Apr
15
2006

Last Exit - 3rd Anniversary Bash / Arizona Countdown

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 09:10:17 pm
(Posted Under: Music Music, Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene)
Last Exit Bar and Grill have their calendar up - the first night we are in Tempe they are having their 3rd Anniversary Bash. Though, I question the date, as their second Anniversary Bash was in April last year while I was there (well, actually in Vegas, hence missing it). [wink]

The highlight is certainly The Black Moods. Certainly a good way to rock out the first night, especially given my new found (relatively speaking) Moods appreciation. The bill also has Special Guests, so I'm hoping for someone good there. Give me some Ghetto Cowgirl! If Ghetto play, that would really make the night.

The schedule for the rest of the month was a bit dismall. Though, I guess it is early days, and there is always June's calendar yet to happen.

So, I guess the countdown really is on! Bring it! [biggrin] Actually, it's been on for a quite while (see Arizona Countdown), but it's well and truely on now, what with Last Exit's May calendar being avaliable and starting to get an idea of the rock that will be had and all. Well, that and that it's 4 weeks today - this time in 4 weeks we should be a few hours out of Los Angeles over the Pacific Ocean.
Now Playing: Jesse Valenzuela - Bulletproof Jacket
Apr
15
2006

WIPFW

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 08:32:53 pm
(Posted Under: Geek, Firewall)
Last night I decided to take a look into anti-virus and a firewall for my laptop. Two things I could do without doing, but given that I'll be travelling soon and connecting to unfamilar networks, certainly something worth doing.

I pretty much knew which anti-virus road I was going to go down, clam-av (for Windows). It doesn't yet have a real time scanner, but I can live with that. None of it too hard at all.

Then it was back to the eternal search for a Netfilter (iptables) like firewall for Windows - basically meaning something that is controlled via the command line, rather than monster that infects your whole system. (I tried one that was suggested, but like all the others was simply that.) Whever I look for one, I always think surely someone has created something like this, yet at the same time, always seems like a pipe dream. But last night, I came across WIPFW. Call off your dogs, the search is over!

WIPFW is a port of the FreeBSD ipfw packet filtering system ported to Microsoft Windows. Hallujah! I've never used ipfw before (I think I only breifly used ipchains before Netfilter / iptables was the thing to use) - it's syntax is quite old, arcane and simple compared to iptables (which I'm quite well versed in), and I wouldn't like to have to do anything fancy in it (like build the iptables firewall I run on my Linux router), but this does exactly what I want to do for my laptop - simple shield it from unsolicited packets from external networks. wipfw does the job absolutely beautiful, and is all controlled from the command line with ipfw. An added bonus is that there are simple drivers (and a service) which are the only things installed! Sweet. Completely uninstalls with no effect not leaving a trace of it. Works beautifully too. Color me damn happy about it.

This all came about from working on ipmasq-ng (my custom Netfilter firewall scripts package), primarily making the way PPP devices are handled. Largely due to an occurance last week of my internet connection being assigned to ppp0, rendering it completely unaccessible from the internet for a day. On getting this done (which also is working more nicely now with all the tweaks I've done) I had another look into reaim (for doing file transfers over AOLIM behind a NAT firewall) which I've wanted to get working months ago. No dice - at least using the installation that portage did. However, getting the source, compiling and installing manually gave me sweet sweet success. On getting this done I also took a look into the condition iptables module (mind you, after two hours of trying to get the patch into my kernel and iptables - patch-o-matic's verbosity leaves something to be desired [wink] ) which is a nice module. Makes it a piece of cake to turn of the inbound reaim ports (when I don't want to do file transfers or direct connections, to lock things down) rather than adding and deleting rules.

The final thing I did today was getting rid of McAfee on the aforementioned laptop - without actually uninstalling it. Basically I wanted to stop it running, but leave it on the machine - partly because I now have wipfw for firewalling, but also because of the annoying popup each time my laptop starts with Spam Killer wanting to "verify" itself. This proved quite a task - I had no idea that Windows XP still used (/had) the Run key in the registry for starting programs at startup - or maybe I did and had just forgotten - I really don't delve that deep into Windows anymore. [smile] On discovering this, I was able to finally irradicated McAfee's Security Center - which actually felt like a virus when I couldn't stop it from running. [smile]
Now Playing: Gloritone - Same Horse

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