I just found out that my birthday is the same date as the Korean armistice. Rad.

Ice Cube – You can do it

I love pay day. I can pay all my bills, chip away at my debts and then buy something for myself. This month, I noticed that The House of Knives was having a sale, so I decided to grab one of their cut throat razors. They had some absolutely beautiful razors in there, but at quite a hefty price even with the sale discount: perhaps too big a gamble if I decided that straight shaving isn’t for me. So I picked up their only Dovo Astrale:

It’s definately not shave ready, it needs a good honing and for me to purchase a strop before I use it. But it’s a start. Down from over $200 to about $140

Jake Shimabukuro – Time after Time

So yesterday I was bored and contemplating some discussions we’ve been having around our team at work. After some complicated backhistory, our office had replaced its perfectly fine Linux based firewall with a string of Juniper Netscreens, which can be best described as prohibitively complicated and increasingly useless. We cannot do any decent logging, graphing or statistics. We cannot easily put in a VPN to a client. We cannot maintain reliability of our own VPN services. We are tied to a platform that simply isn’t working, is wasting a lot of time to maintain and simply providing no business value. And for what? The illusion that hey, we get support from Juniper, and we pay money so it must be better! etc

Now, geeks and tinkerers will all yell out loud about how you can just get commodity PC hardware from a pile of decommissioned junk and throw in some cheap $5 NICs and install TEH LUNIX! Linux will save the day, linux will feed your cat and pleasure your wife in ways the Kama Sutra could only dream about, blah blah blahnix, while I work in my basement getting a realtek driver ported to an older kernel so that I can get 0.0001% performance out of this 486! IN LUNIX!

And they’re right, you can recycle an old box with a couple of NICs and make yourself a very powerful router and firewall using something like Smoothwall, or, if you have a bit more grunt, Clarkconnect or Untangle.

But we’re talking corporate level stuff here. All the advantages of no vendor lock-in with all the performance of corporate level gear. And a Celeron with a few realtek cards from Dick Smith simply won’t cut it. Especially when you’re talking multiple gigabit ethernet connections which will completely flood an ancient PCI bus.

We specifically have a need for some 18 ports of routing, some of which can get by with plain old 10/100, but most if not all should be GbE if possible. So, you’re looking at a PCIe bus and maybe these, Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad PCIe cards. Also for the kind of theoretical maximum throughput, you’re looking at a CPU over 3GHz preferably.

Anyone got a 3GHz+ box with multiple PCIe slots just lying about? Didn’t think so.

So I was looking around for specific products that achieved this; looking specifically at SBC, PC/104, m-ITX etc with a scope for scalability, rack-mountability, and the ability to be used for other tasks such as graphing, logging, SNMP, DHCP, DNS caching and Transparent Squid proxying. I was disheartened to find no such devices at the easy end of a google search and contemplated rolling my own solution and on-selling it. There was plenty with lots of 10/100 ports, a few with GbE but only a PCI slot… none with quite the right combination.

Then I found this:

It’s almost perfect. Using a mix of PCI and PCIe, you could max that out with 10x GbE ports and 8x 10/100 ports. Throw in a mini-PCI VPN accelerator, a hard drive for logs and caching, then either hand craft OpenBSD or install pfsense. If you need more ports or redundancy, configure another one and link the two together using CARP.

I would also recommend maxing out the CPU at the fastest that the board can take, as well as maxing out the memory with a decent brand (crucial, mushkin). Sure, you could spec it lower and upgrade further down the track, but on the other hand will the components still be around when it comes time to upgrade? Max it out now and you should get a considerable life-time out of the device.

I’m still waiting on a local distributor to get back to me with a price, but it’s promising.

Ministry Of Sound – Bigger Than Big (Original Vocal Mix)

At work we have a Google Mini search appliance. Now they say that 70% of IT projects are destined for failure, however I’m not sure what their definition of failure is, but the Google Mini is firmly in my 30% camp, and I’m hoping to extend it to all of our global offices with Google Search Appliances building one consolodated enterprise search platform.

Now, one of the more enterprising developers at work developed an xpi for Firefox so that Firefox users could search against our Google Mini direct from their browsers. That was cool, I guess, but in Opera I can simply add a search engine and then search direct from my address bar. I can do that right now by going to the address bar and typing g < search term > to search against Google.

Now, to add a Google Enterprise appliance to Opera is very easy. First, go to your search home page and do a dummy search. A results page will appear with a likely very long URL. Copy that URL.

Now go to Tools > Preferences, then click on Add.

Enter an appropriate name, and a keyword that you will remember that also is not being used (feel free to delete any unused ones to free up keywords, such as ‘s’ for ‘search’) and finally paste your results URL. Now look through your URL for q=whatever your search term was and change it to q=%s leaving the rest of the URL in place, so it might look something like this:

https://search.companyname.tld:443/search?q=%s&site=All&btnG=Search&entqr=0&ud=1&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&output=xml_no_dtd&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&client=default_frontend&proxystylesheet=default_frontend

And that’s it. Go to your address bar and enter < keyword > < search term > (e.g. esg *.doc) and press enter. You’ll be taken straight to the results page of your Google Enterprise Search appliance.

To do this in Firefox is a bit more involved: Go to a search results page and bookmark it, you might like to organise the bookmark into a subfolder in your bookmarks menu. Then edit the bookmark, you might need to click on a “More” button to show the options you need to edit. As above, find your search term and replace it with %s. Then give the bookmark a keyword. That’s it! Test your keyword and some search terms directly in your Firefox address bar to see if it works.

The great news is that you can do this with practically any search engine. Let’s say you have an intranet with a search function that returns URL’s like http://intranet.companyname.tld/search.php?=searchterm, simply change the URL to http://intranet.companyname.tld/search.php?=%s and give it a keyword. Et Voila! You can now instantly search direct from the address bar.