Tag Archives: PfSense

And now I’m dreaming about pfSense firewall rules…

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Spent most of the day trying to write out an m4a file, which is more problematic than it first seemed. M4A/MP4 is one of those lovely encapsulation formats designed by the mpeg people. Which means is very complex, over engineered but very flexible.

Ended up using a massive lib that supports stuff like album cover art. I’ll get it all to work first then strip all the crap out. Tomorrow I’ve got some work on another mobile project to do.

Walked the dog, fed the dog, which is considerably more than Jamie ever manages.

Decided to play with pfSense again before I went to the gym. I now have (hopefully) all the firewall rules set up, plus all the gateways and the load balancing stuff. Reset the DHCP server and now ready for some live testing I guess. Next step is to set up the Draytek on PPoE and see what works (probably not much). By the time I finished piddling about I left late for the gym, so only did half an hour, but still got out the house.

Again a wine free evening, but I did have some cake.

And oh yes, last night I did dream about firewall rules, sad isn’t it.

pfSense – yet again

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So today was mainly taken up with scaling GUI’s, not the most exciting thing in the world. I did eventually move back on to my codec’s and now got the m4a Apple Lossless codec working on PC.

Went to the gym and did combat. The guy behind me looked like he’d been in a swimming pool by the end of it. I’d hardly broken into a sweat, which means I’m either extremely fit or I’m just not trying hard enough.

Then moved back to pfSense. What I wanted to test was connecting the server to the DMZ and then the WAN (well local LAN) to WAN1. Therefore hoping that the two routed public IP’s would go across my bridge. To cut a long story short I couldn’t see anything from my public IP’s on the firewall logs until I rebooted the server. Then magically it all started working. I need to do a few more tests to make sure all rules are working correct and broadcast traffic isn’t going to the WAN.

No wine tonight, just lots of tea.

pfSense – round 67 (Or that’s what it feels like)

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So the day started well, I took the woof for a two hour walk. Weather started out miserable but I started sweating buckets as the sun finally decided to show it’s face. It defo wasn’t woolly hat weather.

Got back and did the garden poo run, emptied the kitchen compost and refilled the bird table. I then preceded to have the standard Sunday lunch of two boiled eggs, while I read the paper.

Then it was time to venture out to the front garden again. I’m slowly trying to clear a hedge. Slowly being the operative word. I had a tree stump in my path and three hours later it was finally out.

Then on to the next job….pfSense firewall. Well this one’s been on going for a while. So after the strange firewall error from last time I decided to reinstall from scratch. First thing I did was set up one of the spare NIC’s as a backup emergency access for when I inevitably locked my self out of the web config. This time I set up all the bridged lans as ‘none’ and then created the bridge and assigned that to LAN. After some playing with the server firewall it all actually started working. So I’ll leave it there for this evening. Next job is to create a proper set of firewall rules.

And now bath time (I’m already on the wine, but digging was hard work), then I’m going to watch the Olympics closing ceremony.

Welcome back VXR

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So first thing this morning the nice man from Vauxhall turns up for the 2nd time with my car. This time it has all the correct fixings and the wheel no longer hits the wheel arch. They even cleaned it. So top points for a Vauxhall main dealer.

Work wise, still on Apple lossless codec. Did a load of stuff to decode caf files, then found I was actually using m4a. So now trying to make that build.

And on the server front, back to pfSense, still trying to get my transparent bridge to work. It still doesn’t.

Anyway, torture porn night. Time for wine and a film.

pfSense, you are going to be an arse

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After spending the day swearing once again about anti aliasing and iOS codecs (oh why don’t you call my callbacks…). I spent the evening trying to convince pfSense to route windows shares between lan’s. It wasn’t going to happen. After several hours of googling I’m still none the wiser. Another battle to behold.

Oh, and no sign of my car yet. Seems to have buggered off into oblivion.

So, no pony sex then

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After last nights Chinese and large amount of beer / wine combo all I was greeted by this morning was a large dog poo and pool of piss. Can’t blame the dog at all, I know she would have tried to wake me and failed. She did look rather guilty though, and gave me that ‘I jumped on your head at 4AM and you failed to respond’ look. It rained constantly all morning so put off the normal dog walking session and moved back on to doing server experiments. Basically you can fill a machine with network cards and providing they are on the PCIe bus (including the built in NIC), they will always transfer at a pretty constant 942Mbps. If you use the PCI bus however then you get 778Mbps (Even with Intel cards), also I’m sure if I managed to get it going that transferring from two PCI cards would have been even slower. So anyway, now built the pfSense machine up, removed the hard disk and replaced with a flash memory card, installed 4 additional NIC’s, 2 PCIe and 2 PCI. So that gives me 3 high speed connections and two slower ones to choose from. I only need 4 network ports really, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for them all.

The amusing thing is I’be had to configure one of my Ubuntu PC’s to run minicom, as when you install the embedded kernel on pfSense you get no VGA driver. The last time I used a null modem cable I think was in the 80’s. Anyway, it’s installed and it boots fine from the flash card and all the tty appears on minicom. Just set up the firmware load for the wireless (otherwise you have to unplug it each time as the driver isn’t built into the kernel). Next step is to do some proper pfSense configuration, but that’s enough on it for today, but great progress.

Oh yes, for some reason I asked Jamie if he would dress up as Rainbow Dash and I could dress up as Derpy….he turned me down, but did enquire into how I suddenly knew so much about ‘My little pony’.

Please, stop asking me about render….

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I don’t know the difference between Blinn and a bin liner. Spent the day looking at a Crytek paper and demo on SMAA. As usual all these things look really pretty until you move, then it all turns into a shimmery mess. It’s good to see the demo produces the same shimmery mess. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at MSAA again just to prove that isn’t any better and it’s still a shimmery mess.

Went to gym, only did a 20 minute run as I wasn’t really in the mood and my legs are killing from the last two nights jaunts. Car is in garage on Monday, will be fixed by Tuesday and I’ll be about four grand down.

In server news I connected two of my Ubuntu boxes to each other and ran iPerf again, still the same 943MBps, so the switch wasn’t adding any overhead. I’ve ordered two PCI nic’s and a PCIe one, all Intel, so I will perform further tests in various combinations. Still 943 is pretty good, if I can keep that up across all interfaces then I’ll be impressed. Also ordered a compact flash drive sata thing, to install pfSense on, just to make things interesting.

Now it’s time for wine and torture porn, until the next person asked me about render…

And today, not much happened

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Well, I got up and did work. Still on iOS codecs, today doing hardware encoding, which after many battles finally began to work. It’s only encoding to some raw thing at the moment but I don’t think it’s going to be too much longer.

Bumper ordered. No idea how long that will take to sort out, at least it’s in progress.

Finally got back to the gym as the weather has turned crap again.

In server news I set up another one of my eBay PC’s with Ubuntu and installed iPerf. I’m getting 943mBps throughput just raw PC to PC, not even sure they are on the same switch, so not bad. After all I only need about 200 tops working through pfSense. Next job is to configure another PC the same as that one and then the pfSense PC. I will then use one to send test data to the other.

Got round to watching some of the Olympics, all seems to be very well organised.

Where were all the flies today? Ah yes on the Bristol to Bath cycle path

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Today I’ve been working on iOS (that’s iPhone), but on PC. Our mobile engine runs cross platform, so it’s lot easier to write using MSVC than XCode4, which really is a pile of shit. But at some point you do have to suffer the torture of XCode to actually compile it for iPad/iPhone. It’s a pain but needs to be done. Thankfully I was interrupted by having to add some animations to one of our mobile games.

I work in a fairly small room that contains my main PC, another PC, iMac, various servers and a whole network cabinet. This is quite handy in winter, a radiator certainly isn’t required. In our three days of summer it is somewhat overpowering, I guess that’s the advantage of being able to work in only your pants.

When I did finish today, I decided rather than go to the gym I’d go out on one of my bikes (peddle kind). I’ve only managed to so far get out twice this year and both times it’s pissed down on me. So today with magnificent blue sky’s it really was a pleasant evening. Managed a good twenty miles in a couple of hours at a fairly leisurely pace. Now I’m supposed to be on some kind of a diet, but I think I ate more calories in flies than I lost by cycling. They were absolutely everywhere. Every time you opened your gob the little buggers flew in, it was easier just to swallow (no comments on that one please).

So got back, de-fly’d and had a shower, then tried to get my head around the joys of SEO. In the end set it to auto and will take pot luck. Now settled down with ‘Lewis’ and a glass of Arabella. Dog is in the kitchen as Jamie is in there frying things.

Just need to set up automated backups next, then it’s on to setting up PfSense, but first some network speed tests.