Base Jumping Into a Cave
I don’t care where you live, this is freaking cool.
These guys are jumping into the Cave of Swallows in Mexico. This clip is from the “Caves” section of the BBC’s awesome documentary Planet Earth.
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on an ThinkPad X61 Tablet
This weekend I installed Gutsy, now officially known as Kubuntu 7.10 on my X61. I decided I’d try and write up a guide on thinkwiki.org. Because I don’t have an optical drive for my laptop, installation was a bit tricky, I ended up booting off the network. Once over that hurdle, everything else pretty much just worked. No fussing with X configuration settings, wired and wireless network just worked, sound worked etc. Installing Linux has come a long way in the last few years.
DHCP Failover on OpenBSD
I have been running a DHCP server on my home network for eons now, and today I decided I’d move it on to my OpenBSD firewall cluster. It probably really shouldn’t be there but I already run a handful of other internal services there, like DNS, and NTP. Running DHCP on the firewall cluster also means that I can upgrade any machine on my network without losing internet access. Here’s how I got it set up and working.
Running xntpd on my OpenBSD firewall cluster
Now that my firewall cluster is working better, I can add some additional critical services to it. For a long time I have run a time server on a machine on my network so we can have consistant accurate time. I thought I would move this over to my firewall cluster, giving me redundant time servers. The setup was pretty easy.
First, get the xntpd package for OpenBSD from your favorite mirror. OpenNTPD is fine, but the lack of the ntpq command is enough for me to not use it. Once you have xntpd installed, we need to get it set up so it will run when you boot.
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OpenBSD Firewall Cluster
I have been running an OpenBSD firewall cluster on my home network for some time. These two machines use CARP and pfsync to seamlessly fail over interfaces in case of a hardware or software failure. This has been quite convenient, and allows me to upgrade OpenBSD without losing internet connectivity. I only have one available public IP address, so that has to be on the CARP interface, ie each firewall can’t have it’s own public IP address. This meant that the backup machine had no connectivity to the outside world.