Made a good start today on Operation Server Independence. Mostly I was just trying to put things back to the state they were when I took the system down over a year ago.
I found all the components and cables for the old Macintosh Quadra 800. This was no mean feat as I'd stored some of the oddball cables in some non-obvious boxes, and I've moved these boxes at least twice since then, so I spent some time digging through those.
One thing I didn't manage to find is a mouse for this machine. For all the mice I've owned over the years you'd think I'd have more of them kicking around. I seem to have plenty of most every other part. But no mice.
Fortunately, booting this machine into linux involves spending relatively little time in the Mac OS, and I was able to navigate that part with the keyboard alone.
The first time today that I booted into linux I hadn't connected it to my local net's ethernet cable, so it obviously couldn't connect to the net. Some machines I've had could be plugged into the net after booting and would do all that network initializing on the fly, but not this one. But a (fairly) quick reboot got it on the net, no prob. It used DHCP to connect through my D-Link router.
Next I checked to make sure that the web server, telnet server, and ftp servers were running. Using the machine's local network IP address I was able to connect to each of these three. Good.
From past experience I know that now it gets tricky.
I want to poke some holes in the firewall, so that machines out in the world can make web, telnet, and ftp connections to this machine. My old router had something called "port forwarding" that let me just open those three specific ports, and connect them to a specific machine in the local net.
I think my D-Link router will do the same thing. But the terminology and user interface are different, and I wasn't able to quickly puzzle it out. So in the meantime I used a feature called "DMZ" which basically exposes all the ports of one local machine to the world.
I know that this is not the most secure way to do things, especially since I don't yet know how to secure the linux machine really well. But there's nothing of value on the machine right now, so I think it'll be OK during this shake-down/learning period.
Finally, since the DMZ feature connects to a particular IP address in the local net, I had to make sure that the Quadra always gets the same number from the DHCP.
The D-Link has a feature called Static DHCP Client List. It lets me set it so a specific Mac number is always given the same IP address. Easy. I had thought I was going to have to figure out how to set the IP statically in the lunux machine, but this is much easier.
Lastly, with all this DMZ and static dhcp turned on, I should be able to connect to the Quadra using the IP number that the router uses to talk to the world. But this gave me a little trouble.
I had a similar problem the first time I set this up. I think it's called "loopback". The idea is that from inside my local net, I should be able to use the router's EXTERNAL IP address and the router will treat the connection just like it came from the outside world. But this wasn't working.
I could connect to the quadra using the machine's internal IP, but not the router's external one.
I had the same problem last time, and the fix was to update the firmware of the router. There is a minor firmware upgrade available for this new router, I have v 1.0 and upgrade is v1.02.
I downloaded the upgrade, but I'm not sure it came through correctly, and I don't want to corrupt the router until I have the time to debug any problem I might create.
In the meantime I wanted to figure out if a loopback failure really was the problem. If I could go out to a machine in the world, and try to connect, that would tell me what was what. But there are none nearby, so I need to be clever.
I telneted to an account I have on a machine in Calif. While logged in there I was able to make web, telnet, and ftp connections back to the quadra. So success, the DMZ is working.
Well that's it for today.
Next is to make some DNS entries so the quadra is a subdomain of one of my existing domains. And then I'll be venturing into unexplored -- for me anyway -- territory.
I think I'll going to look at mail serving first.
To be continued...
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ADB mice are findable for free, with a little looking (ask around college campuses, for example). Check the MIT Swapfest and you can get one for a buck or two, I suspect.
Posted by: ckd at May 7, 2004 11:49 PM