Over the last couple of years I've been fiddling with various ways of NAT'ing my internet connection at home. I've tried little firewall/router boxes from the likes of Netgear, Linksys and Thompson but I've always gone back to running iptables on my linux server so that I can firstly have more control and secondly, easily manage the firewall remotely.

Over the years I've crafted a set of iptables rules that I use and that work well for me but there's always some headscratching when I fiddle with the NAT'ing side of things as it seems to be something that my brain has decided how it works isn't important enough to retain!

About a week ago I had a disk go in my linux server. smartmon was reporting that the disk was running at 160 degrees centigrade so I'm not surprised it had given up the ghost! So after double checking the backups were all in place I pulled out all the various disks that I'd JBOD'd together and replaced them with a pair of hardware RAID mirrored Western Digital Caviar Green SATA disks. I went for the 750GB models rather than the 1TB disks as there's still quite a premium between the two.

Instead of rolling my own iptables script I thought I'd have a nose around and see what people other people are using. I came across a couple of HOWTOs on the Ubuntu forums but to be honest the scripts weren't that much better than what I already had. I was looking for something that would improve my situation rather than replace my problems with a new set!

That's when I came across the arno-iptables-firewall package. I installed it and ran through the debconf questions thinking 'ooo this is easy'. Tried a ping out from my desktop and.. bah. Didn't work. So I tried a
dpkg-reconfigure -plow arno-iptables-firewall to see if there were debconf questions hidden below the normal threshold. It gave me a couple more questions including a couple about NAT. A quick restart of the firewall and bish bash bosh! It's all done!

More information on Arno's Firewall Scripts can be found here.

I installed Vista on my main machine at home a couple of months ago, installing XP, Vista and Ubuntu, each on their own disk. Originally Vista was the RC2 release, a late beta that wasn't 100% stable, so last week I installed the Business edition that I've had kicking around for a couple of weeks. So far I've been fairly happy with it, not booting back into XP once since the install. There are a couple of funnies; HP don't have any 3-in-1 software for my printer/fax/scanner that will work under Vista (going to try and install the software on an XP VMware instance for those once in a blue moon times that I need it and failing that I'll borrow Jen's scanner!). The other funny is that Ultramon (multi-monitor app) has problems displaying wallpaper on screens to the right of the primary monitor. Wierd!!

Today I tried burning a CD for the first time. Under XP I always relied on Nero to burn my disks, never having had any success using the built in application. So I thought I'd try the built in functionality under Vista. Three failures later it's time to find out if Nero works under Vista!

The crescendo of computer related noises in my office has once again reached the level at which I actually notice it so I've spent some time today tracking down the worst clicks and whirrs. First candidate was my desktop PC. I opened the side of the case and the first thing that I noticed was dust. I'm blaming the shredder. Ever since I put it in the office there's been a noticable increase in the amount of dust that's kicking around. Maybe I should move it somewhere else. Anyway. I digress.. I cleaned out the dust. Well that's not quite true. I re-organised the dust using a can of compressed air, taking particular care to make sure all the build up on the fans was cleared off. Normally I grab a Swiffer and use that but that would have meant going downstairs, something I'm not a huge fan of at the moment.

Still noisey so I started stopping fans with my finger to work out what was making the noise. The graphics card fan. Easy one to sort out with a quick visit to http://www.quietpc.com. So once that's sorted I should have a quiet desktop again.

Next it was time to dig out the server that lives hidden away behind the desk. At least one of the hard drives has been making a nasty clunking noise recently. A nose around inside and after pulling a couple of power leads I worked out that it was the root disk that was making all the noise. Typical; the only disk that requires me to rebuild the box. I've ordered some 250GB Samsung SpinPoint disks to replace all the drives in the box. They are probably the quietest disks you can buy which is what I'm looking for. Seek speeds and ultimate performance aren't really required in a file server.

So rebuilding the server allows me to try another flavour of Unix. I was going to go back to Debian after fiddling with Gentoo for a while. But friends have recommended Ubuntu. It's based on Debian with the same package management system behind it; the thing that I love abot Debian. The difference is that it's a lot more up to date with a release every 6 months, come rain or shine. I'll see how I go.

Back to the stairs remark earlier. I hurt my back on Saturday and have been struggling since. I'm booked in to see the Quack on Friday afternoon with a view to being referred to a local chiropractor called The Spine Team. I've heard a lot of good about them and after checking today that they are registered with BUPA, it's not going to break the bank to go and give it a go.

The annoying thing is that I was all rev'd up to start back at the gym on Monday morning. It's now Thursday and I still haven't been. It's making me more determined to come up with the final solution though.