Archive for the ‘upgrade’ tag
Why Linux isn’t ready
There are plenty of people around who will happily slate Microsoft (sorry, that should be Micro$oft), Windoze, and Internet Exploder. The majority of these people will, unprompted, extoll the virtues of Linux.
I won’t lie, I like Microsoft. I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available. And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.
But I also run a Linux server. It is a modest beast. It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN. It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.
I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.
About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason. I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the Linux box would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.
So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.
Netgear DG834G and NAT loopback
Yesterday I made the decision (read: mistake) to update my Netgear DG834G router (hardware v4, firmware v5.01.09) to firmware v5.01.14 – and, as is the way with these things, it brought trouble. After the upgrade I couldn’t reach www.nikrivers.com from the LAN side of the router.
The problem is caused by the way the router handles traffic coming from an internal IP address and destined for the WAN (i.e. external) IP address. In this situation it requires that the router first transfers the traffic from the internal network to the external network, and then immediately passes it back whilst applying any firewall or routing rules that are relevant to incoming external traffic.
