League of Legends Friends List and Smoothwall

Recently I’ve have been playing the great game League of Legends but my friends list has not been working. After dealing with the problem for several weeks, I’ve finally found the issue. I use Smoothwall for my router, and as Smoothwall users may know, it has a niffty IM proxy feature. Well, after playing with… Continue reading League of Legends Friends List and Smoothwall

Intel D945GCLF2 and Surround Sound on Gentoo

I while back I purchased an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard to play with. This board features the dual core Atom 330 processor in a nice mini-ITX form factor. I’ve recently set this up as a media center PC, running Gentoo and XBMC. I’ve been quite happy with its performance in this role, but there was one… Continue reading Intel D945GCLF2 and Surround Sound on Gentoo

Network Bonding in Gentoo

I’ve been trying to find a good use for the second network adapter in my fileserver, and what better than to increase the throughput to the network. Using something called bonding, its possible to combine two physical network adapters into one logical bonded adapter. Using a bonded adapter provides several advantages such as fallover should… Continue reading Network Bonding in Gentoo

Deny Hosts and SSH Login Attempt Behavior

A few weeks ago I installed DenyHosts, a small deamon (can also be run as a cron job) that runs on my server to block IP’s that make brute force SSH login attempts.  The script has worked great, blocking over 500 hosts on the first day I used it (including myself a few times…).  One… Continue reading Deny Hosts and SSH Login Attempt Behavior

Sun Fire V120

Through the gracious efforts of a friend, I have managed to come by a Sun Fire V120 server with a 650MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor.  It is in need of a hard drive, but is otherwise in working order.  I’ll be getting some cheap 80 pin SCSI drives on ebay in a few days, but in… Continue reading Sun Fire V120

Switching to Linux

After several years of dabbling in Linux and a few months of server administration, I’ve decided to make the switch and use Linux, specifically Gentoo, on my primary machine.  Although I do still have my Windows XP x64 install, it will be used only when necessary.  Based on my experiences running Gentoo as a server,… Continue reading Switching to Linux