code in the ruins

This weekend I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while - I installed the dd-wrt firmware on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. dd-wrt is based on the original firmware from Linksys, but it adds a ton of new features.

Since installing it three days ago, I've done various things that I couldn't have done before:

• Static DHCP leases for my machines, so they always get the same IP address. This also makes the router act as a DNS server for free.
• SSH access to the router
• WPA2 wireless security
• Increased the transmission power of the router's wireless signal
• Set up NTP to keep the router's time current
• Set up IPv6 on my home network using 6to4. The router will automatically assign IPv6 addresses to all clients.
• Mounted a Samba share on the router

I love doing this kind of thing. dd-wrt is a fantastic piece of work, and has increased the value of my router a great deal.

The most satisfying bit was the IPv6 setup.  I find it kind of nifty that simply having a single IPv4 address entitles me to several quintillion contiguous IPv6 addresses. You know, just in case.

In the evening on Monday, December 31, my venerable home Linux server, obelix, went down for the last time.  His boot drive developed a bad block and could no longer be mounted.  Efforts are still underway to recover the data from the drive, but on Tuesday, I made the decision to decommission obelix for good.

obelix was a Dell Dimension L667R with a Pentium III and 384 megabytes of RAM.  I've had him for about seven years.  I bought him (refurbished!) on a whim, somewhere in the distant past.  He was extremely versatile; he acted as web, file, and database server, as well as providing services to our network as a Samba domain controller and an LDAP, DHCP, and DNS server.  In his early years, he was also my primary workstation, running countless window managers, desktop applications, and games over the years.  Due to his having a FireWire card installed, I used him to capture DV from my video camera to edit on another machine.  He spent most of his lifetime as a Gentoo Linux box, no doubt logging thousands of hours of software compilation.

Until recently, he served my websites over my home connection, although since I recently began hosting with Dreamhost, he no longer performed this function.  This was a major factor in my decision not to stand him back up after the disk failure.  Although he had still been providing network, file, and database services, I knew that I would no longer need a dedicated server at home once the websites had been moved to external hosting.  So I moved his large data disk to another computer and dismantled the Samba domain, which was more or less unnecessary to begin with.  His primary function as a database server was to host my Amarok music collection database, which was easily rebuilt after he went down.

I will miss having obelix around, though; I named him after my favorite Asterix character, I've had him longer than I've known my own children, and I knew him backwards and forwards.  Tinkering with Gentoo, Apache, MySQL, OpenLDAP, and Samba on obelix was how I began to truly solidify my knowledge of Linux system administration; using obelix absolutely helped get me where I am today.

It's somehow fitting that he should go out on the last day of 2007; it's been quite a year.  There's been a lot of anxiety, some deaths, a birth, some sickness, some health, some successes, some failures, a new job, many highs, many lows.  It hasn't been the easiest year to live through in a lot of ways.  In no way is the loss of obelix anywhere near a significant event in the face of what's happened this year, but it does sort of reinforce the feelings I have about 2008 - cautiously hoping for a clean slate.  The new year always brings new things and does away with some of the old.  Whether that's for good or ill, we'll just have to wait and see.