My Technical Side

Because of my career, a large portion of what I do and learn is focused on computers. My home network and computer lab has all sorts of interesting ongoing projects. When I have the chance, I'll highlight them on this page.

For my domain, I run my own web/mail server. Over the course of time, it's gotten to the point that I really hate SPAM (and I don't mean the food)!!! For a while, my domain was deluged with the stuff. If you sysadmin your own sendmail server like I do, you may be interested in my anti-SPAM solution. I now only get one or two spam messages a day.

Quite a while ago, as an experiment I connected my SGI Indy with its IndyCam to my website. Here are that project's details and results.

I prefer that my computers be somewhat reliable, especially my mail/web server. Therefore, I've some UPSes (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) to help when the power goes out. I've set up web access so that I can check to see how things are going when it does. Unfortunately, of the two UPSes on the LAN, only the one that services the backbone devices and web/mail server has the ability to be monitored. To make sure all the computers shut down properly, I've designed a very simple and easy-to-implement UPS network notification system.

I learned a lot by helping to start and by later leading the Syracuse Linux User Group. Some of the presentations and other material that I've done for the group can also be found in this local cache.

I've been using the vi editor for almost as long as I've been using computers. Of all the editors that I've used, I still like it best. Although it has a steep initial learning curve (modal editing is unlike everything all the other editors do), I think that it is definitely worth the effort. To find out more about it, try this link.

A uniquely-contrived embedded OpenBSD system acts as my LAN's internal DNS, DHCP and NTP server. Based on ideas from work I did while at iContact, I created a way to easily modify, install, and configure this custom, embedded system. I've not yet found any similar ideas on the Internet anywhere, so I'm posting the details here.

I did some work to allow my iPod Touch's AirPrint to print to my home network's printer. Afterwords, I did a presentation about it at a Triangle Linux User Group meeting. Perhaps you'd like to try doing the same? If so, a copy of the slides I used to explain how I did it are here.

I had previously set up an IPv6 Tunnel using Hurricane Electric's Tunnel Broker service, using one of the Linux machines on my home LAN. More recently, I switched from using an off-the-shelf Linksys WRT610n wireless router that had unofficial and broken support for IPv6, to a Mikrotik RB750G router that officially supported IPv6 tunnels. I decided that the new router should be the machine routing IPv6 through the tunnel, and these pages tell how I did it.