Undrblog

More functionality on the horizon! I’ve added the ability to post comments. Registered users can now post comments. Unfortunately, i’m the only registered user, and i havent written a sign-up process yet, so until i do…. you’ll have to wait. 😛 -War

Added a title pic.. Which is slightly less lame than the word “Index” which i had there during development. I’m not graphic artist, but any stretch, so you have to deal with it. I could never figure out how to make a nice transparent background, see the distortion around the letters? No good. I’d never make it as a graphics guy…. Which is why I don’t claim to be one! I’m an admin, I know Linux, Windows, Cisco, and a handful of languages. I don’t need to make pretty graphics. If I cant take a picture of it, or swipe it from another site on the ‘net, you wont see it here. heh

-War…

Or, my front yard rather.

Last weekend we cleaned up the planter in front of our house, and planted some flowers. Well, the whole time we had a little visitor watching over our shoulders, i guess making sure we didn’t ruin his hunting grounds. A Praying Mantis! He’s probably about 4-5″ long, and he’s not planning on leaving from the looks of it.

Today I went out to water the flowers, and plant two more that the wife had bought, and as I’m watering one of them, guess who comes running out from underneath? Our garden protector of course! So this time i decided to get some pictures. I ran inside and grabbed the Sony CyberShot (Love this camera by the way.. :P) cranked it up to its highest res. and snapped a few pics.

The gallery can be found here: http://www.undrground.org/geek/gallery/mantis

-War…

Anyone who knows me, know’s I’ve been into MMO’s for almost 10 years now. I started with EQ at the beginning of 2000, and now being 2007, i guess that makes it 7 and a half years. Anyway, I like the idea of MMO’s, but i’ve never liked the monthly subscription fee’s. I understand why theyre necessary, but I just dont like paying a monthly fee for a game that I’ve already purchased!

The last game that i actually paid for was WoW, I closed my account near the end of 2005, due to lack of time and at the time, lack of interest. Every game gets to the point where you just dont want to play anymore, and you need to take a break. Well i took a break, and found better uses for the monthly subscription fee, and never re-upped. Well, I miss it. Not just WoW, but the whole MMO scene. Financially, things have changed, and I still cant justify the monthly charges, so I’ve been hunting for something free, that might fill the void.

Someone suggested Eve Online. While it’s not free, they DO have a 14 day free trial. So I went ahead and signed up. What a phenominal game! I was about 90% sure i was going to buy a subscription once my trial ended, but on the day it ended, i changed my mind. Theyre fee’s are something like $20 for the first month, and $15 thereafter (or close, check their website if you want to know for sure, what do i look like, an ad campeign?), and I couldn’t see spending that monthly…

So the trial expired, and i was left with no game, again. I did some more digging. I had toyed with a WoW server emulator a few months back, and i had it working! The playable game was so full of bugs though, that I just couldn’t enjoy it. While I was researching the emulator I was using, i ran across publicly run free WoW servers, that actually host their servers on commercially hosted dedicated servers, and have an actual staff that maintain the world! They pay for all of this through donations.

Enter, WoW-Sexy (www.wow-sexy.com)… WoW-sexy is the name of a group who runs one of these servers, well, really, a few of them. They have a “Fun” server, which is a modified game, with a load of exp per kill, and non bliz-like (the term for blizzard like servers) content. Then they have a server which tries to mimic the live game as close as possible. It runs TBC, and has all of the current live content. It’s still got its share of bugs, but it is VERY playable. The EXP is something like 3x live. which is ok imho, its not like a level per kill, but it does speed things up a bit. I play on this server, and it’s very close to a live WoW experience. Some nights I can play all night and not run into a single bug, other nights, its a little frustrating, on the bright side, you can usually find a GM online, and get bugs taken care of.

Check it out! Seriously, it’s fun!

-War…

Have you ever built a firewall from scratch?

Did you build it, thinking that you’d thought of everything, just to find out later than you missed something? I have… So when I decided to replace my old, tired, un-reliable Linksys SoHo router with a full blown firewall, I dug for pre-built linux-like firewall distributions.

A co-worker turned me on to Smoothwall Express. It runs a linux kernel, iptables, and a host of custom written seciruty apps. On top of that, there’s a whole team of coders/security guys working to develop it. AND you can download the whole source tree, and build it on your own!

I downloaded the Smoothwall Express 3.0 Beta SP2 ISO. Installed it, and loved the features! A day or so later, I decided that I wanted to limit the number of simultaneous connections allowed to my BBS, so i tried to add an ip connlimit rule to iptables…. NO! Ip-connlimit is busted. So i took the smoothwall down in an effort to find a better solution. Well, no better solution exists. So I spent A MONTH working on building a custom, from source, smoothwall, with a patched, and working ip-connlimit module. The end result? A rock solid firewall, with a ton of nifty geeky tools, AND connection limiting. One of the developers even hinted that he might be taking my work, and putting it into the release! Pretty nice if you ask me.

-War…