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Got an Arduino Uno

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Jason

Found myself with a little bit of down time our here on my deployment.  While using that time to surf the Internet, I came across some articles about a board used for electronic prototyping. I decided to do some research on it. This little gem is called an Arduino and the things you can do with it are almost limitless. So I decided to order an Arduino Uno board to play with and do a little prototyping of my own. I also ordered the Ethernet Shield so I could connect it to a network.

While I have been waiting for it I have been reading article after article on setups, configurations, and programing with an Arduino, so that I can get a feel for what it can do.  My first real project that I am working on is a security system that will unlock a door using RFID tags and checking to make sure the RFID tag is allowed over the network to a PHP and mySQL server.

I am working on it right now, but I just don’t have all the parts I need out here in Afghanistan to make it fully operational. But I do have some of it worked out. Once I get more if it working I’ll post my setup using fritzing along with my source and my PHP script for allowing access.  Until then if you have any nifty Arduino projects drop a comment, I would love to hear about them.

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iSCSI is Awesome

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Jason

I have been playing with openfiler a lot lately, and I must say that the more that I learn about it the more I like it.  The coolest feature I have used so far is iSCSI.  Using iSCSI I can mount a disk to my mac or to my windows 7 virtual machines over a network and the machine treats it as if it’s a physically attached drive.

I am thinking that I can use this mostly on my mac for Time Machine backups.  It would be great for that because I tell my mac as soon as I join my network to mount the iSCSI drive then my mac will do it’s backup’s on it’s own.  I also figure this would work over a VPN so that way as long as I have internet my computer will always stay backed up.  I am excited to try this in the real world and not just in my virtual computer tests.

If you have any experience with this please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Visualization Station

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Jason

I am trying to figure out how to best go about setting up a virtual environment for my network at home. I have sketched together a network map to help me plan it out and think about things.  There will be three sub-nets. The first will be for all the servers, the second will be for all my permanent devices, and the third will be a guest sub-net.

I will be setting up a virtual server with three machines in it right now.  The first and most important one is the gateway computer. This machine will be handling all the incoming and outgoing traffic even route internal traffic across the three sub-nets. It will hand out DHCP addresses, and be a  DNS server along a transparent proxy.

When computers connect to the network the DHCP service will figure out if it is a permanent device or a guest machine based on the MAC address of the oncoming machine.  If it is a permanent machine it will give it a reserved IP address on the second sub-net.  If it doesn’t recognize the machine it will give it an IP on the third sub-net.  The purpose of doing this it to segregate the guests from the permanent machines.  The permanent machines will have mostly unrestricted access to the server sub-net and the internet. The guest machine will have no server access and very limited internet access.

The routing will be accomplished using iptables and a proxy.  All traffic trying to cross the sub-nets will get routed using just iptables.  All traffic trying to leave the network will get routed to the proxy by iptables. The proxy will then determine what to do with the traffic based on the ACL’s (Access Control List) that I will be setting up.  There will be ACL’s for the servers, for the permanent machines, and for the guest machines.  The servers will have limited access directly to the internet to try and minimize possible infection from viruses and spy-ware.  The permanent devices will have mostly unrestricted access to the internet.  The guest will only be able to surf, some chat services and I might allow more services as needed.  I will also be trying to find a good anti-virus what will scan files as they come into and leave the network.

My File Server will be running a network storage OS with server hard drives in it for storage.  My virtual machines will run off of it. Any data that will change a lot such as logs and website files will run on a locked portion of the shared drive for quick and easy manipulation and redundancy.

More on this topic to come soon.

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