The worst thing to happen to a geek?
To lose the internet connection. Even worse when it’s his own ‘fault’. In an attempt to upgrade the software on the firewall I ran swaret (which is a tool to install and maintain software on a Slackware OS). In the process something died. By “something” I mean that the hard drive stopped responding. Rebooting the computer brought up the message that the hard drive had been removed. It looked like time to simply replace the box – a 486/66, I could upgrade the hard drives and a complete machine as well… since it was running Squid/SquidGuard, I needed more hard drive space. I have quite a few old boxes just sitting around, my wife keeps trying to get rid of them, but I won’t tell her which ones are ok to get rid of 
. I also have a box full of hard drives, courteousy of Steve. Every time he upgrades at work I get hardware… which adds to the aforementioned boxes sitting around. So I grabbed a couple of 1.2g drives – hey this is a firewall what do I need with all of that disk space? – and a box I got from my brother by upgrading him to a 400 (screaming machine ). The box is just a standard whitebox running a 266, fantastic improvement from a 66. I threw in two of the three nics from the old box popped in the Slackware 10.1 CD (oh, how much nicer it is having a CD drive actually in the machine that I want to install software to) and ran through setup. There were the usual glitches, forgetting to set the partition bootable, and having to endure the Win 95 splash screen from the “unwiped” drive because I didn’t set the first boot device to be the CDROM drive before installing, but all in all the install was easy enough.
And there was the configuration… not really bad, but I didn’t have it written down anywhere and it certainly wasn’t in my head. The main things I had to get reconfigured were the firewall (iptables) and name services/dhcp (dnsmasq). After that Squid. After fighting with it for some time, it dawned on me that I didn’t have nat turned on… sheesh! One line to get things forwarding properly again. There were still some things to set up, but this was the major configuration. I was back on the net. And for a geek that’s the most important thing
