Linux

Wow.

I would be kind of cool to be on this migration team.
"Yeah, let's power down this Pentium and replace it with this Opteron"

http://www.woodtv.com/global/story.asp?s=4771988

Seems like they could have scheduled it a little better, as mentioned in the article:

"The upgrade is unprecedented and comes at a time notorious for severe weather in West Michigan. The National Weather Service will be shutting down one of its largest eyes on the sky for five days; five days with little to no radar."

I haven't used it yet but it looks like a good way to keep the bad guys out. Of course, changing the default port always helps quite a bit too for the automated scripts out there.

SSHd Filter

Fail2Ban - automated prevention help

Blocks IPs after it has determined that the IP trying to get in is a 'bad guy' - great for SSH servers and other services that are commonly attacked brute-force style.

A great HOWTO writeup is here:
http://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/fail2ban/

You could always get real clever and do port knocking but that is sometimes a hassle.

http://mobile.newsforge.com/mobility/06/02/09/1727256.shtml?tid=104&tid=132

I seem to live in the last known area to have analog cable with Charter Cable in Michigan. We are surrounded by digital cable, but our Crockery Lake substation has yet to be rebuilt. DSL is not available in the area either, and even if it were, it would be iDSL at best. I'd love to pull in a T1 into my house and setup a little wireless ISP but I know for a fact that the instant I do such a thing, for a big cost outlay, suddenly digital cable will be available out here.

I know for a fact that there is a lot of interest around here for something better than ISDN. Right now when I'm at home, I'm on my cell phone with a data plan. So now it is a race between whether digital cable with cable modems get here first, or EVDO gets rolled out in Grand Rapids. If I pay off enough bills and can get enough people to subscribe to a wireless subscription, I might have to get a T1 in here for any decent speeds.

Anyway, long rant, but I would love to get VOIP on my little WRT54GS but over a cell phone on 1xRTT (144kbit - basically just about IDSL speeds - I sometimes get 16k/sec) , VOIP just isn't viable. Too much latency variance and not enough 'fat pipe'.

[snip]

1.1. What's New In Fedora Core 5 test1

* Xen virtualisation software and yum package manager are now well integrated within the Fedora installer. The installer interface is more streamlined. Remote logging and improved support for tracebacks is included.
* Pup, a graphical updater using yum, has replaced rhn-applet.
* GNOME 2.12 and KDE 3.4 desktop environments are available.
* GNOME Power Manager and GNOME Screensaver are available as a technology preview within this release.
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 final release is included. OpenOffice.org now uses system versions for many of the libraries leading to increased performance and efficiency.
* Xorg X11R7 release candidate 2 has been included in this release. This is the first modular version, which helps in providing additional features and bug fixes at a faster pace.
* Kernel 2.6.14 is included. Software suspend is enabled in this release.
* SCIM has replaced IIMF in Fedora Core in this release.
* There are changes in the animated mouse cursor theme.
* Fedora Project now has a new logo.

[/snip]

Hopefully it won't have the "Bloated Evlis" feel that FC3 and FC4 have. Even on a fast machine, FC3 and FC4 seemed to run a bit clunky.

Someone beat me to it. I've been sick of having hard drive failures on my little Thinkpad that I use to do most of the house's packet routing and shaping. I've been working on getting a 44-pin laptop IDE to CompactFlash adapter that will actually fit correctly in the bay of the Thinkpad 600E.

http://www.cflinux.hu/

My original thought was Fedora Core 4, stripped down, and mounted r/w only sparsely but it looks like this distro is made specifically for Compact Flash.