Anthony’s Ramblings

I’m not a Hot Topic person. I have a $50 gift card for sale. Click here and bid now!

My electronics instructor showed us a pretty useful site to help with the study of electronics. It has a lot of useful information. If you’re bored and/or are interested in some technical reading, check it out. It’s 100% free .

Work-Ready Electronics Modules

After much fussing and tinkering, I did get the Cisco 871 router I purchased a while ago to work beautifully. It turns out that the default MTU for any dialer interface you create is 1450. In most cases this is okay, but PPPoE DSL doesn’t like any value other than 1492. Once this was corrected, it works wonderfully. Has a fancy firewall (I like), and a neat intrusion prevention system. IPS is pretty much a packet by packet inspection for malicious data. It requires regular deffinition updates just like your anti-virus software. The router also has a bunch of different VPN configurations…it’ll act as a client and a server in numerous different configs. For those of you who don’t like CLIs, this router also has a pretty neat GUI interface. I will post some screen shots of it soon (will edit the post and add links) and possibly elaborate some more.

There is one downside. I cannot browse to my external IP and view my webpage or try things as if I was a user externally. I’ve been told this is to prevent unnecessary traffic looping around in the router, and it makes sense. An easy fix was to throw up a DNS server inside my network to direct my domains to the local IP of my server. However, the only way I can test if any ports I open are working is to ask a friend, “Hey, can you do this for me?”, or remote into a system at work and try things out. However, I’ll live.

The Cisco 871 makes my previous router look like something from Fisher Price.