSs, prone to security holes!
