I finally upgraded my Linux firewall at home. I had a hard drive warn me that it was going to die soon (S.M.A.R.T. saved my bacon), so I decided the time had come to overhaul the system.

I recently switched from Windows XP to Kubuntu at work, so I thought I’d use Ubuntu at home as well. In the process of figuring out what packages I wanted on my server, I played with various ubuntu derivatives. I wanted to keep it light weight, so I decided to go without any GUI or with the Xfce included with Xubuntu over VNC. In the end I went with Ubuntu server with no GUI at all.

I also installed a transparent proxy cache (Squid) and a content filter (DansGuardian). I’ve used both of these for years, but it was interesting figuring out the new options in the configuration files. I forgot to backup my iptables scripts, but I found an old version and brought them up to date.

I hope it stays up another 216 days (the amount of time since my previous reboot).

One of these days I’ll have to tell my story of my failed attempt to “upgrade” to Windows Vista Beta at work. Having worked a few years for Microsoft in times past, I was honestly shocked and disappointed that they would let anyone outside the company try to use something so broken.