I’m giving a presentation this Wednesday at the November NLUG meeting on OpenWrt. The title of my presentation is “OpenWrt: Linksys Router Hacking for Fun and Profit.” Yes, I know it is a bit of a clichéd title, but I like it. I’m going to be providing a good overview of the OpenWrt distribution and project, as well as a demonstration of compilation and/or installation.

The basic idea that I will try to communicate is that if you have a supported router, there’s really no reason to be running a stock firmware! I know many NLUG’ers have such routers, and I hope I can help them unlock their full potential.

If you live in the Nashville / Middle Tennessee area, come on out! 7:00 PM Wednesday night — directions are available on the NLUG page.

I recently corresponded with a visitor to my site who was interested in my use of my Cisco Aironet 350 card with my PowerBook G3 Lombard. He was having some difficulty with his 350. In the process of troubleshooting, he discovered that he had an older Ralink card that was supported under OS X.

So, if you have an Ralink card, or are considering getting one, they appear to have fairly decent Mac OS X support.

One point I want to make is that the Cisco card is supported under both OS X and Mac OS 9, whereas the Ralink drivers appear to be OS X only.

Simon, thanks for the info and I hope it helps some other Mac users out there.

I now have my own Bacula backup setup running entirely over IPv6. It didn’t take too long to figure out, but I thought I’d share this here. The trick is defining the addresses for your storage daemon, file daemon, and director. The entry looks something like this:

DIRAddresses = {
   ipv6 = {
     addr = servername;
     port = 9101;
   }
 }

In my case, I have AAAA records set up for my servers, so I’m not using the colon notation, but the documentation seems to indicate that either is acceptable. This above example is for my director, found in the bacula-dir.conf file. Similar entries for the FD and SD are found in their respective files.

A friend of mine recently got me to try out a piece of software called Synergy. He told me it was like a software KVM switch, only without the “V” part. He said it was like working with a dual-head computer system, only it worked across separate computers. He also said that it was cross-platform and provided a shared clipboard!

I have to admit that at first, I really didn’t fully understand what Synergy did, but it sounded impressive enough that I had to try it out. Once I got it installed, I was truly amazed! I was amazed first by the technical aspects of Synergy. It’s not that Synergy is that complicated. In fact, once I got it running, I understood very well how one could go about constructing such a thing. The thing that most amazed me, however, was the boost in productivity I found from working with Synergy.

Like many IT professionals (or hobbyists, for that matter), I have several computers in my office or on my desk. Several of my machines are laptops. With this setup, I generally switch back and forth between my desktop(s) and laptop(s) throughout the day. This process can be rather tedius because it involves moving my hands from one keyboard / mouse to another. Now, I understand that there are KVM options and other ways to deal with such a problem. But in my case, these were not entirely feasible. And, if you give Synergy a go, you’ll discover that a movement of the mouse cursor is as convenient as switching a KVM or even more convenient in the case of a KVM without keyboard controls. What Synergy has allowed me to do is to sit back and use a single keyboard and mouse seamlessly between my desktop PC and my PowerBook, whether my PC happens to be running Windows XP, Linux or Darwin.

I highly recommend Synergy for anyone who uses a laptop on their desk next to their desktop computer. It’s not difficult to set up at all and there is even a nice installer for Windows.

I happened to be looking over the Linksys WRT54G article on Wikipedia today and discovered an interesting external link. The article linked to a page that is a part of Earthlink’s R&D site describing a custom firmware Earthlink developed for deploying IPv6 into the home. The firmware is based on the Linksys firmware, but provides IPv6 routing capabilities and appears to be configured to work specifically with Earthlink’s IPv6 service.

I’m thrilled to see this kind of project. This kind of thing is just the thing that will speed the adoption of IPv6 in the home. Earthlink makes a pretty strong disclaimer regarding the quality of the firmware, but I imagine it mostly works just fine. They even addressed security concerns for opening up home network computers using publicly routable IPv6 addresses by providing a strong firewall configuration by default. It also appears that this service is open to anyone, not just Earthlink subscribers.

Really, I’m happy to see such a project and I hope that this and other similar projects help make IPv6 more practical. As IPv6 deployment becomes more practical, I see real potential in online gaming, such as Xbox Live or the Nintendo Revolution’s online game service. Anyway, check it out.