Entries with tag "linux"

• Donating Bandwidth to Neighbors

  My neighbors across the street don't have Internet access so I volunteered my WPA password to them so that they can use my Internet. Today I decided to install a custom WRT54G firmware called CoovaAP to turn my router into an open hotspot like you would see in hotels for my other neighbors to use.

  It was very easy to install and configure. It uses CoovaChilli to create a captive portal to allow my neighbors create a user and log in. It also separates my hardwired network from the wireless hotspot.

  I also installed ipp2p to block p2p traffic to keep the bandwidth usage down. Besides everyone uses p2p for piracy anyway (Don't try to deny it). Bittorrent is a great technology used for evil. Don't get me started on Limewire... Here's a howto on installing ipp2p on Coova

  Posted by on January 2, 2008

  2 Comments

  Tags: hotspot, linux, networking, news

• Xubuntu Day 3

  So it's been three days since I started using XFCE flavored Ubuntu.  It's been a pretty lovely existence, but I have a few tips that's I've come across
  
  

  Notification Daemon

  Stock Xubuntu doesn't come with a notification daemon that works with XFCE installed.  So those little popups that rise out of the task bar in Gnome don't rise anymore and I end up missing things like new IMs, new mail notifications, etc.  Unfortunately, there is not a package in the repositories for the xfce friendly notification daemon so you'll have to compile it yourself. Follow the instructions here.
  
  

  Mail Notifications

  Since I'm running Xubuntu in VMWare and I need Outlook running so that Activesync will sync appointments to my Blackjack, It's hard to know when new emails come in.  Luckly, our Exchange server here provides IMAP.  I could run Evolution and get my mail in XFCE, but why should I have two mail clients running.   So what I did was set up two Mail Watcher panel Applets, one for my corporate email and one for my personal Google Apps for Domains account.
  
  Unfortunately I was missing emails yesterday because by default, all the Mail Watcher applet does when new mail comes in is change the icon.  This is what prompted me to get the notification daemon working.  Details on how to tie Mail Watcher and Notifications together are here
  
  By the way, I absolutely love Google Apps for Domains, it's brilliant.  I wrote a little mailto: handler script for my wife's laptop so that when she clicks on mailto: links anywhere, it opens gmail.  I'll provide that script sometime, it's a little 10 line beauty.
  
  
  
  

  Powered by ScribeFire.

  Posted by on August 2, 2007

  0 Comments

  Tags: linux