Like most home internet users, I have a dynamic IP address and I use Dyndns to map it to a static host name so that I can remotely access my router (and computers behind it) without having to know its current IP address.
My router is a LinkSys WRT54G, which is running the OpenWrt custom firmware. OpenWrt comes with a package called ez-ipupdate, which can be configured to automatically update your Dyndns host record whenever the router’s address changes. For detailed instructions, see the DDNSHowTo page in the OpenWrt wiki.
The instructions in OpenWrt’s wiki are pretty good but they don’t deal with the situation where the time between address changes is greater than 30 days. …Continue reading » How to Force ez-ipupdate to Touch Dyndns Record Every Month
Yesterday I wrote a custom log file rotator script in bash for one of my embedded Linux boxes (yes, I know about logrotate but this was a special situation that required a custom script).
One of the building blocks I needed for this script was a function that could return the size of a file. The wc command seemed appropriate for this: …Continue reading » Just the File Size Please
Just for laughs, I recently created a point-to-point VPN (a.k.a. gateway-to-gateway VPN) between my home and the office. At the office, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys RV042, which, as far as I can tell, runs Freeswan VPN software. At home, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys WRT54GL, which I hacked to run the OpenWrt linux distribution and OpenSwan VPN software. A future post will detail exactly how I did this but the purpose of this post is to discuss how I got my Windows file shares to work across the VPN. …Continue reading » Accessing Windows Shares Across a VPN
Many Linux distributions are preconfigured to automatically and periodically rotate syslog log files by means of cron jobs that call logrotate or a similar log rotation script. However, if you want to clear a log file manually, you can simply use the greater than sign followed by the log file name. For example, to manually clear the file kern.log, you can run this command:
me@mycomputer:> /var/log/kern.log
The beauty of this is that the cleared out file still retains its original permissions and ownership.
