As I have promised, here is an explanation of the palm and yesterday.

Friday night, my dad gets a Palm Zire21. Still not sure /exactly/ how he got it, but I do know it came from work for some reason or another. He tells me if it will sync with linux, it’s mine.

After a quick google search, I find that it works quite nicely under linux. So I get it and I charge it up for three hours. Then I try to sync using jpilot.

After about six hours, I finally figured out that it should be /dev/ttyUSB1 and not /dev/ttyUSB0. I also found that you need to hit sync on jPilot first.

There was also the little ‘no-user-installed’ thing. It needed a user set to sync properly. I found a linux utility to do it, user-install, or something.

Yea. So now I have a wonderful palm pilot which can sync, beam, and do all that fun stuff. w00tz0r.

And yesterday. As you know, last week I was unable to set up mj’s network, for various reasons. This week, we had round two. It had a rockey start, but we managed to pull it off.

When we first began, the computer he wanted to use for routing refused to boot. The ribbon going to the harddrive and the motherboard was damaged, so when we noticed that, we replaced it. Good as new.

Then there was the issue of his ISP logging the mac address of the first ethernet device to access the web through his connection. The first device was some little netgear router. We obviously couldn’t switch ethernet cards, so I set up mac spoofing with the /etc/network/interfaces file.

Then I set up eth1. Figured out how to give it a static IP and all. Fun fun.

After the hardware was all set up, we punched some numbers into the windows box we were using to test. No luck, we had some numbers wrong. Once we got those right, the boxes would ping each other. However, the windows box inside the network couldn’t access the internet. But that was all right, we had to enable nat for that.

For those who don’t know, nat, or IP masquerading, is used when you have one public IP and several computers on the internal network with private IPs. (Go read the damn RFC if you don’t know what that means). A request from a computer on a private IP to owlmanatt.com would go through, but owlmanatt.com wouldn’t be able to respond because the IP the request came from was a private IP, not a publc one.

So we had some fun getting the firewall rules for ip_masq working. We got it up, and everything was happyhappy funfun.

Then as the ultimate test, I rebooted the router box to see if everything would start up at boot, as I had set it to do.

The results were…mm. They would ping each other, and the windows box could ping eth0’s public IP, but no further. I finally located the problem.

We had two files with firewall rules. One was in /etc/init.d/, and it started at boot. I had thought it also executed /etc/gateway.rules, but it didn’t. So I added sh /etc/gateway.rules to the init script, and boom. Rebooted again, worked fine.

So now, I need to go do a technical writeup of all of that for mj so he can try and do it again on his own. If you’re reading this, sorry I didn’t do that last night, I was occupied until midnight getting my 1677 in on Eron, and I Had to get to sleep at a reasonable hour because I’m going to New York later.

Mmk, see you all tonight.