Tomorrow evening (always say that with a Bela Lugosi accent, as in “ve shall be leeving… tomorrrow eeeeeevening!”), a team from Netcabo will go to my place to change my modem (which is working perfectly well), because (translated by me):

due to an upgrade action of the NetCabo network, your Cable Modem will no longer be compatible with our network.

With this upgrade, we intend to improve the security of your access, and to incorporate new features which we’ll announce soon.

I have no idea of what “new features” they are talking about, as as for “increasing security”, I really hope that they don’t start blocking ports, or other idiocies like that, which might even force me to move my server elsewhere (and, believe me, I wouldn’t stay with Netcabo). Contrary to what they might believe, not everyone uses Windows, nor is everyone a complete “noob” in terms of securing systems. Hopefully, they just mention that because they have to convince people that they stand to “win” something with this change, and “security” is a fashionable subject…

One other thing that came to mind (which I hope is true) is this: I have a 4 Mbit connection, and I know that my modem (a 3Com sharkfin) can only do 6 Mbit or something like that. Maybe they’re going to do what they did some time ago: increase everyone’s bandwidth, without raising prices, so they can be competitive with ADSL again. If it’s that, then it explains the need for a new modem… and having 8 Mbit at home would be nice.

Unfortunately, because of this, my sites will be down tomorrow, from 6 PM GMT until a couple of hours later. I hope everything goes well…

New developments here, and not all of them are good.

To begin with, in the first part, I made a mistake (I was at work when writing it, just like now): my OpenBSD box isn’t connected to the “Internet” port in the Linksys, but to one of the “normal” ports. If I connect it to the former, it doesn’t work

Second, it still isn’t working perfectly. I’m still trying out stuff; however, it’s like this: if I haven’t gone online with the DS for a while, and I try to do so, it doesn’t work. I simply have to go to the OpenBSD server and ping the router’s internal address… and it works afterwards. It’s as if the server “forgets” that the DS is behind the router (as they’re in the same network – otherwise, the router would have to do NAT), and has to find it for itself first – if it’s “forgotten” about it, then connections from the DS go out, but the return packets aren’t routed to it.

I’m going to try a static ARP for it later tonight. I really, really don’t want to use a crontab to ping the router every 5 minutes.

I’ve also tried another possibility, which was to connect the switch’s “Internet” port to the server, and connect one of the ports to the switch for my old network, 192.168.0.0/24. I have to enable NAT in the Linksys between the 192.168.0 and 192.168.1. This way allows the router to update its clock using NTP, which it does every time it’s turned on, but then the DS can only connect while I’m pinging it from the server (!).

This is weird. This Linksys model isn’t exactly great – for instance, it basically “reboots” itself for every configuration change, unlike the Linux models (which I’ve seen at my father’s place).

I know, I know – I could have avoided all of this by just connecting the Linksys to the Internet, doing NAT there, and redirecting ports 22, 80 and 443 to the OpenBSD server. But I’m stubborn, and I trust OpenBSD to be “in the front lines” much more than I do the Linksys. Besides, pf (the OpenBSD firewall) is great.

Continuing from the previous post, Nintendo DS: First Impressions, here’s a more technical bit. Still to come is a post more related to actual gaming – more precisely, Mario Kart DS, the only DS game I own.

As I said, since Mario Kart DS is the first DS game playable online (instead of simply using the DS’s normal wi-fi, which requries players to be near each other), using a normal Internet connection, to access NintendoWiFi. It doesn’t use a cable, though, but connects to a wi-fi access point.

So far, so good. However, since I’m not one of those filthy rich people who own laptops , my home network was (and is) based on that highly advanced and incredibly modern technology called “ethernet cables”.

Now, Nintendo sells a wi-fi dongle, and you can use any other one as long as it supports WEP encryption. So I thought about buying a dongle. However, I also figured out that, eventually, I’ll have some more hardware, such as a laptop, which will need a wi-fi connection. Therefore, to avoid wasting money, I bought a router, the Linksys WRK54G, which was the cheapest one I could find.

So far, so good, right? Not so fast. Those routers expect – indeed, they’re made for exactly such a purpose – to be directly connected to the Internet, and then to “give” access to other boxes – it can do NAT, port redirection, firewalling and also serves as a DHCP server.

But I already have one firewall, my OpenBSD box, which is also the server where all my blogs and sites reside. And I had no intention of putting it behind the Linksys.

After many tries and changes, what worked was the following:

• I added a third NIC to the OpenBSD box, and created a new network (192.168.1.0/24, the already active one is 192.168.0.0/24), to be used for wireless stuff. The new card has the IP address 192.168.1.1.
• The Linksys’s “Internet” port was connected to that new port.
• The “Internet” port in the Linksys got a new address in that new network, 192.168.1.2. It also has an “internal” address, 192.168.1.3. No other (ethernet) ports on the Linksys are used.
• I disabled NAT in the Linksys, and enabled it for the new network in the OpenBSD box.
• I activated a new dnscache process to listen on 192.168.1.1 in OpenBSD.
• In the Linksys, the default Internet gateway is, of course, 192.168.1.1.
• I configured the DS to have a static IP, 192.168.1.4, and the gateway is 192.168.1.3. The DNS server is 192.168.1.1. (I think I tried using 192.168.1.1 as the gateway in the DS, but it didn’t work)
• I activated WEP encryption in the router, generated a key, and typed it on the DS.
• “Connection test successful”… yes!
• I also configured OpenBSD to do NAT between the two internal networks, so I can use a browser in my desktop (192.168.0.3) to administer the Linksys (at 192.168.1.3).

Most users wouldn’t be in this situation, they’d just use the Linksys to connect to the Internet. But I didn’t want to, so…

EDIT: the above isn’t 100% correct. See Part 2.