An email from Daniel Berninger recently pointed out that Thursday, April 30th 2015 is the 20th anniversary of Internet Independence. According to Dan; The decommissioning of the NSFNET backbone on April 30, 1995 was the final step in the process…
This morning’s email included a message from Manuel Kasper, leader of the m0n0wall project. On the very day that is the 12th anniversary of the project he has announced that he’s bringing it to an end. I’ve used m0n0wall for…
Our household NAS, known as HAL, is suffering. A LaCie 5Big Network Drive, HAL arrived in December of 2008 loaded with five 500 GB hard drives, yielding 2 TB of RAID 5 storage.
HAL was a Christmas present. He addressed my wife’s need for a storage strategy for her digital photographs, amongst other things. Within the family I was widely known as a geek. The fact that she welcomed a NAS as a gift cemented her standing in that regard.
HAL was twice upgraded such that he presently sports five 2 TB Seagate Barracuda
In recent weeks I’ve been accumulating some thoughts about the edge of networks, and the edge of my home office network in particular.
This all started last month where there was an Ars Technica article describing how someone found a backdoor that allowed an evil-doer to gain admin access to a common consumer combination DSL Modem/router/Wifi AP. The author initially proved the exploit by hacking his Linksys WAG200G wireless gateway.
The article describes how he published the script used to run the exploit. That allowed others to try the exploit against various makes/models of consumer hardware. It thus came to light that the same trick works against various products from Linksys and Netgear, amongst others.
This is too funny. Many thanks to Evan Kirstel at Sonus for the link.
Not long ago Colin Berkshire made an interesting observation about a trend in new home construction. He noticed that builders are no longer pulling cable for telephone and network connections, which leads to an “RJ-free” home. This makes a lot of sense for most homes, but it’s not what I would want for a home office.
Of course, Wifi is phenomenally convenient. Hereabouts we use a Ubiquiti PowerAP N device configured as a wireless bridge/access point. We’ve used various devices over the years. The Ubiquiti PowerAP has been without a doubt the best of the bunch. Sadly, the product is not available anymore, although they can occasionally be found on E-bay.
With a population of over forty devices, ours is a considerable home network. While many of the devices we use are connected via Wifi, much of the network remains connected by traditional Ethernet cables. Wired networks are more trouble to install, but the effort is rewarded with more consistent performance and reliability.