February 10, 2006 at 8:50 pm · Filed under firewall, m0n0wall, security
I’d been having problems with my Watchguard Firebox X500 firewall at the office. Seemingly randomly, the damn thing would lock up, and I would have to power cycle it to unfreeze it. Nothing in the logs yielded clues. Firmware updates didn’t help.
I and my users put up with this for about 6 weeks. No one was happy with the situation.
Tonight, I switched to m0n0wall. It took me and another guy 2.5 hours total to configure everything. Everything seems to be working well. We configured PPTP VPN, the webservers, and mail server. The provided web interface is extremely easy to use and gave access to everything that we needed to configure.
m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software). It is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities.
February 3, 2006 at 4:58 pm · Filed under design
I consider myself more of a programmer than a designer so I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my projects better. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use nice icons to represent actions or to just throw on the screen to break of the monotony of text and forms. I’ve done quite a bit of searching fr open source icons and i have a personal collection that I’m not sure of the license underwhich they were released. For that reason, I’m not going to share them and I am hesitant to even use them on anything that is released to the public.
I have found the following sources for icons and artwork.
Icon Buffet - These guys give away icons and they have a trading system set up so members of their site can trade those icon sets that they’re missing. They also sell some really nice icon and illustration sets. The sets that they give away are royalty free, but still copyrighted.
Gnome Art - This is the official art site for gnome. There’s a bunch of icons, background and themes. The best part about this site is that most, if not all, of the art on the site is released under a free as in beer type license. Lots of GNU General Public Licensed and CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
If anyone knows of other sources of free art to pretty up websites and applications, please leave a comment.
February 3, 2006 at 9:20 am · Filed under amusing
Note to self… extinguish flame before doing shot.
