Now that I am done with school and I have completed work on some money-earning projects, I am switching my focus to my pending personal projects:

• Changing server hardware – Something less power hungry than what I have now. More details later.
• Upgrading Fedora – Since I am changing hardware, taking the opportunity to upgrade Fedora. FC13 release is only a week away.
• A Django project – Still not sure what exactly I will do but I want something that takes advantage of the newly released 1.2.
• Network security – Research new (or new to me…) tools to enhance the security of my network.
• Studying new subjects – Things like SELinux and a refresh on iptables are on the table.

I plan on using this blog and the wiki to document throughout these next few months. Very excited/amped about this.

So I finally was able to get my PTR record changed for my static IP from Verizon.

Formerly, the generic:
static-68-161-230-103.ny325.east.verizon.net

Now, my static IP will resolve to:
home.iambelmin.com

I had to first call Verizon and the lady who I was first assigned to quickly recognized what I was requesting. This was a plesant surprise because I googled around trying to find information on how to modify a PTR record from Verizon and I came across many claims that their support was clueless.

Anyway, the lady then transfered me to someone in the “Enhanced product support” department who, after a few questions, requested I e-mail my request to her just to have everything in writting. Sent the e-mail while she was on the phone, she confirmed that she received it and said I will be receiving an e-mail with confirmation that it was done the following morning.

Around 10am the following morning, it was put through. Went pretty smoothly. No complaints here.

Now that school is officially off till Spring, I have been doing a lot of work on my “test-bed” server at home. I pretty much try to replicate a small business environment. I use this server to gain experience configuring and administrating services. Currently, it runs:

• Web sever (Apache and PHP) – I run WordPress (this blog and IAmBelmin blog), MediaWiki for wiki.bfworks.com and a couple of other PHP based sites.
• Database server (MySQL) – Using MySQL for the database back-end of the sites hosted on the box.
• Firewall/Router (IPTables) – Wrote up some custom IPTables rules to secure and route my network. Currently have two subnets–wired and wireless.
• DHCP server (DHCPd) – Configured to give IPs to computers connecting to the network based on the subnet they are on.
• Nameserver (BIND) – Through DHCPd updates A and PTR record for new clients on the server under the internal domain iambelmin.lan.
• Filesharing (Samba) – Made a couple of shares, private and public, for my internal network
• Other Linux services (SSH, NTP, etc.) – Services of typical Linux installations.

While school is off, I plan to write up a few Wiki articles concerning some of my configurations and administration practices. This is mostly for my own benefit since having things documented will help me better understand why I did things a certain way later in the future. As of now, I have most of my configuration files pretty heavily documented so this should not be a difficult task.