All Things New

This is my first post from my own website.  Pretty cool, huh?

In the last few weeks we got Comcast Internet here at the house, which gave me an opportunity to do a bunch of stuff related to my projects.  We were able to have Cat5e run along with the coax, so I now have a hard line to my bedroom so that should make things much nicer when the microwave is on, or trying to stream AirPlay, or managing the VM Host downstairs.

I also went ahead and hooked up the pfSense firewall I built a month or so ago.  Have that nicely configured with Squid (w/ filtering), setup a basic VPN (which I’ve been able to test quite easily since the DSL line is still functional).  Just have a decent network layout going.  I haven’t gotten the traffic shaping configured in a way I like yet.

After that project was done, I moved on to (hopefully) setting up a personal website/blog/email server on the home network.  I ran into some snags with Comcast blocking some ports, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and venture into the cloud.  Started by messing with a few Spot Instances on EC2 for a few pennies an hour, to try to figure things out.  Nothing overly complicated, but a fair number of big annoyances for even such a small player as myself.  Once I was comfortable, I purchased a Reserved Micro Instance, allocated an Elastic IP and started configuring email (not quite working) and got this blog installed and migrated.  And now I type this first post.

The next thing on my list is to install a wiki here so I can keep a record of projects, diagrams, and little tips I never have a use for at the moment I find them.

Edit: I had a Spot Instance running for a couple days which I started a wiki on (not critical) thinking I’d be able to migrate relatively easily if I ever went to a Reserved Instance.  When I went to move, I wasn’t getting anywhere and couldn’t mount it to save my life, but was just now able to mount it on my permanent instance and migrate all the old wiki data over.  Haven’t found any issues.  Sweet.

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