Michael P. O'Connor

I just tried to compile the kernel of BSD, and I got linker errors, I have never gotten an error on the linker while compiling a kernel, what is up with the BSD kernel?? I would love to spend the time figuring this beast out, but I don’t really have the time for that, I guess I will be grabbing a copy of a Linux to server as the VPN server. I might some day in the future try BSD again, but at this time I don’t have the time for it. I don’t even have the time for the VPN server that is needed but, it will take less time then trying to get BSD to compile then installing and testing the VPN stuff. Now that it is 3:30am I might want to consider going to bed now, since I have to be up in 4 and a half hours from now.

I am trying to get the BSD system going, and it not working as well as I has hoped. It does not see my network card, and if I can not get it to see the network card I will have to bail on the BSD idea. I would like to use BSD for it, but if it does not see the network card, I will have to go back to Linux, since the main reason for this computer is for network stuff (the VPN stuff) But for now I am compiling a new kernel, I have included all the network drivers, if none of them work I will have to kill the idea. The problem might be that the computer has a SMC-Ultra card, and those have always been nasty to get going, so I can not blame BSD for that, but I don’t want to spend any money on this system, since I got the box free, there should never be a reason to put more money into a computer accessory then you put into the computer, also the computer is only a Pentium 1 (maybe 2 if I am lucky) 300MHz.

I am back working on the VPN now; I am looking at putting a BSD flavor on it. From what I can get form some of my friends on wplug, I might be going with FreeBSD and see how it goes, that is the nice thing about getting another unused computer for the server, you can mess with it before you get all things in place, and you don’t have to worry about messing up your work boxes since it is not a work box to begin with.

This weekend I am hoping to be able to start reading the VPN book I got at the cplug security conference, and maybe have some thing setup so I can have full access to my home network and shutdown all the other ports I have open up at home, I am thinking the few ports I have open the few chances I have to get hacked into on the home network, call me paranoid if you must. Plus if I do this right I am hoping that I will be able to see my iTunes Library that is at home from work. I just have to make sure that when I am connecting to my iTunes, no one can connect though the iTunes at work and get to my iTunes at home.

I had an interesting dialog box pop up on iTunes today, I got some Celtic Hymns today, and more then I care to admit here. When it finished downloading the music it popped up a dialog box with the following message “Your Music is important, Please back it up”. I was kind of taken aback by it. Not because I did not know that, but because 1) most music stores do not want you to back up your music, and 2) it would be more profitable for them to not have their customers back up their music. I will have to give it to the Apple corp. they don’t seam to be as greedy and evil as other corps. seam to be some times, that is probably why I will continue to go back to the iTMS.

I have to admit I like the USB jump drives that are coming out. At first I kind of resisted them because I was hoping that the SD cards and card readers would be what replaced floppy drives, but I am not blind and I can see that it is the USB jump drives that are what people like to be the next replacements for floppy drives. The benefits of them are that you do not need drivers for them, and most (if not all) computers in use today do have USB connections, and windows 98se or higher, Mac OSX, or a Linux based computer that supports USB mass storage devices. The one thing I love about the SD cards was that they not only worked in the card readers on the computers, but also in PDA’s and Digital cameras, and a host of other devices. The one downside to the SD cards was that they were (in fact are) slower then the USB jump drives. And the card readers (even the smallest ones) are considerably larger then a jump drive. The nice thing about the jump drives now, is since most people are buying them, which is helping to drive the price of them down. I still like the SD card for PDA’s and digital cameras but I am starting to move over to the jump drives.