there and back again

my old apartment, more empty than usual.

21st birthday was Wednesday, moved into my parents’ basement. I sort of have a studio down here.

Also, was on the receiving end of Anthony‘s trolling while driving north from Chicago, earlier that day. A string of frantic text messages, saying that his laptop was on the verge of meltdown and I CAN”T AFFORD A NEW LAPTOP. He emailed over what was allegedly a recording of what the fans were doing, which my phone failed to open. Gave him a call, he detailed the situation in grave tones, uploaded the audio file to his website and sent over a link. This did manage to download and play properly, after freeing up some space on the phone’s sd card. Turned out to be what sounds like a bad DDR-esque mix of Happy Birthday. Made my day.

I’m writing this from whitebox, my primary machine. More to the point, I’m writing this from the basement, on the far end of a less than elegant network.

The dsl modem (could be worse) is sitting in another building entirely, and is connected to a D-Link wireless router, which has a Hawking signal booster attached. This signal is caught and passed on by a Hawking repeater (armed with a high-gain antenna) over here in the house. Down in the basement, my laptop serves as a glorified network bridge – it’s connected to the network broadcast by the repeater, and relays the packets to/from this connection to its ethernet port (iptables rules all), which is connected to a Netgear router’s uplink. (Wireless router, making a total of three wifi networks…) Whitebox is attached to this router, and thus are internets provided. It works disturbingly well.

Still, exposing whitebox to the internet at large would be impractical just now, and given the chronic uncertainty surrounding UW Superior’s network, we’ve gone ahead and moved whitebox’s primary functions to a Linode VPS. This was the consensus after giving Dreamhost’s PS service a trial run – while it does indeed provide a vps, it’s still tied fairly tightly to their service management platform. Functional, but not the best if you need a completely independent box. Thus, Linode. Those who’ve used it speak of it in awe, and so far it seems like they might have a point.

Digitonal – I recommend this.