Solo Technology

Another Play with Puppy Linux

August 26, 2009 - 9:22 pm | Tech

It has been almost a year since my last look at Puppy Linux so I dusted off the old ThinkPad 600e laptop (pentium 2!) and had a look at Puppy 4.2.1.

Initially it would hang while booting from CD. After some searching I learned to give the “acpi=force” argument at boot and that got things going.

Once again, I’m blown away by how fast apps run on this old machine when using Puppy. Apps just “pop” onto the screen after launching them! Very cool. Well, the browser (SeaMonkey) didn’t really “pop” though – Once again, I must observe that modern browsers are not the friends of old hardware… but that’s not Puppy’s fault.

First issue I hit was that my PCMCIA controller – and subsequently my WIFI card – wasn’t being detected. Apparently, that’s based on that acpi=force thing. Not good… I tabled the project for a bit while pondering my next move.

While pondering, I installed Puppy into a virtual machine. Never hurts to have a fast loading / low resource *nix laying around, right? For that one I did the hard drive install (instead of the normal boot from CD thing) and noticed the boot sequence was a bit different. In fact, It seemed like the stuff the ThinkPad had been hanging on was no longer an issue.

Tonight I fired up the ThinkPad again and installed Puppy to the hard drive. Rebooted and … sho ‘nuff! I now had a functional PCMCIA WIFI adapter. Let the surfing commence.

Web browsing was great right up until I visited some of the more modern and script-laden sites. Heck, just typing in a twitter update with that little character counter slowed down the whole system.

Here’s the deal: If I needed to setup an old machine to be used for working on documents, spreadsheets and general productivity stuff I think Puppy would be just the ticket. It really brings the old machine back to life. Looking for a machine to primarily browse the web? For that my hardware is just a bit too old. It’ll do the job, but you sure have to exhibit extra patience.

I think I now remember why I had shelved this laptop last spring… but since it is out, maybe I’ll toss Windows 2000 back on it

Remote Server Admin Tools for Windows 7

August 24, 2009 - 9:22 pm | Tech

A Quick Look at Untangle

August 22, 2009 - 4:51 pm | Tech

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I’ve been running the same “SOHO” firewall at home since 2001. My trusty Netgear FVS318. A pretty solid unit and hasn’t ever let me down, but old enough not to be upgradeable. This week I decided to have a look around see what else is out there to use.

See, while the FVS318 has certainly been solid for me, I’d like something with some more features aimed at home users – and yet still affordable. I thought perhaps something PC-based would be the way to go. That way I could try out a few options and not have a large investment in hardware. They also tend to be open source based or derived which can help with cost.

Originally I was going to start with the free version of Astaro as that’s one I had heard of. When I asked on Twitter if anyone had used it, Mortisult replied back suggesting I look at untangle instead. So, I took his advice and started with that one.

I borrowed an older 2.4 Celeron with 1.25GB from the office and tossed in an old’ish Netgear card that I had laying around. That way it has two Ethernet ports: One for WAN and one for LAN.

Next I headed over to the Untangle site to grab the ISO for the free version. Burned the ISO to CD, popped it into the machine and fired it up.

The installation is dead simple and on first boot I was walked through a little wizard to get things configured. I connected it to my cable modem (WAN) and a little switch (LAN) with all the other machines on my network and it was all working as soon as I finished the wizard.

Very simple to work with and very easy to configure. The primary interface is via “the rack.” You can see from the image below that I’ve added most of the free bells & whistles to mine.

See all that fun stuff? Spyware Blocker, Web Filter, Virus Blocker, Intrusion Prevention, Protocol Control (currently off as I really have no need for it), Firewall, Ad Blocker, Attack Blocker and reporting modules all loaded up and all free.

If you go the Paid-Apps route you get commercial versions of some of that, along with other nice stuff like an AD Connector, Policy Manager and some interesting Remote PC stuff.

Each individual item in the rack can be managed via its “settings” button and that’s also where you go to check individual logs. Each item also has a power button to the right which can make for some very easy trouble-shooting.

The only thing I haven’t added and tested yet is the OpenVPN rack item. That’ll happen soon though as it is another one of the reasons I’m exploring other firewalls.

My benchmark speed tests haven’t changed. In fact, they may have increased a very small amount (using speedtest.net).

However, I will note that the PC running untangle reported a jump to 52% CPU while I was running the test

Long story short, for a minimal investment in an older PC with dual network cards you can have yourself a very full featured little home firewall and security system. So far I’m very impressed.

I may have to scare up my own PC for this to give this loaner back to work… but finding older PCs is never really a challenge. Might be an interesting use for one of the laptops I have floating around…