HEY PAT

Welcome to phpMyAdmin 2.7.0-pl1

In other news, ResTek has accepted the task of handling SMTP-out for students. So, I will be working on getting that set up in the near future.

I’m also building a new server to replace this:

CPU: Intel Pentium III (647.19-MHz 686-class CPU)

...which just isn’t cutting it anymore, and the programmers won’t settle for it as the server becomes more widely-used.

And last but most important, winter break has begun…and we snuck through finals week with minimal injuries.

Tonight I finally got around to re-doing my FreeBSD box. I had already upgraded to FreeBSD 6-STABLE but I have been using Windows for a while. Anyway I wanted to start fresh so I deleted all current packages and installed the gnome2-lite package (lite must be somebody’s idea of a joke).

I started playing with PF soon after that because IPFW has some limitations. PF is much more powerful than IPFW from what I can tell, and thus I now prefer it. One of the things I like about it, that IPFW lacked, is the logging. IPFW would log drops (for example) to /var/log/security, but with limited information.

pflogd is a background daemon which reads packets logged by pf(4) to the packet logging interface pflog0 and writes the packets to a logfile (nor- mally /var/log/pflog) in tcpdump(1) binary format.

This is very useful because you can review pflogs with Ethereal, and it will tell you which rule the packet was dropped by, among other information which is very useful when debugging firewalls or auditing security.