Open source home renovations

On June 30, 2008 I took possession of my very first property. It's an 800 square foot, two-bedroom condo in South Calgary (Alberta).

Given that I am a massive geek, part of the renovations I am taking on in preparation for moving in, is a robust home network. This includes (at least) seven cat5e, and six rg6 cable drops. For this I have used a fancy product by Leviton. Their Structured Media center items appear to be exactly what I need to marshal my assorted cables, and send them along to their eventual end points.

This allows a lot of flexibility towards future home renovations, and lets you easily re-design the layout of the network at a future point in time. As far as I am concerned, this sort of cable organization is the best way to go.

In any case, all this work is being completed with the intention of designing an ideal open source home. My routing, media distribution, work bench, telephony and data storage system have all marshaled into a single room. The original analog telephony network is untouched in case a future owner doesn't want to use the fancy system that I have built.

Anyways, I have been doing this upgrade as part of a behind the scenes project that I have been playing with to develop a home running entirely on open source software. More on this later, expect interesting developments as the year goes on.

-Ted

My initial experience with pfSense

As good as OpenBSD has been as my gateway router OS, I am pretty sure that I am going to move away from it to one of the pre-packaged routing systems.

Specifically, I am talking about pfSense. pfSense is a distribution of FreeBSD that uses the pf packet filter technology originally from OpenBSD, and actually had its origins as a fork of the m0n0wall project which uses ipfilter. Both systems are extremely powerful, and importantly, easy for me to use, and because I want to stick with pf as my underlying packet filter, I have chosen pfSense.

Installation onto my compact flash driven Compaq Evo D300 Small Form Factor, was very straightforward with the assistance of my card reader, dd, and a null-modem serial cable (after I figured out that installation is done via a serial terminal rather than the screen). Certainly, anyone ready to do an embedded installation of pfsense just with parts lying around their house deserves major geek cred points.

Right now, only 64Mb of the 2Gb flash card is partitioned for use (from the default image), which actually is not really a big deal since its a router. I'm not exactly going to mess with it very often. Maybe. I am forever tinkering with this stuff. But I think that I will leave it until the next distribution update.

Compaq Evo D300 SFF as a router

About 6 months ago I purchased a reasonably cheap second hand Compaq Evo D300 Small Form Factor PC.

Originally, the machine was intended to become a dial-up router and http proxy for my moms small gallery business in Empress, Alberta. After repeated failed attempts to get OpenBSD to actually dial into the ISP, I gave up on that train of thought for the time being and brought the machine back to Calgary.

Jumping forward a bit, I decided to start using the machine (named evo on my network) as my own gateway instead. Fine. OpenBSD installed just peachy, and configuring dhcpd and dns took a couple hours. Poof, instant router. However, one of the machines problems is that unless a keyboard is attached, it will fail to boot. Despite all my rummaging through the bios, I was unable to turn off the darned "halt keyboard missing; Press F1 to continue error".

This is a problem for server hardware which run headless (like a router should be able to), since if there is a power failure, I will need to manually hook up a monitor and keyboard, and press F1, and verify it is booting. Gah, No thanks; I would rather run a crumby linksys. Sure enough, Google came to my rescue. Apparently, the ignore missing keyboard option is available on the machine, however, both a power and bios password need to configured to make it available in the BIOS.

Silly.

That said, the machine is more than capable for a SOHO router, and now I am keeping it for myself.

I want less hardware

I have been seriously considering reducing the number of computers in my life. In the good old days, I ran a fairly powerful Pentium 4 desktop for gaming and general computer work. The machine is still my central desktop, but I have found that I rarely use it these days. That said, I promised my brother that he can have the machine.

I've been thinking about what I want to replace the desktop with, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I no longer really want a desktop.

My laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) performs the majority of the tasks that I need, has open source drivers for every piece of hardware on the machine and is also very easy to bring with me where ever I go. And from personal experience, the machine is a spectacular conference laptop. Avoiding the need synchronize the machines is very appealing.

So. Is this the way I want to go?

Maybe.

For May, my plan is to pack up the desktop, give it to my brother, and see if just using the laptop works for me. At the end of the month, I will review if this was a success or not and choose whether or not to buy a new desktop.

nvidia quadro nvs 280 cards

So I have recently purchased a number of PNY Quadro NVS 280 (nvidia) graphics cards across a variety of bus flavors.

I have a number of thoughts regarding the cards. They support dual-DVI and are passively cooled.

While they are certainly not very performant cards, they can reliably support any activity that a typical workstation would need to do.

Besides keeping a number of the cards, for myself, I think I will forward a couple of them off to the nouveau project. At some point in the near future I would love to be able to throw one of these cards into a machine of my choosing and have a 3d capable system at my finger tips.

Lastly, since I own a number of nvidia cards anyways, I have been VERY strongly thinking of getting involved in the nouveau project myself.

I will be moving later this summer to a place with a garage that I can certainly see converting into an open source development workshop.

-Ted

Pizza and video cards

So I am just sitting down for dinner in a local pizzeria with great expectations of enjoying a very scrumptious dinner for one.

Being a complete nerd, I naturally have my laptop with me, and have connected to the restaurants wireless connection. The fact that this situation is possible, really speaks to our ability to be communication. Like really.

Even 5 years ago, what I am doing right now, would have been relatively rare. Now, however I am only one of several people in the restaurant playing with various wireless devices.

Cool hey!

Anyways, I just left my favorite computer store here in Calgary with three rather sexy video cards.

The cards are as follows:

• PNY Low-Profile Quadro NVS 280 AGP with DMS-59 (Dual DVI-I)


• PNY Quadro NVS 280 PCIe with DMS-59


• Matrox G550 with DMS-59

All the cards are passively cooled, and will find loving homes in the various re-incarnated computers that pass through my life.

Dual monitor goodness

About 2 years ago I purchased two monitors for a dual monitor setup on my home workstation. Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disgusted with the image quality of my mythtv system when I was using my traditional CRT as a monitor. So I sacrificed my second monitor and have been using it as my television for the past long while.

That all changed this week when I purchased a new 26" LCD television to use and the monitor for my mythtv media server.

Now that I finally got my second monitor out of so called bondage, I took the time to configure a dual monitor setup on my main workstation.

I was surprised at how straightforward this was with OpenSUSE 10.3. Originally I had expected that I would need to do at least a little bit of manual configuration inside my xorg.conf. Well, it turns out that dual monitors was far easier than I had expected and I am now working on httperf across the dual monitor set-up.

As a side note, I am using an nvidia 7800GS with the proprietary driver.

My iriver clix gear - Oh the joy

So I recently gave away my iriver clix cradle because it was never really mine to begin with... Does that make sense? Anyways, whatever.

So last sunday I was moping around with no way to listen to music without an external set of speakers or headphones and feeling generally sorry for myself. To rectify it, I hopped onto eBay to search for a new cradle to call my own. Sure enough, I found someone in Canada selling one of these rare beauties and put a bid down on it. Not even a minute later, I discovered that this seller also had a matched FM Transmitter (AFT-200) up for auction as well. So I bid on it too!

Anyways, a few minutes ago, they both arrived safe and sound, and now I am relaxing with blissful tinny (is this a word?) music echoing around my apartment.

Thumbs up for the iriver clix, a great product.

Thought you should know.

-Ted