I just stumbled over a nice looking web based interface to the OpenBSD pf filewall: http://www.allard.nu/pfw/

It would be nice to have it ported to Solaris & ipfilter... yet another pet project!

I found an excellent site on slient PCs, http://www.silent.se/, it is well worth a visit. It has everything you ever wanted to know about acoustics and IT noice.

The page is made by a Swedish guy named Mats Risberg, but is available in English.

I've found another server which might live up to all my demands. A German company called Hush Technologies makes really cool looking slient PCs.

The chassi is made of aluminum and acts as a huge heat sink, so it has no fans. The only thing that makes noice is the disk(s).

One of the guys at the office pointed me to them, and he has one at home which he is very pleased with. He runs Linux on his, but since I want to run Solaris I need to take it for a test drive to make sure that I can get everything I need on it to work.

Crap! Just when you think the spring is around the corner it starts to snow again

The view from my livingroom window at 1730 (or 0530 pm for you 24 hours challenged people)

I'm about to upgrade my home server, which currently is a Shuttle SS51G (1 GB RAM, 2.4 GHz P4, 2 * 120 GB disks) to something even more quiet, but I have trouble deciding if I should build or buy.

Since I use it as a server and run Solaris 10 on it, to host a few domains with matching web sites and mail servers, I don't need any fancy-schmancy stuff like a killer graphics card and 5.1 sound. My very modest requirements are:

• At least 2 GB memory
• Room for two disks
• One free PCI slot (so I can add an extra network interface)
• Silent
• Small

I've looked at the Shuttle K 6200 which has an external power supply. That makes it really quiet - only 28 dB(A). The downside is that it only comes with a Pentium 4 or Celeron processor, and I want to use an AMD Athlon64.

I could go for the Shuttle G4 8500, but then it isn't as quiet as the K 6200, which is a problem as it will be sitting in a closet next to my bedroom.

If I build one, I'll have the benefit of getting it exactly as I like, but I don't have the time (or energy) to spend to assemble and test it, and I've become lazy lately. I just want things to work, so I can spend my time on the real stuff.

Decisions, decisions...

I got myself a new toy during my California visit. My old Sony Vaio Z505HS wasn't up to spiff any more. When I fired up Sun Studio (NetBeans) it quickly ground to a halt. It doesn't have enough memory, and the processor is only a 500 MHz Pentium III, so I decided to go the whole nine yards and get myself an Acer Ferrari 3400, and some extra memory so I got a total of 1 GB.

It is heavier than the Vaio, but it does make up for that in featues and power: 2 GHz 64 bit Mobile Athlon, 80 GB disk, 15" 1400x1050 screen, built in WLAN and GB Ethernet. The list could go on, but I'll stop gloating now.

I've installed Solaris 10 (running in 64 bit mode), and it works like a charm. I used BlastWave to get all extras installed, and only only thing I don't like about BlastWave is that it is too verbose. I'll see if I get around to add a "-q" option to pkg-get.

This mean that I can hack away on my pet projects in front of the TV, so hopefully I'll be able to get some more work done on the Log Viewer. I'll also be able to bring it when I do customer presentations, and do live demos of the stuff I usually talk about (zones, privileges, auditing, RBAC and other nifty features).

I've been playing with the features of Firefox (and Mozilla) lately, and one of the first things I did was to create a search plugin for SunSolve. It is dead simple, but I think people out there might still be interested in it, so I'm putting the files here.

Download these two files (sunsolve.png and sunsolve.src) and save them in your firefox/searchplugins folder. Then you have to restart Firefox for the SunSolve option to appear in the search menu.

I can'y use the regular SunSolve search page, as the search plugins only handle GET requests, and SunSolve uses POST. I'll have a word with the team and see if they can't fix that...

Note that this search plugin works for Mozilla too.

Forgive me father, it has been a long time since my last blog.

I've been back from my trip down under for quite a while, and I've even had time to make a business trip to our HQ in Santa Clara. All that travel makes it hard to keep up with my extra curricular activities, such as blogging...

At the moment I'm buried in work. I'm updating a couple of outdated Sun IT security standards, and adding a brand new one - a necessary but boring job.

I'll try to get my act together and blog more often now, and I'll even do ten "Hail Mary" to repent for my sins...