So my last post I was starting back at work. Now I can safely say that I am back in the groove again. I’ve already had three travel occasions (two of which were impromptu) in the past 7 weeks, which is pretty aggressive. My sleep patterns are back to what they used to be. I no longer need a sleep aid to fall asleep, which is a big thing for me. Though I still am banned from napping…
This week I’ve gotten a couple new toys to further my computing knowledge. The first one, which I already have, is a Yubikey. These are little USB dongles (you may giggle at that word if you wish) that generate one time passwords, or OTPs. These OTPs can be used to authenticate with all sorts of services. If you’re interested (and I totally know you are), read up on Yubikeys here. I ended up getting two, one white and one black. They each have 2 identity slots, so I can mess around with long static passwords or different OATH-HOTP methods. Terribly nerdy.
The second item, which I’m eagerly waiting for from UPS, is a new router. I have long been an advocate of DD-WRT on WRT-54G’s or other compatible Linksys hardware. But now I’m going to consolidate an old Catalyst 2950 and an E2000 into a RouterBOARD product. The Catalyst is a power-hungry heat-generating beast that is starting to show its age, and the E2000 doesn’t have enough ports to do what I want. I also want to do some advanced networking, such as VPNs and multiple SSIDs, which DD-WRT can do, but not very cleanly. A lot of DD-WRT is hacked together (which I am not saying is a bad thing) and can take a lot of tinkering to get it to work. This RouterBOARD should do everything I want and more out of the box, with no special scripts or software.
I chose the RB2011UAS-2HnD-IN which is one of the top RB2011xxxx models available. It has 10 ports, built-in Wifi, and a L5 RouterOS license. Probably overkill for what I need, but it’s going to be a good learning tool for advanced networking. I’ve been given a very good primer on these RouterBOARD systems, and hopefully don’t run in to too many pitfalls. I’ll of course still have my E2000 to fall back on if everything royally breaks.
Well, this post will also serve as a test to see if Facebook posting is still working. I never did get it working 100%. Here goes nothing…(clicks post)