It has been a few days

But not all is lost. It just took a few days to get started. With a new lab set up, we now have a full network running upstairs. Right now, we have my wrt320n working as a wireless bridge to the upstairs from the crappy d-link down. I have to get another mimo n router to bolster my network a little, but all and all it is good.

I now am writing this from my dual boot p4 2.53 box in debian install. j2geeks station is running puppy and we installed server 2003 on a amd 64 3200+ None of it is doing anything yet, but they are up with an OS. Tonight, I am going to try getting this OS to look a little cleaner, and I am going to try to get the network to play nice with my windows 7 box.

Update

Well, No Net BSD tonight, but I think I have made a valuable alliance. J2geek and I are pooling our resources to maximize our ability to come up with new and great things.

While he was here he convinced me to flash my WRT310n. AHHH, That was a leap of faith! We installed ddwrt on the router and it took it flawlessly. Now that I have gotten over the fear of bricking my $120 router (I am sure it is cheaper now I got it when it was a brand new model) We are going to try openWRT and see what tricks we can make this thing do.

I am already excited that I will now be able to bridge my wireless network to a wired one in the Nerdary.

Little Progress

Unfortunately, I had to work at the JSK today and that hampered most of my plans, I was able to get all my distro's out to CDr or DVD respectably. Tomorrow, I have some errands to run in the morning, but by mid afternoon I am re-arranging the "creation station" (Read: me and my fiancee's shared office) into geek central, I also plan on searching craigslist for some free desks, table or shelves. I am kinda excited to re-establish the geek lab. World of Wires here I come.

On a related note, I wanted to take my old router and flash it with ddWRT but alas it is not compatable. I would freely trade anyone my dlink router for one that supported ddWRT.

I am also stopping by my parents to pick up an old CRT, keyboard, mouse and 8 port switch.

So tomorrow, I should have at least two machines going in the geekitorium.

*** New Geek Update! j2geek is stopping by and we are going to throw net bsd on a box and see what happens *** updates to follow.

My first Post --welcome to the beginning of the end

Well, I hope at the end of this journey I will be well versed in linux and have a better understanding of networking as a whole. I have finally come to the realization that I am a geek. I have tried to fight it for years now, but there is no denying that growing up on an apple IIc and HP Vectra ES/12 has indelibly scared me.

But I now have a goal, sort of. I am trying to achieve a job in the computer administration field. That isn't saying that I am doing nothing now. I was/am one of the first "gig"ers in the "gig-o-nomics" era. I should say, that actually I have a full right to call my self a gig-er as I am a stage hand and my work was always called a gig. but I digress.....

Here is my starting points. and some early goals...

1. Hard ware
PC 1 - (current specs)
Name - mediabox
O/S - Windows 7 (this probably will not change)
General Purpose:
Games movies and audio
Specs:
Form Factor - miniITX
CPU - Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Memory - 4gb g.skill
HDD - 1tb WD Caviar black SATA
CDR - Blu-ray reader DVD R/RW
PC 2

Name - VPR Matrix
O/S - Windows XP
General Purpose:
Office Applications
Specs:
Form Factor - Full ATX
CPU - P4 2.53 pre HT
Memory - 1 GB oem
HDD - 2x 80GB WD Caviar ide
CDR - HP DVD R/RW
PC3
TBD

I have 3 cases and lots of junk hardware, this will probably be a duron 700 with whatever i can come up with for hardware.

Starting goals:

My media box is getting left alone, Although I may put on some VM and use it for testing in a virtual machine setting.
The VPR matrix is going to be my first full on server. I want to run this as a Samba, Apache, Qmail, etc that also acts as a domain server. Up until now I have only been able to make samba work under root with full privilege (Lame I know)

I have an old D link router I want to flash with ddWRT and get familiar with the interface I would like to make it bridge with my router downstairs and bridge it to a wired connection upstairs in the lab.

Thirdly, at this point, I would like to play with clustering and integrating windows and Linux. Also I would like to test out new OS's as they come along.

So Tonight I started the painful journey into Linux. I have downloaded about a dozen distro's the big dogs are:
Slackware 13.x
Debian
DSL
Puppy
I plan on updating this blog every time I work on any project. I have started a number of blogs in my life, so my hopes that that will happen are kinda mediocre, but can't never did anything