Internet access & time slots (pre)defined with pfSense

pfSense logoHave you ever wasted too much time online? Right, so posting this on my blog imparts some selection bias to the answers to that question. But have you really wasted time to the point of not getting work done, or letting other things fall by the wayside?

We’re going to block some sites that sing their siren song to us, calling like the blue light inside the bug zapper. I’ll use four that friends have suggested.

Now, it’s simply no good to just cut off your access to these sites. The goal here is to get you back to work, not to make it so that you have to go find a way around an all-encompassing block to get your fix. So, we’re going to block access to problem sites during parts of the day when you think you ought not be accessing them.

This can now be easily done with pfSense

To implement this we need to break down the problem into two parts:

1. What do we want to block?
2. When do we want to block it?

Read the complete howto here.

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FreeNAS week; 6 FreeNAS Tutorials

hddrives.jpgBack in 2006 Daily Cup of Tech had a FreeNAS week. If you’re not altogether comfortable getting FreeNAS up and running, why not have a look at FreeNAS Week series of howtos?

Have you seen the “FreeNAS, how it works” video?

FreeNAS Week – day 1: System and Skill Requirements
FreeNAS Week – day 2: Installation HowTo
FreeNAS Week – day 3: Basic Configuration
FreeNAS Week – day 4: Configuring Disks
FreeNAS Week – day 5: Windows Shares
FreeNAS Week – day 6: Setting up FTP access in FreeNAS

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FreeNAS: Review and Suggestions for Educational Use

FreeNASFreeNAS is an open source operating system exclusively built to serve the purposes of implementing a small Network Attached Storage (NAS for short) device. NAS devices allow for centralization of data, data backup, and collaboration. The beautiful part, besides it’s being free, is the ease in setting it all up.

At TTU we have begun using a FreeNAS server for organizing all of our files that are commonly used throughout our department. One of the issues that kept coming up within our department was versioning control (people using different versions of the same document). We were also struggling to keep all of our files that we commonly shared in one central location. It was not uncommon for one person to go on vacation and inadvertently lock us out of accessing documents that we all needed access. FreeNAS allows one central location for all of these solutions. FreeNAS’s features really shine in its versatility. With FreeNAS, one can connect to the NAS as a shared network drive, an ftp server, and many other useful methods that meet a wide variety of operating systems needs. With FreeNAS we can insure proper backup either by using a hardware RAID or the built in software RAID.

As one can already see the possibilities for education are pretty varied and wide. It for one can offer life to legacy hardware by turning older machines with lower power processors into centers for data management. A NAS does not need the heavy computing power that many other services need. FreeNAS can also be fun from a usb drive or compact flash drive further reducing its footprint. FreeNAS offers efficiency and access to files from either work, home, or abroad. It offers a method for sharing files that would other wise have to be handed off physically or broken into chunks and sent through email. It also gives schools the opportunity to centralize their documentation and backup. When combined with backup software one can greatly decrease the likelihood of data loss due to hardware failure. It also offers integration with LDAP and local user authentication and restriction control. All in all the software provides another free and easy to configure alternative to expensive projects.

This is a review by rschapman. Bold by me.

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FreeSBIE wiki

The FreeSBIE Team has started a the FreeSBIE wiki which aims to be an open platform mainly used for the documentation and FAQs for the FreeSBIE project.

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How to create a streaming audio site with FreeBSD

streaming-audio.jpgAre you bored at work and wish you could listen to the hundreds or thousands of mp3′s or ogg’s that you have ripped to your hard drive at home? Maybe you want to create an internet radio station and live out your fantasy of being a DJ.

Whatever your reason, I’m going to show you how to very easily and freely create a kick ass streaming audio site using Linux or *BSD that you can listen to from any computer. I say again, any system – Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever – will be able to listen. Sound cool?

Read Rich Morgan’s howto here

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DesktopBSD 1.6-RC3 Released

DesktopBSD logoDesktopBSD 1.6 RC 3 is now available for download from our mirrors or via BitTorrent. This release candidate is considered a large step towards a final release 1.6 with major changes such as:

  • X.Org release 7.2, improving support for modern graphics hardware
  • NVIDIA graphics driver, providing hardware 3D acceleration for NVIDIA video cards
  • Latest FreeBSD 6-STABLE as base system with High Definition Audio (HDA) support
  • More up-to-date software packages from the DesktopBSD build servers
  • Many small bug fixes and optimizations

Upgrades from 1.0 and previous release candidates are supported. An additional language CD and 64-bit (AMD64) DVD will be released soon.

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PC-BSD 1.4 BETA Released

After months of hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available he 1.4 BETA release. This version includes many exciting new features and software, such as:

  • 3D desktop support via Beryl
  • Adobe Flash (Youtube & Google Video)
  • Many Nvidia, ATI and Intel video cards supported
  • KDE 3.5.7
  • FreeBSD 6.2
  • Xorg 7.2
  • New GUI tools & utilities
  • Optional Components, and much more!

PC-BSD 1.4 BETA can be downloaded via our mirrors or via Torrent on the the download page.

As this is a beta release, please report any and all bugs to the Bugs database or our testing list:

More information:

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FreeBSD 7.0 LiveCD released

[update 13/12/2007: a new version has now been released - check here]

The next major release of FreeBSD, version 7, is one of the most significant so far, with amount of new technologies and improvement largest since introduction of 5.0.

Ivan Voras has now created a FreeBSD 7 LiveCD . This is part of his 2007 Google Summer of Code project, finstall, a graphical FreeBSD installer that’s also a live CD.

The Live CD contains the FreeBSD 7.0 “base” system, a recent kernel, and a basic X11 system with the Xfce 4.2 desktop environment (can be run it as root by starting “startx”). This LiveCD is mostly usable to people that need a “rescue” CD or those which need to experiment with certain aspects of 7.0 like hardware compatibility. It’s not a general-purpose “desktop” LiveCD.

This is all still work-in-progress and Ivan has already reported some problems (panics).

Download

FreeBSD 7.0 LiveCD

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