Another fresh start
So, like usual, I’m sitting on a plane and have little to do. Figured that this is a good time to start writing for my blog again. It’s been much ignored recently, but a new update to Ulysses just came out and it supports posting directly to WordPress sites.
There’s been much that has changed since I last posted. Much has changed in my personal life, but much has also changed in my nerdery. My home network now has over 45(!) things with IP addresses on them. This is forcing me to make a change that I did not want to do. For years I’ve been running the Home Edition of Sophos UTM. I really couldn’t be any more pleased with the functionality of it, but for whatever reason, it is limited to only 50 internal IPs. Now, granted, when I first got the software, that seemed like a ridiculous number. But, as with all such things (640K of RAM – who’ll ever use that much?), the time has come for me to move on. My first attempt was to use the next generation firewall from Sophos. Well that failed 30 minutes into me trying to use it. Many of my devices have static IP addresses handed out to them via the DHCP server. When I was taking those address into the new firewall, it TIMED OUT ON ME AFTER I PUT THEM ALL IN. Yup 30 minutes of laboriously entering MAC addresses, IP addresses, and host names – the damned thing failed. You see, Sophos didn’t develop a migration tool from the old UTM to the new “goodness”. Time to move on.
So – this weekend, I’m going to pfsense. It’s not as slick. It doesn’t do all the UTM stuff. It’s clearly written by folks that are nerds like me and not professional UI dudes (no disrespect intended). I’m going to miss some of the features of Sophos, but I have to move on.
Why you ask? Well – that’s the good part of this story. I just bought a new (well to me), Dell C6100 four node blade system for my home lab. It’s going to bring 32 cores, 192GB of RAM, and lots of other things to the home DCF (Data Control Facility for you new readers). That gives me enough juice to run most of the “hard core” stuff my vendors are trying to shove into Datalink. It’ll be fun having a really nice home cluster again.
But … to get that guy on my network, I’m going to have to doll out at least 12 more IPs just for the hardware. Imagine home many more I’m going to have to hand out once I start firing that guy up full of VMs.
Yeah – I’m a nerd and have first world problems – but that’s how I learn and make a living.
More to come…
Tags: technology