h0bbel.p0ggel.org

I've recently started wondering why I do this? Why do I bother posting lots of random stuff here, and who cares? Looking at my logs, it actually seems like a lot of people care, for some reason or other.

If I am to continue doing this, I feel I need a purpose. Random ramblings are fun and nice and all, but it would be much more interesting to actually write about something that will actually be of use to someone besides myself.

So, what can I do? I'm a Windows sysadmin by day (that lives to tell about it), and hopefully a budding hobby-photographer at night. I'm a father, with two lovely kids. Put various Gallery tasks into the mix, and you've pretty much got me covered. Thats me, defined. How interesting is that, really?

I can use my experience and knowledge on Windows based administration, and probably help somebody in the process. At the same time, I want to use this space to promote Open Source projects that I love, like Gallery. That, combined with photography and other random items really sounds messy. Or does it?

Utilizing catergories, and perhaps even (slightly) different stylings on different content might help seperating the personal and the professional content.

I'm going to give it a go at least, and we'll see how we go from there. I do have a few changes lined up, hopefully I'll be able to follow them through as well.

First off, redesigning the site to be a full width one, it feels a bit cramped as it is now. Upgrading my Gallery from v1.5 to Gallery 2 and incorporating it into Wordpress with WPG2.

When that's done, more and better categories, more "professional" content related to managing a Windows environment and hopefully better photos than the ones I put online today.

The current plan is to get my new webserver installed sometime in June, and then move the content over from the old one pretty quickly. Then it'll be hosted in a datacenter, with a 10Mbit connection 24x7. Thats pretty decent motivation to get things moving.

A miracle. No more, no less. I'm speachless.

When you walk through a storm Keep your chin up high And don't be afraid of the dark. At he end of the storm Is a golden sky And the sweet silver song of a lark. Walk on through the wind, Walk on through the rain, Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown.Walk on, walk on With hope in your heart And you'll never walk alone, You'll never walk alone.

In the spirit of self-celebration, I just have to mention that I've now passed the 10.000 post mark in the Gallery forum. I guess that truly makes me a Voluminous Viking

How fitting is it that this is also post 100 on this site? Coincidence? Perhaps.

boson/boson2a
I've gone through the BOSON's® Practice Test for Microsoft Managing Windows Server 2003 Exam (070-290).

And I'm sorry to say that, well, it sucks. Look at the screenshots. How on earth can you take these seriously?

I hope that people don't spend money on these. I've used the Transcender practice tests a few years back, and they were really good. I'll need to take a look at those again before my next exam.

Boson was a big let down, definately not worth the money.

I presume I've been sorely missed the last few days, right? My latest period of downtime was caused by several issues, all of which stem from the original idea of me having a hardware firewall at home, to provide VPN connectivity to my workplace. So far, so good.

Since I was behind a NAT router, IPSEC based VPN tunnels are not very reliable, often not really possible at all. Not possible in my case, so I sent a request to my ISP asking for something they called "fixed IP with subnet". Basically it's a /30 mask, leaving me with two usable IP's, one for my router and one for my firewall. Brilliant! I recieved a detailed email from them, with step by step configuration settings for reconfiguring my router. So, thursday night was D-day.

First of all, knowing my ISP, I decided to have a quick conversation with them, to make sure my request had been properly handled and that everything was a-ok before I started reconfiguring. According to them it was, so I got to it, with the result that I was basically an orphaned island in their network. Thankfully I know people that work for the ISP, some of them are former colleagues of mine, so I had a direct phonenumber to call. Guess what, they had not enabled the new setup for my router, even though I checked before I did anything else. Basically they forgot to add my router to their shizzy ldap based configuration tool...
They sorted that mess out pretty quickly though, and I was finally able to get online again at last.

Configuring the VPN part, was a breeze. The Firebox Edge X box is really easy to manage, and work really well combined with the Firebox III/700 we have at work. Suprising, huh?

Next step, enabling inbound connections to my webserver, mailserver and such. Policies created, and policies enabled, and then.... nothing. Turns out the Watchguard had decided to only allow one machine access to the outside world, blocking every request any other machines on my lan did. Firmware upgrades and downgrades, activation routines, the lot, I don't think there is much more I could have done to troubleshoot this at that point.
It took quite a while to make sure this was the case, since I was suspecting that my Linux network-foo wasn't quite up to standards. I even drove back to work to pick up a laptop I had laying around, to see if that was the case. Surely enough, that one couldn't connect either. Several emails to the Watchguard support service, handled by someone called Harsh Verma later, no resolution was found.

Inserted: 2/21/2005 11:21:41 AM by HVerma Id like to discuss it further on phone .Please provide me your phone number and best time to call you up.

That kinda illustrates it...

Basically, it all boiled down to me having to replace the unit with a fresh one on monday. 10 minutes of configuration later, everything was finally back on track again, and working flawlessly. Now I just have to wait for the DNS to propagate properly, since I "parked" the domain while I was having problems.

So now I have proper firewalling, a secure constant VPN connection to my office, and my website/mailserver back on track. Life is good again.

Hopefully I won't be having the same kinds of issues with the other Firebox Edge X boxes I'm going to configure in the next few days, those will be shipped to Kroatia, Romania, Poland and another location here in Norway. They better work as intended, as I don't plan on going on a european tour the next few weeks.