Well, time for my bi-annual journal update...

Since last post, I've quit my old job, worked freelance for 6 months, scored a new job, and just about gotten myself out of debt :)

I'm not working on a remote minesite, doing all sorts of geek stuff, ranging from wireless networking, to PABX configuration, to AD administration, to firewalling, to maintaining a large cisco spanning tree ethernet network, etc.

All good fun and a huge learning opportunity.

Looking to actually do some courses at some point in the near future, with a view to actually *learning* stuff i don't yet know, as opposed to just scoring paper certs for stuff I can do in my sleep.

Considering Java app development, as it seems to be fairly multipurpose, and well entrenched.

In my spare time, I've decided to get into club level motorsport - JDM spec Nissan 180sx with around 300hp at the rears, coilovers, sway bars, etc, etc...

And that's pretty much it.

Will try to update this more regularly :)

smash.

Well, time to get another job. Just recently handed in my notice, I've had enough.

Not really much more to add, my last day is next friday. Anyone looking for a unix/networking guy in the Perth, Western Australia area (part time work preferred, starting my own business), please feel free to email me :D

Well, so far so good.

The wireless IPsec link has been working flawlessly - the only problems I have encountered so far have been key lifetimes (they're too far short by default), and a power outage. The link is point to point via a middle hop, and this device is in another companies office.

They had an extended power outage the other day, and comms were lost...

Not too bad - over 3 months uptime without a hiccup :)

I'm still halfway through writing up the documentation - it will be linked here when its finished.

Well, I've been setting up a wireless link between 2 of our offices at work lately, and I don't trust WEP encryption anymore than I trust Microsoft IIS, so I've been playing with IPSec in tunnel mode under FreeBSD.

Each end of the link is run by a Linksys WAP11 access point, hooked up to a FreeBSD firewall box running IPSec in tunnel mode.

The IPSec documentation is a little confusing on this type of setup, as it goes on about setting up a gif interface to use for tunnelling, however as far as I can see, its not required.

In my situation, instead of setting up a gif interface, I simply ended up using the NIC connected to the wireless bridge in its place - running tcpdump on either end is showing the packets as being ESP encrypted, so as far as I can see it all looks sweet.

Think I'll try putting together some documentation on it and submitting...

Well, I downloaded and installed FreeBSd 5.0 the other day, and it seems that the installer is a little bit screwy - in particular, it failed to newfs my /var slice, and as a result it wasn't mounted, and /var was unpacked under the root.

I rebooted, manually newfs'd and moved /var from the root to it, but I'm guessing some permissions didn't come across properly, as X, and vi complained about access to /var/tmp.

Couldn't be bothered sorting it out, and went back to 4.7 for the time being...

Think I'll wait for 5.0.1 or 5.1 - some of the new features are very enticing (proper threads, devfs, etc), but for the time being, 4.7 works well enough for me :)