Hank Reardon's Journal: I'm Such A Geek...

Today, I think I finally realized just how much of a geek I am...

I recently rebuilt the entire home network and moved from a crappy Belkin Firewall/AP combination to a full Linux box pieced together from some old units I had lying around. The old Firewall just wouldn't cut it any more, as I've got the kids starting to browse more, and they seem to have a knack for getting spyware installed on the machines.

The upshot of all of this is I wanted a transparent proxy and firewall on the new machine, and Squid fit the bill. As a nice side effect, I can filter out pr0n from their machines and also remove those lovely sites like DoubleClick.

Of course, since I had a dedicated box instead of some overpriced doorstop, I decided to create my own NTP stratum. And create a local Portage rsync mirror. And I might as well monitor my network with all kinds of SNMP data, so install net-snmp and Cacti. Oh, and while I'm at it, SSH runs kind of slow when everybody else is browsing the web; time to install QoS Packet Scheduling.

Getting QoS working with 10 levels of tagging based on time of day and type of traffic (SSH and rsync get the highest priority, then HTTP and mail, then streaming music, and so on all the way down to Bittorrent at the lowest level) and having daily graphs of network usage by machine and outbound port finally brought everything home: such a geek, I'm stereotypical.