Network problem with DNS

Posted on March 16, 2003 by kalle

Yesterday evening I was trying to help Johan install FreeBSD on his server machine. He thought it could be interesting to try FreeBSD since it is much more secure than Windows. He had doubts having a Windows machine up on the net 24/7. So I brought the 4.7 floppies and started to install and all went well until teh installation should resolve the name of the naem of the ftp server we used(ftp.se.freebsd.org). I have experienced that problems before with installing FreeBSD, for instance on the old laptop I have here.
I think the problem has to do with the ARP tables in the router is not updated and therefore the return traffic does not return to the host as it should. But I’m not really sure about it since yesterday Johan first brought up windows on the machine to transfer some files from it before we erased the HD to install FreeBSD. He was viewing some webpages so obviously had access to the net. Then we restarted machine, used DHCP to get the IP number so we would get the same as windows had used before. But the installation could not resolve the ftpserver name.
Anyone got any clue on this?

IMAP Web Client

Posted on March 15, 2003 by kalle

I have not yet configured mail on my machine but Fredrick gave me the following recoomendation of a nice IMPA webclient: SquirrelMail

NATd: Making DC++ work again

Posted on March 15, 2003 by kalle

Since I installed the firewall in the server I have not tried to use DC++ but today I thought I would give it a try. Though I realized I couldnt search for anything and people couldn’t download files. After a short chat with Fredrik I realized why. I didn’t forward any ports from my public ip to the PC on the local net. So just to configure NATd to do that.

Fredrik had a natd.conf which I didn’t but it turned out it was not so hard to fix. Add or change the following lines in rc.conf:

  natd_enable="YES"
  natd_flags="-config /etc/natd.conf" 
  natd_interface="vr0"

The last line should be you public interface, the one connected to Internet.
Then create a natd.conf-file with entries that are the arguments you would give natd:

  interface vr0                               
  # Direct Connect redirect                
  redirect_port tcp 192.168.0.5:412 412 
  redirect_port udp 192.168.0.5:412 412

Now you have to start natd with the new config. If you have natd already running kill it first. Give teh following command to start natd:

  natd -a nn.nn.nn.nn -config /etc/natd.conf

where nn.nn.nn.nn is your external ip.

Different monitoring tools

Posted on March 15, 2003 by kalle

I have used MRTG before to monitor some data like the uptime of my DSL link. But since its quite hard to configure I have been looking for other tools.

Today there was some discussion of bandwidth monitoring on the BF1942-linux_server mailinglist. Also monitoring game server statistics would be interesting. People on the list recommended the following tools:
– Cacti – BWBar – NTop

From before I have been recommended to look at Cricket that seems to use ”>RRDTool as Cacti does to. No its just decide which one to use:-)

Installing USB Storage Device

Posted on March 14, 2003 by kalle

Today I bought a i-Boy 2.5” HDD case to put a 2.5” HD into. It connects to a computer using a USB cable. I had a 20Gb disk on the shelf and together with that case it will be a perfect storage device for MP3s. Next time someone has a party, just grab that disk on the way there and here comes the music!

So I wanted it both to plug in to my PC or anyones else. So I started to format the HD on my PC. I chose NTFS since it’s quite large disk and most people have XP today, if they dont I guess they can’t hear my music. But I also wanted it to sit on my FreeBSD server so I could stream the music to my xBox for instance.

So this is what I did to make that work. Read the comments I made to see what I actually did.

Installing Java

Posted on March 13, 2003 by kalle

Yesterday while creating this blog I also tried to install Java on my FreeBSD machine. I wanted JDK1.4.1_01 as its the latest from Sun but that turned out to be impossible. It exists in the ports but I couldn’t make it run, the JVM crashed all the time. Even tried the Blackdown version as well but no luck.

So today I started with new energy and uninstalled those two and tried install JDK1.3.1 for which it exists a specific BSD patch. This went very well. One thing I got a bit irritated on was that javac isn’t accessable by default. I mean its not in the default path as javavm is so one has to update the path to include it to be able to compile. But all worked well and I successfully compiled a small Hello World program. Next to do is to install ANT so I can build larger projects.