Mine the Harvest

IT Adventures

Linux on a home router

by on Sep.22, 2007, under IT Adventures

Taking my Cisco classes has been great, and I’ve certainly been learning a lot more about networking, routers, routing protocols, TCP/IP, network design, WANs, VLANs and such. But a few weeks ago I came across this killer site for OpenWRT which allows you to install Linux onto Linksys and other routers which have enough memory and use supported chip sets. I love Linux and knew immediately knew I would have to do this.

My first attempt on my own Belkin bricked it -it didn’t have enough memory (knew it but couldn’t resist trying). Getting the correct original firmware back on it was a nightmare – THANKS BELKIN for putting about a dozen incorrect firmwares out there and utterly hiding the correct one for this version. Appreciate it.

But then a friend of mine had a Linksys WRT54G ver. 2.0 that he just replaced as it was giving him some trouble and he graciously donated it to science. Perfect!

Now that I had supported hardware, I simply had to play with this. It sat several weeks as I was busy with class, but then last weekend I finally got to try it out.

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Colbalt Server & Strongbolt

by on Sep.21, 2007, under IT Adventures

I love making old technology live on some times – today’s bleeding edge is all fine, but give me a nice low-tech solution any day.

Last weekend I had a fun time playing with a server I am picking up from work. I found a Sun Cobalt XTR laying about, forgotten by the flow of time, and it seems to have followed me home. A co-worker and I played around with it at work first, fired it up and ensured it still had a pulse. I decided to toy with it to see if it could fulfill my long held desire of having a RAID file server – a central dumping ground where I can at last place all my completely invaluable files and accumulate even gigs more! My digital pack-rat mentality can finally realize its full innate potential. I can save everything forever – just like that Microsoft guy and his “My Life” project. Or at least have a stable place to back my other systems up to.

So – I brought the box home and it looks like this:

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