Firewall woes.
The heat in Connecticut is nearly unbearable; so much so, that whatever the blistering temp was outside, my basement (and server room), was 20 degrees hotter. This is roughly the surface temp of the sun.
Which was too much for my firewall. I gave my Dual PIII 550 to Ben (to cut down on power usage), and did the server shuffle.
I moved the Athlon 2200 (previously a workstation), and migrate that machine to the fileserver. The Athlon 1800 was migrated over to the firewall. and The P4 was migrated to the secondary workstation.
This worked great for about 3 days. Then both athlons melted. The 2200′s power supply took a crap, and the athlon 1700 just stopped working altogether. For the first time in almost 8 years, I had to use linux as a firewall. My file server has around a terrabyte of data on it, so a quick reload with openbsd was not not an option. I had to use iptables (for the love of God, please port PF over). I spent the next two hours stumbling over the arcane, and deliberately confusing syntax to get my network back up and running. At two in the morning, it is as if Rusty is trying to drive you mad.
As a linux user since the early 90′s, I have a great deal of love and respect for the software, but, IP TABLES SUCKS. There are no two ways around this. It feels kludgey, configs like something on an AS/400, and at the end of your painful relationship, it actualy punches you in the head.
PF lays it down, and works it over like Scott Peterson in prison. PF has a great single config file with decent syntax, variables, and easily to remember rules.
Thankfully the poor experience I had with IP Tables, helped motivate me to fix my Netra X1, and upgrade it to OpenBSD 3.9 (Sparc64). I really wish PF ran on everything.
