The Mandelbear's Musings

The new DSL line is working well; I did a little tweaking with the ruleset to cut down on log clutter. The most common attack turned out to be Windows messenger popups. Go figure.

"So here's the transition plan..."

The easy thing to do first is to swap local IP addresses on the old and new (interim) gateways, which will leave everybody routing through the new, fast line. Before I do that I'll have to add another zone for the Windows PCs, which are on a disjoint subnet on the same wire as the Linux boxen. That's mainly a matter of copying the config from the old gateway, though I'll have to make allowances for the difference in interfaces.

The mail server is a potential problem, since it will eventually need to relay outgoing mail through mail.sonic.net, so I'll point its gateway at the old DSL line for now.

The DMZ is entirely confined to the wireless router and its "inside" wiring, and is masqueraded through to an address on the router's third interface. The simplest thing is just to change the WRT's WAN interface to an address on the inside network, which is where it was a year or so ago. (After it's all done I need to put the entire DMZ subnet on its own interface on the router and bypass the extra masquerade, but there's no hurry.)

Since the eventual plan is to take the existing (old) gateway and repackage it in a 1U case with a bigger disk, the next step will be to copy its disk to the interim gateway and configure its web server. It's all using NameVirtualHost now, so that's trivial. Might do some cleanup at the same time. The only question is whether to copy it all onto the laptop's drive (there's room) or onto a drive in a USB enclosure that I can then put into the new gateway. The latter was tempting until I thought about it. First of all the drive I really ought to use, a 200GB IDE drive, is currently in the fileserver waiting to be replaced by a 400GB SATA drive. Oops. Secondly, if I wait, I'll be able to build it into the replacement gateway before I need it. Might do it with a keychain drive, though, it's only 1.2GB.

Anyway, the next step is to start changing DNS records. The only one that's the least bit problematic is gc.thestarport.org, because that's the mail relay. So I'll also need to fix my current mail configuration.

At that point I'll be off the old DSL line, and can start on upgrading the disk in the fileserver and building the new gateway.

And did I mention that I still have taxes to do? Did the last of the receipt data-entry today; next up is the year-end credit-card summaries from AMEX. They categorize charges so it's easy to spot the charity contributions.