Category: Web Hosting

It’s my Birthday!

Forty one today, forty one today. I’m the same age as the Superbowl.

I’m surprised that I haven’t updated my site, my bLog since September … I guess I have poured much of my offline time into my online vLogs on the OctaneCrew site … I’ve found talking into a camera much easier than doing this typing thing, but once all the video is recorded, editing can become a lengthy process …

So what’s new since my last post in September? Happy New Year!

Web Hosting: Nothing much new in the hosting world. I’ve been trying to get hold of Savvis to renew my contract. Three years has finally come and gone in December, but getting hold of my account representative has been more than difficult. I finally got him on the phone about a week ago and haven’t heard back yet. This has been the worst response from Savvis to date. I think their sales force is not as professional anymore, or I got the one guy who doesn’t keep up on things … I got a quote from them about a year ago for $250 less per month, but I was told I couldn’t renew my contract until it was up. When talking to my rep last week, he tells me the price has gone up. If this is the case, I will be switching companies, no matter how much the hassle.

The main Windows server crashed beginning of October. The machine went on its merry way into Lalaland … I was able to put the drive into an external enclosure and suck off the data onto a new installation which made the switch fairly transparent to those who just use web services … The mail handled by FreeBSD kept flowing, and the registry infomation that the Windows products keep there was able to be saved so no renewing of passwords, etc was necessary … What a relief that was …

Octane: Much the same as they continue to play every weekend on the Philadelphia club circuit. They did have a highlight November 30, 2006 when they appeared on the Opie & Anthony satelite XM Radio show where they played on the “walkover” … a deluge of CD orders poured in that I dutifully got out in the post … They were just on again yesterday morning, and again, the CD orders are coming in from across the country …

The crew is starting fresh in that the crew that I inherited when I started with the band are all but gone. The last remaining guy has given notice and will be done as soon as he can be replaced or he gets sick of waiting for us to find someone. My son started coming out to shows and he has fell into duties that he’s never done before … Of course this means I have to do much more work than before … It’s not been fun the last couple weeks … Hopefully we’ll find some new crew that can get the job done as before …

Father-in-Law: My father-in-law Edward Walter Andrews passed away January 2, 2007. He was born in December 29, 1925 … He had a building of fluid in his chest a week or so before Thanksgiving and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He never came back out of the hospital. I thought for sure that he would have come home. For my children and I, that was the last that we’d ever seen him … My wife went daily to visit him in the hospital … Again, I thought for sure he would get past this … He was a big burly cement finisher … Never thought that it would get the best of him …

Since I’d known him, he didn’t work … Already retired … He did keep himself busy though … You couldn’t keep him away from tinkering with something … When I was dating my wife, he’d help with the car if there was a problem, or I should say the “report” of a problem … Like my wife would mention that I was having a problem with my brakes … While sitting there waiting for her to come out of the house, out he would come, “Problem with the brakes?” … and you would want to blow it off and say yeah, but I know about it and I am taking steps to rectify the brake trouble. “Pop the hood.” … oh no, well, I will humor him … He checks the brake fluid level and stuff … “Need to bleed the brakes” and then we spend the next 30-45 minutes bleeding brakes and it’s fixed … He wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to fixing things … While the brake bleeding went well, sometimes everything didn’t go as planned …

Once we moved into our house, there were things around the house that were broken and I would sometimes come home to find my father-in-law working on things … I would ask my wife why he was here, and she would say that she told her mother of the problem and he came over to fix it … So, sometimes the fix would be quick, other times he would explain to me what the problem was and make frequent trips to the hardware store getting what was needed and trying the next steps on to fix the problem … While we may not be able to use whatever he was fixing at the time, eventually he’d get the right thing from the hardware store and off we’d go …

I guess I should have mentioned that he was hard of hearing, so in these processes, you would say something to him, and his reaction wasn’t always such that you’d know if he heard you or not … It could have been lack of hearing or determination, not sure which so that added to part of the mystery … He would sit at family gatherings and be in his own little world … While everyone is discussing something at some length, he’d blurt, “Th’say it’s gonna rain tomorrow.” or he’d comment on a sports player playing on the team that was playing on TV … He was a Philadelphia fan …

Although very silent while in the family gatherings, you could catch him beaming at his grandchildren … Not knowing what was going on in his semi-silent world of his head, but he was entertained by his grandchildren … From across the room, he would make gestures to catch the children as they would fall … Ah, he was a character … My wife would laugh when telling me of things that her father would do … He was a price watcher, often going to 3 different supermarkets to catch the sale at each one … Often times, haggling on prices when prices aren’t for haggling … Being concerned with parking spots on a street etc … Having conversations with people and when they’d gone lean down and ask, “Who was that?”

My kids have lost their Pop and we took the kids to the viewing, mass, interment and luncheon … While the 8 year old broke down at the end of the viewing, the 5 year old was just about at comprehension … There was debate on whether the children should have attended and I was adamant about them going … They hadn’t seen their Pop since before Thanksgiving and never visited him in the hospital with all the tubes in him … They needed to see him sleeping in his casket and laid to rest … They did want to visit him in the hospital, but my wife also expected him to come back home as well … I still can’t believe that congestive heart failure won him over as well … I fully expected him to live forever …

Well, that sums up my major life since my last post. If anything else comes up, I will update.

It’s more than a mail server

So, I attempted to upgrade my mail server … it didn’t work …

Actually, it started out as an idea for me to start another mail server from scratch … I wanted to create a test email server so I could learn more about all the interaction that goes on … As I was researching this, I determined from my reading that it would probably be very simple to upgrade the existing mail server … You know, the one that’s serving thousands of actively live email addresses, whether email is stored on the server or forwarded … I have upgraded plenty of servers in place and have never had major issue … This changed yesterday …

Normally what I’m upgrading is PHP … They update PHP on a pretty regular basis, and it ain’t no thing to cvsup to the latest ports and deinstall, reinstall to the latest and greatest … but with the mail server, this is a bit different … there are many dependencies … I can usually handle this very well too … I can backtrack failures or Google errors and find a fix …

Up until yesterday, I have always paid a consultant to work on my mail server … Email is not something to take lightly … It is the most exploited thing on the Internet … Too much SPAM and Viruses to think that I could handle all of this on my own … So for years now, I have had someone else do the thinking and I do the tinkering … Because of all the tinkering I’ve done myself, and I’m pretty proud of myself that I setup authoritative name servers and an inline firewall all doing multiple amounts of graphing, etc … I thought that I was at the point where I could handle the email server on my own …

All that seemed to be required was that I bring the ports tree up to current and then compile the new programs … Since this was something I wasn’t familiar with, I figured I would let portupgrade have at it and upgrade all the ports that needed upgrading … That’s why it had sounded so easy to me … I also figured I had all the time in the world to do this as the active system would remain active until I rehashed and restarted the services … Not the case …

First thing to fail, the MySQL server … When it’s portupgraded, it stops the MySQL server … So that was the first problem that immediately ceased mail flow … I started the “new” MySQL server and all seemed well … but then things just degredated from there … Now it was a race to compile the programs and get everything in sync once again … The phone kept ringing, but I didn’t have immediate answers … I wanted to try to fix it before I talked to anyone … One hour became two … Then two became four … I didn’t have much sleep, so I was purty tired …

Once I got to the point that everything was finished compiling, out of the hundreds of ports that were checked and upgraded, there were three that didn’t make it … cronolog, fastest_cvsup and maildrop … Two of those stopped the operation of webmail as well as normal mail flow … cronolog stopped apache from operating and maildrop, well, it’s a mail server so something called maildrop was probably pretty important, eh? So I attempted to deinstall, reinstall those programs … When they didn’t work (and maildrop took some time to fail) I Googled to find answers … Those answers were not readily found … I suppose in retrospect, it’s because maildrop is probably not as popular as PHP or apache …

So, I am dead in the water … I could continue to tinker my way through and make it work, but there was two things going against me … The major one, there was a bunch of people that wanted their email … After all it was a Monday, and Monday is the most important (busiest) day … Man, when I screw something up, I do it right! The second thing was, no matter how I got it working, I would not feel confident that it was done right … That’s the most important thing to me … Again, email is something that I don’t think should be messed with or taken lightly …

I resort to turning my mess over to the consultant … Now normally I book time with him … We schedule a time and I open up the firewall, etc and we get it done … Him proceeding with the necessary steps and me babysitting in case he needs to restart the machine or something goes goofy … There’s been only one time that I can recall that I actually had to help him … Most things just worked when he did them … Anyway, by the time he straightened out what I had brought the mail server to, it cost me $200.00 … I figure it probably cost me more due to the fact that people couldn’t get their email … but it’s working now, and that’s all that matters I guess …

The problem is that I don’t understand the mail server … There are many programs working in concert to facilitate the flow of mail and in that process weed out the bad mail and forward the good … The good thing is that I understand the mail server more after this experience … Where I left all of the thinking to the consultant and Mr. Bernstein, knowing the steps in which to rectify the situation I have a better understanding of what’s going on … The other problem is that the mail server isn’t just a mail server … It’s a web server, and imap server, pop, smtp, etc and a bunch of applications talking to one another again, to facilitate the flow of what is to be determined as good email …

This brings me back to the beginning … I am going to set up a parallel mail server … One that I can break and not affect the masses that depend on the mail server … In doing this, I will be able to learn more about all of those applications that work together to stop the bad people on the Internet … There are many ways to do this, and I would like to get more of them in place … The more I can do on my own to figure out how to make it work, the better off I will be in providing this for other people as I will actually know what’s going on … That is becoming more important to me as the cost of running the mail server starts to hit my wallet more … While it’s all Open Source programs, they’re getting much more sophisticated since the baddies are getting that much more sophisticated … I don’t want SPAM … I want to stop it … I could certainly pay someone to make that happen, but that goes beyond the scope of a working mail server … That goes into to custom stuff, and that’s what I want to pursue …

If you’re someone that relies on my mail server for mail, sorry about yesterday (Monday, September 18th) … I had nothing but good intentions in bring the mail server up to date on the applications processing the mail … portaudit was informing me of application that contained vulnerabilites, and I wanted to get them fixed … I just didn’t want to spend the money for a simple portupgrade … Well, now I know that all things that may seem simple aren’t always so simple …

This goes back to things I have said in the past, and they certainly ring true by this example … It may be very easy to set something up … There are many people out there setting up hosting servers that are all encompassing and selling cheap hosting on them … $1/mo., etc … They’re very easy to put in place, either by paying someone to do it or by using a basic understanding of server setups … Where the important stuff comes in is in the ability to maintain that server/application … Vulnerabilities pop up all the time … Microsoft and Apple have facilitated an automatic update feature to solve this … Every once in a while, my iMac tells me, “Hey, you need to update this piece of software!” and I do it … The Microsoft guys, I manually check on a regular basis, sooner if I know something is up, and that’s due to having one machine that still checks and informs me if there’s something going on …

So, I want to get to know my mail server since I have been working on a control panel of sorts that is keeping track of many things for me … The more I update it, the more things are revealed that I was unaware of … This is just things that people were able to get out of me for free since I wasn’t paying very close attention … The more I got this working, the better handle I got on things, and with the mail server also keeping a database, I want to tap into that and merge that into the control panel … If something can be queried, it can be updated and eventually I will be able to get my application running the entire network … I work on this as time allows … The more and more I work on it, the more and more I get to a hands off solution … But I digress …

Back to School

Well yeah, I haven’t posted in a while … Sometimes I would think about when something in particular came up that I thought would be a neat topic to discuss, but I just didn’t get a round tuit … I think I used to have one, but I don’t remember where it is … and yes, by my standards, I have been busy …

The vLog … I have been creating vLogs for the OctaneCrew site … Got into this when monitor guy Alex started it, and I thought it was a much better way to share thoughts than typing up a storm such as I’m doing now … Then light guy Dave made a vLog of which he’s the video guy and he set our standards much higher … I have got into some pretty interesting video editing …

Octane has been working and working and we just came off a fun weekend … They played 3 all original shows … Friday they opened for Staind, Three Days Grace and Soil at The Electric Factory … Sunday they opened for Three Days Grace and Blackstone Cherry at House of Blues in Atlantic City … Saturday was an extended set at The Grape Street Pub in Manayunk … I guess in all instances I was on some pretty neat boards … Staind travels with the PM5D and HOB has a 5K … Grape Street has an A&H ML something or other … HOB sounded awesome …

Have been watching Eagles preseason … They look good … I remain, as always, optimistic and I will leave it at that …

Saw the season premeire of House last night … Still a good TV show so let’s see where they take it this year … Lost starts October 4th …

October 5th is the date I am supposed to be able to renegotiate my T1 contract and you can bet your booty that I will be on the phone first thing in the AM … I have been paying a T1 cost that is outrageous and was locked in three years ago … They would not renegotiate the contract until this one was up … I am in the process of determining if whether since they did this to me that I ought to switch providers … My opinion was that since the price dropped a couple hundred dollars per month that they should have renegotiated me at that time … Instead they told me that I had to wait and there was no recourse but to pay the contracted amount whether I stayed with them or not … Meaning, I could drop them at anytime, but I still owed them the contracted monthly payment … Funny thing is, one of the prices I got about 8 months ago was from them so I attached that email and sent it to my account representative saying that those two should talk … They stuck to their guns and continued to extort the additional money from me …

I cleaned up my hosting database substantially … All the domains that I no longer hosted I removed from my database … All the billing history, all the customers that no longer existed … While I tried to collect from them, it never happened so I decided to strike it up as a loss and to concentrate on those people that are part of the program and do pay as scheduled etc … I wrote a bunch of code in the last week to straighten out my DNS according to my domain database and removed all the discrepancies and found some things that were not right … Sometimes people get things by me, and this code stops that easily by painting a very clear picture of what’s going on … I need to expand this into email and actual disk residences, but DNS is certainly going to stop the traffic …

To sum up those last two paragraphs, with the T1 pricing and the coming and going of hosting customers, hopefully this will once again even out … I have been paying a lot of money to keep a connection active that isn’t necessarily supporting itself … For whatever reason, those people utilizing the service have chosen to stop what they’re doing or go elsewhere and I don’t claim to know exactly why … I can only assume … First, I can assume that someone else is cheaper … I have tried a 1&1 site for a little while … I have even started moving my domain registrations to another registrar … The second thing I could think of is service and where I try to be awesome in service, there are those times that my SmartJack got wet or I have had things such as my DNS server crashing … All interruptions were fixed as soon as possible, but for the 1 year uptime, that 1 hour makes all the difference … So what you were up 8,760 hours, that one hour was when I *really* needed my email … I changed the DNS servers at 1&1 and am pointing everything to me … I didn’t like 1&1’s interface etc, and I don’t like their junk mail … Back to the original reason I started hosting, to be able to do things my way …

Anyway … that’s an update on what I’ve been up to, maybe I will be able to get back to posting here regularly? That would be special …

Power Supply fries in Windows Server

I am awake now because a power supply failed in a Windows server. I should be sleeping now preparing for my weekend, but these things take priority. My wife woke me up when she said there must be something wrong with the computers because several people were calling … Sho’nuff, I see that Mr. Windows 157 isn’t responding to requests … The green power light is glowing, but the fan ain’t blowing … (Johnny Cochran I’m not) … I try to power off from the rear and power it up … Nothing … If the fan were bad, but not the supply, I could have replaced it at a later time … Anyway, slide that puppy out of the rack and spinning screws to put in a replacement power supply … Booted up, and it seemed to me to be slow to get to the BIOS banner, but who knows, I was across the room when it powered on and things work weird through the KVM … So, I will definitely have to cycle it after a boot … Since I am going to have to cycle it, I put on the current available maintenance if any exists … Just so happens there is, so I put this on all other Windows servers … Cycled and all is well …

What really stinks about this? I was sitting here all night running side by side ‘net installs of SuSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 … I had all this down time of waiting where if I had known that server wasn’t responding I could have had the supply replaced well before morning prime time … C’est la vie … I am going back to sleep … Long sleepless weekend ahead …

AOL Postmaster: Revisited

Spoke too soon?  AOL still blocks my FreeBSD mail server …  After a third party originally got the ball rolling with AOL last Friday night, and my follow up and resolution Saturday afternoon, the problem persisted into Tuesday morning …

I again called AOL Postmasters and this time they say that the ticket opened that day by the third party was opened and closed at 2/28/06 12:50 EST … They say that whatever happened Saturday was referenced by this new ticket as it did not “take” and that the 48 hour wait time started at this new time of 12:50 …

I asked what they were going to tell me Thursday when I called back …

AOL Postmaster

I recently spoke directly to an employee of America Online whose job it is to manage the ability of outsiders to send AOL users email … The employee said that they are the “red headed stepchildren” of AOL … They are for the simple reason that stopping the ability for a legitimate host to send AOL users email seriously screws up that person’s business …

I blame drunk people … and the reason I blame drunk people is due to the fact that all of my problems dealing with the inability to send AOL email stems from people that signed up on a band or bars email list and then report those messages when they come in to their inbox as a Terms of Service (TOS) violation to AOL … They say that the emails they’re getting are unsolicited email … The fact is, these people requested that they receive those emails … Rather than click on the unsubscribe link (which I never do myself), they shove the email over to the TOS …

The reason I myself never click on an unsubscribe link is because in most UCE, that link is simply a ruse to verify your email address and will do nothing but generate more SPAM … But in the case of the band or bar, I think those users should realize, hey, I was at that bar, or I saw that band, and it’s quite possible that I signed up for an elist that I really don’t want … In this case, having the familiararity of that band or bar ought to be enough to verify that the unsubscribe link isn’t in fact a ruse, but a legitimate way to stop the flow of email to that person … But we are talking about AOL users here, and drunk ones at that …

So, taking this many steps further, those drunk AOL users that willy nilly report these emails as SPAM and get my mail server denied access to AOL’s mail servers completely screw up the ability of a person I host who has nothing to do with bands or bars and don’t even drink that regularly at all … Maybe a cocktail at a holiday party to get warm and fuzzy for a little while … So Susie who hosts a simple site to display the photos of her new children can’t email Mom and Dad (who access AOL across the country) to tell them that there’s Day 5 pictures posted … Why?

Because AOL empowers their users to shut off my mail server even if it’s because AOL users are stupid idiots … What did the AOL employee have to say about that? That AOL receives fees from their customers and will do whatever their customers tell them to do because they’re paying them to do it … Oh! Well, guess we should bake them a cake? … But what about Susie’s parents? They never asked that their daughter’s email be shut off to them … Oh well … The AOL employee agrees that there are certain users that probably shouldn’t be allowed access to a computer …

Here’s another way I get screwed … An AOL user wants their own domain … They now have web space and a mail server … Instead of taking the time to learn that new mail server and all of the wonderful features that it provides, they simply set up one email address and forward all of that email to their AOL email account … Then, when SPAM comes through their domain and forwarded to their AOL account, they TOS that SPAM … Well, where did that SPAM come from? Their domain hosted on my servers, so basically *I* am getting blamed for that SPAM, and again, I am being shut down by AOL due to a stupid AOL user … bah!

With coding comes satisfaction

I’ve been coding an update to a web application I developed in mid 2001. I originally wrote it in ASP and since I’ve scrapped that proprietary language for the more versatile PHP, this is the direction I’ve taken … Along the way, cleaning up the code is happening as well as adding more features to the application … I’ve already implemented a completely new user authentication system … While working on this code as a whole, other things have come up that required me to implement them into other projects, so I go off on tangents a bit … The overhead flourescent got turned off and I’m back in reflected off the ceiling incandescent bliss … My kids and wife came to the dungeon and asked why I had shut the light out … Each one of them individually … I told them that I didn’t shut the lights out, just switched which lights were on …

Anyway, I have already begun using the application although not finished … Handling receiving of payments has been completely rewritten so it is much easier on me … This is normally what held up the completion of each month’s cycle in the past … Due to this update, that should not ever be an issue again … I also merged the application … Whereas I used to log into a system separately and let the registered users into their own version of the code, I am merging the purposes of the files to serve those privileged and those that are not … I am also asking for input from the wife as I hope she can start to get into doing things on the computer rather than the occasional lookup on the web for driving directions or something … Would like to get her into full fledged email and computer understanding …

Finally what will happen is that I will write system level scripts to be run automatically by the computers … This way things that need to be run at a certain time or date will happen … I will also add the running of these scripts to run more often and I will start bugging people more often than I have in the past … This should help me in many ways … Along with those scripts revolving around this application to be run on a scheduled basis, I will also have the scripts within the application leave breadcrumbs around for other scripts that will be run on a schedule act according to those breadcrumbs … This should take a bunch of administration out of my hands and automate it for me … I should have done this a long time ago … How crazy I get with it has yet to be determined … I don’t know what snags lay before me …

D.I.Y.

So our home phone no longer had a dialtone … We called for service and they came out … I was asleep at the time … Wish I wasn’t cause the guy royally screwed it up … He told my wife that things were screwed up outside … That he hooked it up properly and didn’t know why it wasn’t working … He traced some of my internal lines and couldn’t get to where some of them went and marked where the line came in and was working … That I would have to take it from there … What this guy did was rewire it at the pole so it came in on my defunct DSL connection … WRONG! … Being that that’s where it was, I figured out how to mount those wire in the demarc and get the line working internal to the house … I’m not happy about the connection now coming in that way as it’s now accessible on the back of my house whereas the other 7 or 8 lines come in on this big black cable … I’m not using all those lines anymore, they were for the now defunct BBS I had running when I moved in … The Internet took care of that …

This past Wednesday, February 1st 2006 Octane opened up at the TLA for Pray for the Soul of Betty which is Constantine from American Idol‘s band … Considering all of the concern prior to the show, it went fine for me … I made Octane sound good and everybody was happy … I didn’t meet the guy, but I was in his presence and that was interesting enough for me … I didn’t attempt to meet him either as I wouldn’t have had anything to say to him except that I saw him on TV … Still the highlight of my Octane career has been meeting Gene Simmons whereas I did have a conversation at length with him and he signed a copy of his book for me …

ICUHost.Net Billing went out and I also sent out a newsletter … After reading the letter and rereading it, I emailed it out and I missed a blatant misspelling … Damn! … I have started developing a replacement billing application that will replace the ASP one I wrote years ago … I am writing the new one in PHP … I am also using a different authorization system than I normally use for other sites I’ve secured up … This one does hash checking as well as email address verification through links and stuff … Pretty cool … Needed something like this for keeping tabs on customers and verifying new ones … I can’t tell you how many people I just didn’t set up because they were from out of state … Even though they signed up and everything, when I didn’t get back to them, they didn’t get back to me, so I guess I was pretty good in sniffing out the fakers … So hard to trust anyone on the Internet these days … Anyway, along with the new authorization methods, the new billing application will be able to verify domains via different databases and I’ll have a way better handle on billing and domain management … There have been domains that I’ve set up but never assigned to a user and they got a free site for months … When I started verifying DNS against accounts, this won’t happen … I’ll be able to check balances and anything past due I can update the DNS records and inactivate the site … Writing it in PHP allows me to utilize the command line and schedule the billing to run as I see fit … I think I will end up running something weekly if not daily … It will check many things for me that I have not been able to check on a regular basis … Right now, I have someone who moved their site, name servers and everything, but I see that they’re using my mail server and other stuff that I haven’t inactivated … I don’t think that’s right, and with automation, these things won’t happen …

Anyway … no time … need more time … We didn’t win PowerBall … We will this Saturday though …

It’s all in the config

After a couple weeks of toying around with the installation of a FreeBSD 6.0 PF firewall using PF, the key was unlocked by a member of the freebsd-pf mailing list … It was as I suspected a simple couple lines in rc.conf to bring the interfaces of the if_bridge “up” … I have documented this installation on my projects page here …

Maybe FreeBSD 6.0?

FreeBSDHmm … Maybe FreeBSD is the way to go with this project? FreeBSD 6.0 was “released” November 4th … That’s the new logo over to the left there … I had played with it a bit after setting up the FreeBSD 4.11 firewall, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results … Also, when upgrading the source, it didn’t seem there were any updates available … So it’s still pretty new …

Working on the OpenBSD machine, I was getting frequent errors … The machine would halt, and I would be left with booting … This was an intermittent problem, and seemed to be related to the network interface although I did seem to get a video error once or twice … I am just speculating as I have no idea what the error messages are reporting … I can only guess by Googling and sampling like results … Waiting for the machine to boot and go through the Raid controller boot was a pain too …

I built the OpenBSD machine on a Proliant 1850R, so rather than blow away my work, I simply swapped out the drives to try the FreeBSD 6.0 solution … I am using two 18G drives in a Raid 0+1 setup … This will save my ass down the road … As you can see, I sort of go back and forth in my work … Each time going through it, there may be something new I find or an option that I may have changed my mind on … I currently have the FreeBSD 6.0 installation to the point where it’s a working server … Running an SMP kernel and having Apache 2.0 with PHP4 installed …

My ultimate goal is to have an IPless filtering bridge with a network card behind the bridge for machine management. I mapped out this configuration in a drawing here … I sent this off to the freebsd-pf list requesting advice … Many of my searches didn’t return reliable information, and the stirring on that list didn’t bring back definitive answers, but that it’s possible … It seemed to me that OpenBSD was going to be a better solution … So I will go back and forth and see which works better for me … I think I know how to thwart the OpenBSD halts now since I had a similar situation on the FreeBSD install … I installed FreeBSD 6.0 via FTP … It also seems to me that FreeBSD is sort of getting comparable to OpenBSD in its distribution in this manner as well as attempting to implement tried and true solutions only available on OpenBSD until the release of FreeBSD 6.0 … I think I am on the bleeding edge, and I am documenting this as I go and have already started a document on it in my testing area …

There are three reasons to get this working in this manner … One is that having the card in there that can talk to the network will enable me to keep the machine current with easy access for cvsup’ing my ports and source … Two would be that the firewall will report to me nightly … Previously having the IPless firewall without network access, I didn’t know if there were problems developing on that machine since I didn’t receive the nightly maintenance messages … and finally, having access to the machine and running an Apache installation on there, I will be able to produce pretty graphs to display the firewall’s activity …