return void;

I apologize for the lack of updates; I have been off for about 2 weeks busting my damn hump preparing for the midterm and chugging away at the homework.

Wow, I just received my Machine Learning test back and I ranked near the absolute bottom of the grades. I did worse on that test than I’ve ever done on any test for any class, ever. I left large sections of it blank and don’t feel I deserved the credit I was even given. I was about at half the median score, which is just pathetic. Normally, I rank new the front of the bell curve but I was the very back end of it this time.

Hopefully this is the rock-bottom I finally needed to reach so I’d relax when it comes to taking tests. I have a bad habit of getting way too nervous and ultimately not performing nearly up to par. I have been struggling with the Qualification Exams and maybe this is the way out of my poor test taking slump.

I’ve never had trouble with school. Even as an undergraduate, school was still pretty easy. I’m only taking a single class and I have to work at it for several hours every night. I had even been struggling with the homework, but it seems I am out of that slump. I finished the third assignment (programming part) with more than a minute to spare; actually, i submitted it with several hours to spare.

Hopefully the midterm is only worth 15% and I can do much better on the midterm.

So I promised I would explain how my setup works and here it goes. First some background though. For the last 6 years or so, I’ve been using a Linux box as a router / firewall. About 5 years ago, I started using IPCop, which has both functionalities built into a very stable version of Linux. I did this because I didn’t trust a Linksys machine or anything my ISP could give me. That inherit distrust carried through the years as I added several services / machines behind this gateway. I now run a web server (as you can see), a file server, a proxy server, 2 desktops, and now 2 IPTV set-top boxes courtesy of AT&T.

Typically, the RED interface of the router is connected to the modem. In this case, the modem and the RED interface both plug into the same switch. From there, the rest of the physical connections remain the same (except for how the Residential Gateway is connected).

The RG (Residential Gateway) apparently has some software to (somehow) detect that there is a router behind their router. After talking to 4 levels of tech support, I learned that the RG reserves the first 63 addresses as well as the addresses used by it’s DHCP service. You can disable the DHCP server on the RG, but then you cannot host your own website. I recommend moving all of your interal IPs to 192.168.1.1xx.

I set the GREEN interface to be 192.168.1.102 and all of the internal machines use this as their default gateway. I set the RED interface to pull a DHCP address. This is very important, as it will ultimately give us full control over our connection.

Then I disable all of the firewall services. From the settings page, add all of the services you will be adding to your external access or NAT tables internally. It it important to note that you should be forwarding these ports from the RG to the RED interface detected by the RG. From IPCop, turn on the aforementioned port forwards / external access settings.

Lastly, add your website (if you are hosting one) to the hosts file of each of your internal machines so they can access it. Otherwise, you end up with a wierd loopback connection problem that never resolves itself.

At this point, if you run a port scanner against your public IP, you should finally see port 80 is now available. Now you can use gigabit ethernet internally, have a fiber connection externally, host your own services, and wield full control of your internet connection. I was really on the fence about whether or not I was going to keep the service because of this port 80 issue, but now that it is resolved, I think I’m going to keep it.

I should note that I had troubles with getting DynDns’s Port Redirect service to work, so I’m not sure if that’s a viable option as well, but it may work out for you depending on your situation.

So it’s been a while since there have been any updates here. In fact, it’s been a while since the site has even been available. Let me explain.

About a month ago, I signed up for AT&T’s new service called U-Verse. It’s basically Fiber (to the node) internet similar to Verizon’s FiOS. I signed up for the 6 Mb / 1 Mb download/upload package and their IPTV service. The reason why the site was down was because I have been struggling with the new equipment and service to allow all of the old things I used to do with the DSL line.

In the end, I went through 2 broken router harddrives, countless reinstalls of IPCop, countless network configurations, several hours of time on the phone with level 3+ technical support staff, surfed the forums for other subscribers, and a few weeks without my webserver being available.

I’ll post more about the service later, but I felt the need to finally pop off an update. I have a few other posts I have been working on that I plan on finishing and posting within the next week, so stay tuned. I promise to be more active than I have been lately.