A hearty Merry Christmas to all.

Christmas for me went very well. My mother-in-law and her husband flew up from Florida for a few weeks. We had the big festivities Christmas Eve although the kids opened stocking and a few gifts today.

Unfortunately, my son’s Leap Pad was D.O.A., but I only figured it out on Christmas Eve after all the stores had closed. Oh well, we did have fun putting together his first 100 piece jigsaw puzzle.

The Sweet Potato pie was a huge hit with everyone.

I installed SmoothWall at home for a gateway. Boy is it slick. The install is one of the simplest Linux based installs I have seen, and I have seen Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Slackware, and Gentoo. Once it’s installed, the web interface is very simple and easy to configure. In addition to firewall it does caching proxy, dns proxy, dhcp, VPN, dyndns, and a pretty decent logging. It also supports a DMZ, which I don’t use currently, but might for wireless AP in the future. It’s a great use for an old PC and a few old NIC’s if you happen to have them laying around. (I am curious what the power consumption will be. It’s an old K6-2 350, that used to be the web server.)

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