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After weeks of struggling with ipfw and natd port forwarding, I finally got it working. Turns out natd doesn't forward the packets right, so they have to be forwarded manually in the ipfw rules. Why? I don't know. Nor do I care, it works now, and that's all that matters.

Yes, I was up all night looking at this, of course.

Labels: FreeBSD, Servers

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Yet Another Long Night
Posted: 4:31:00 AM 0 comments

I hate it when I get momentum to work on something after midnight.

So I took a look at Reborn's ipfw/natd problem today. I actually tried to use pf, but I couldn't get anywhere with it, so I started to try to resolve the existing problem. I did succeed in getting the DNS working, although that was more of a problem with dnscache not able to listen on multiple addresses than with ipfw/natd. One problem solved.

The other problem had me baffled, though. I had absolutely no ability to VNC into my internal network from outside, where I had before I "upgraded" to FreeBSD 6.1. This is because I lost all of the configuration files when I went to upgrade.

Anyway, just tonight I figured out my problem. Basically, a remote machine will send a request to Reborn on a port that it is to forward. It does this fine, and the machine it is forwarded to processes the request fine, returning it to Reborn. The problem is when Reborn sends the response back out, it is sending it from the wrong address, namely the local ten-dotted address.

And I have absolutely no idea how to fix it.

But at least I know what the problem is now. Hopefully I'll have one of my Linux techie friends know what's wrong with my configuration and be able to fix that.

But for the love of Chick-Fil-A sweet tea, it's 4:30 in the morning, and I have a meeting in 5 hours. The curse computers put on us these days.

Labels: FreeBSD, Servers

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Reborn is reborn
Posted: 12:46:00 AM 0 comments

What I refer to as my 4th computer, known as Reborn, has been... well, reborn.

On Thursday, I logged in to find most of /bin gone. No idea what happened. I did an in-place reinstall of FreeBSD 5.4 and everything seemed good, minus an unusual lack of space on my / partition. It wasn't a big deal, though. I spent the next two days on and off portupgrading and otherwise making sure it was running fine.

Sunday, I got brave. I decided to in-place upgrade to FreeBSD 6.1. The lack of space on the / partition killed the upgrade and left me with a non-functional system. Someone suggested I had a virus of some sort, or even got hacked. Argh! So I reinstalled most everything Sunday, and today I finished up configuring the DHCP, NAT, and Firewall so that the box was back to normal.

The good news in all of this is I finally am getting a feeling of comfort within Linux. I now know more about rc.conf, what /usr/local/etc/rc.d is used for, how to configure and upgrade applications, and so on. I'm not quite ready (read: not ever going) to make Linux my primary machine, but the server side of it is really making me consider my options in terms of my choice of servers when I do things.

Labels: FreeBSD, Servers

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Slowly Learning Linux
Posted: 4:21:00 AM 0 comments

After finally getting fed up with my ISP's DNS server, I decided that I was going to just do it myself. Unfortunately, that meant having to learn a bit of Linux. But after some work, going through error messages, and relentlessly searching Google, I have commanded just enough knowledge to get daemontools svscan working, a copy of djbdns installed with dnscache, and dhcp configured to use it. All without breaking the ftp backup. In fact, it works better. Now ftpd doesn't have to choke when the DNS server chokes.

Slowly but surely, I'm finding enough uses for FreeBSD to make running it worth it. I don't plan on moving my web sites over there anytime soon, but all the back end stuff is really starting to fall in place.

Labels: FreeBSD, Linux, Servers

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

New Linux box
Posted: 8:58:00 PM 0 comments

I finally got my 250GB hard drive running. As a result, I put together a machine based on one of my old motherboards to get a new FreeBSD box running. I'm starting to get comfortable in Linux, it's scary.

The process was a pain, though. First, I had to upgrade the firmware on the ATA card. Then I had to move the CD-ROM off the ATA card cause it wasn't bootable. Then I downloaded and burnt the latest FreeBSD. Then I had to figure out the geometry for the hard drive so it could install.

Once that was done, though, it was pretty smooth sailing. It even got me to playing around a bit on the ModPlug box without worrying about breaking anything.

Labels: FreeBSD, Hard Drives, Servers