kerravonsen | Moving and Configurating

Well. More moving and shaking. I managed to move the desk stuff all over again (this time a little more organizedly, and without piles of dust). Putting the case on the floor didn't work, because the monitor cord wouldn't reach that far. But I still managed to organize the stuff so I have some desk-space free (useful for putting the laptop on when connecting it wired.

I now also have some of my long-intentioned preliminaries over! I now have a more proper wired network, and the DHCP server in the router sort of works; I can't figure out how to get it to tell folks what the name and IP of its clients are, but that isn't too bad, since the laptop just needs to talk to the desktop, rather than the other way around, and the desktop IP is static.

But what I am gleeful about is that I now have (a) a caching DNS server and (b) a web proxy. I used maradns for the DNS server after quailing at BIND and frowning at the acrimony surrounding djbdns (of tinydns and dnscache fame). But maradns wasn't hard to set up at all, I just took the example "recursive dns" config file and tweaked it a bit. However, getting a caching DNS server wasn't enough to enable me to surf from my laptop, in fact it was rather useless. However, I not only installed "tinyproxy" to act as a web proxy for the laptop, I figured out how to get netenv to set my http_proxy environment variables in zsh automatically depending on which network I was connected to, and how to set up an automatic proxy configuration file for mozilla/firefox because mozilla ignores the http_proxy variable.

So now I can surf the web from my laptop! Woo hoo!

Of course, right now it is sitting right next to the desktop, connected to the router via the old cable that used to connect it to the desktop, but still, it seems to be several steps in the right direction.

And I skipped lunch and I'm hungry!