deandra.homeip.net

I hope everyone had a good Xmas, in spite of the recent unpleasantness.
The cold snap has finally, well, snapped. The weather has turned warm and the snow has started to fall. I decided it would be the perfect time to get out and do some skiing.

Well, my day started off all right. A good cup of coffee, a hearty breakfast, and then it was time to start my vehicle.

I was met with the noise every driver fears, the slow rur-rur-rur-rowr-rowr of the engine turning over too slowly to start.

Occasionally the engine would stutter, but it stubbornly refused to catch.

I figured, "Well, I didn't plug in last night, and it's -30°C right now, so it's probably too cold to start." I plugged in the block heater and went back inside.

Well, this past weekend, I got my first taste of cross-country skiing.

My skis have been sitting in my work room for the past several weeks with a fresh coat of glide wax on them, but the snow has been so rotten (slushy and sticky) lately that I haven't been able to use them. Well, on Saturday, I got my chance. Having never cross-country skiied before, I've been reading up on the technique (and watching lots of YouTube videos on the subject,) so I figured I'd find a nice quiet spot and try it out.

So, I found myself at a high school today, sans laptop, with some time to kill. I popped in my thumbdrive and decided to check my mail with Mozilla Thunderbird. However, I found myself unable to check my home email account.

Just a quick shout out to http://www.portableapps.com. I've recently installed the PortableApps launcher on my thumbdrive, and I'm finding that its much nicer than carrying my laptop around with me everywhere I go.

Granted, loading applications from a thumbdrive is slower, but that's the price I pay for being able to carry everything I need on a lanyard around my neck (and not looking like a dork while I'm at it.)

Lately I've been noticing a disturbing trend in my home town. People are neglecting a component of their automobiles which is absolutely vital to the safety of everyone on or near the road. Worse yet, people seem to be totally unwilling to acknowledge that this omission on their part is a problem. This can only lead to chaos and mayhem on our city streets, and worse than that, the lack of demand is resulting in production cuts that care causing widespread shortages. In fact, an entire industry is failing, which is going to hurt even more people in these tough economic times.

Due to popular demand (OK, one person mentioned that it would be a good idea, but hey, that's like 50% of my regular readership,) I've installed the subscriptions module to my installation. Registered users can now subscribe to receive emails when new content is added or comments are made.

As part of an experiment at work, I was asked to look into WYSIWYG editors for Drupal. Previously, I'd been writing the code by hand, but I installed Xinha (http://www.xinha.org/) and TinyMCE (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/) on my home Drupal installation to test-drive them.

Introduction

As others have stated, corporate managers like pre-rolled VPN solutions like ISA server and SonicWall because of the vendor support provided. Other solutions, such as the VPN/firewall network I recently deployed in my organization, are less popular with non-technical types because, even though they may work better and more reliably, their TCO can vary widely depending on the expertise of the in-house IT staff. This is due in large part to the fact that these solutions are hand-rolled from the ground up, and may be reliant on a single individual for their operation. Here, I will attempt to spread some of the knowledge so that others may implement or maintain a network of firewalls/VPN nodes that run on cheap hardware, using freely-available software. Specifically, I will describe the particulars of the VPN firewalls I recently put together for my school district.

I'm looking back on why we decided to replace our fleet of SonicWalls after only a couple years in service, and all the reasons suddenly came flooding back to me. I wasn't going to go into too much detail, but hey, it's filler, and it might be useful to someone.