Life On The Bleeding Edge

After yesterday's Happy Horseshit with the random MAC address, I installed the updated kernel package I made last week.

And, naturally, it turns out I should have done that first because the random MAC problem suddenly vanished into thin air. I am the best waster of my own time. I'm glad I picked a three-day weekend to do this because I'm going to need it.

I built that kernel to save time, but today I meandered over to kernel.org and discovered the fucker went up a revision.

Why do I bother?

Also ipset, an add-on to iptables, went up two revisions over the last week.

Two.

At least I saw that coming, since I subscribe to the netfilter mailing list.

I had a very nice iptables+ipset configuration going back in 2007 before the Hard Drive Disaster that year, and I was hoping to resurrect it during this project.

The reason is, Ban-O-Matic adds another line to the firewall table every time someone gets banned. Over time, it makes the list unwieldy since every packet has to be checked against every line. With ipset, that all goes into a single line and only the set is updated. Makes things more efficient, if only a little faster.

The challenge back then was to code loading the sets during a reboot and I had it all hacked out, running perfectly (as perfect as things get around here) when the drive crashed. I eventually recovered it all thanks to my Magic IDE Card but I haven't done anything with it since.

And, speaking of the Magic IDE Card, I was going to give it a permanent home in the new box, but it conflicts with the built-in (single) IDE controller. That was never an issue in the NetVista box. So, that is probably where it will live the rest of its days.

And as far as that box goes (I'm on a stream-of-consciousness roll now), back when I was having ATI "issues", I played with the idea of getting an old box for my original Voodoo 3000 video card to play UT on. Now, that dream is within reach. I never had a single issue with that card on Windows 2000 and performance was always just fine on a PIII 450mHz junker.

I can dream, can't I?