My new toy arrived today loaded with 3 hard drives totalling 60 GB (which I don't know how exactly to use up, so I'm only using 2 drives), gobs of ram, and enough processor for me not to be able to use up. First thing I did was crack open the case and hook up a cdrom. I tried installing Slackware 8, but when I booted up with 2.4.5, the kernel wanted to check every single possible SCSI combination (0,0,0, 0,1,0, 0,2,0,... 1,2,0... you get the idea).

After I got annoyed enough with it going through enough SCSI devices, I remembered it was supposed to be my FreeBSD box anyway so I could have OpenBSD router, linux webserver, and FreeBSD database server. That is when I started trying to install FreeBSD 4.3. It was the first time I stuck it out and didn't give up when it didn't work the way I wanted it to the first time. I reinstalled 5-6 times till I figured out what I was doing and was more comfortable with navigating through the install gui. I got it up, installed MySQL and distributed.net and it's sitting there waiting for me to finish my marketing project so I can just tear into the network and mess everything up that already works.

My objective has been realized. I have a windows computer for school work, games, and general misc., a linux laptop for development, a linux webserver, a linux secondary dns machine, a openbsd router, and a freebsd database server. I think it might be better to have the webserver and database server OSs switched, but the hardware configurations are the limiter in that simply from hardware setups (and where I can put the cd burner for quick backups). I can't wait for school to start when I'll just start diving into the configurations of all these OSs. Sendmail is going to be one of the first things I learn better, then maybe proftpd, and dns caching. Fun fun. It's even more fun since I know there are no classes at school that teach that stuff and that all the CS majors I've talked to are starting to get jealous.

I'm compiling a new OpenBSD kernel so I can have more bpfilter devices (nmap and dhcpd barf on me with just one bpfilter device). I assume when it's done, and I reboot, I'll have dhcp on my lan. Then I'll want to figure out how to set it so two of my MAC addresses always get the same IP... or maybe I want them staticly set. Hell... I'll just figure out how to do that configuration for the heck of it and then set them staticly in the servers and have my windows computer pull it with dhcp. Yeah.

I got a little update from the bug I filed about XSLT for PHP. It seems the XSLT support will be changing in 4.0.7. I'm interested to see if there are any speed improvements over what I've got installed now. I'm not all too excited about how fast it is with Sablotron.

I was supposed to spend today working on my class project for marketing. I haven't touched it. Probably not good.

Later: Yeay. I have dhcp on my lan. No more messing with comptuer configurations tonight. Increasing bpfilter did the trick thanks again to Google and its excessive crawling of mailing list archives.