Computer

i have owned an acer travelmate 2420 for about 5-6 years or so and i have noticed, especially more recently, that my cpu temperatures were pretty high. the cpu would idle around 60-65°C. a couple years ago, i started taking the laptop apart to see if there was access to the processor to reapply the thermal paste. turned out that it wasn’t so easy to get to so i simply gave up since i couldn’t find a service manual for it anywhere online. since the temps seemed to keep getting worse, i decided to try to look again. ...

as many people are aware, many ISPs block traffic on port 25 in order to attempt to prevent spammers from using bot infected hosts on their networks. this can be a problem for people who want to run a mail server from their home connection. yes, i realize that running an email server violates the TOS of most providers but that is a discussion for another day. i personally use my email server as a learning experience but i also use it for my primary personal email. ...

continued from part 1 yesterday i received my soekris engineering net4801-60 in the mail. the unit seems to be in good condition and even came with a compactflash card and vpn1411 card which i won’t end up using. i will most likely end up selling the vpn card as i don’t use my smoothwall to create a vpn and the smoothwall os does not have support built into the kernel for a vpn card such as this anyway. ...

even though all of my parts have not arrived for my new smoothwall project, i can begin to do some initial setup. first of all, here are all of the items of which i needed to find for the project: soekris engineering net4801-60 soekris engineering 2.5" hdd mounting kit soekris engineering power supply 2.5" ide hard drive 10 foot serial null modem cable since i already have the hard drive, i can do some of the prep work by installing smoothwall. i am using an old laptop to install the os to the hard drive. luckily linux is much less picky than windows about changing hardware after installing. i downloaded and burnt a copy of the latest smoothwall 3.0 sp1. installing smoothwall is about as straight forward as things come. just follow the steps on the screen until you get to the “Network configuration menu”. since we currently do not have the correct network cards in the computer, this part is going to be overwritten later. ...

i’ve decided to look more into power efficiency of my computers at home. while my power bill isn’t horrible, it could most definitely be lower. there are only a few computers that i leave running 24/7. one of them is my smoothwall. while i built that computer with power efficiency in mind, i didn’t take things to the extreme that i could have. now i want to build a solution that is closer in power consumption to your typical home router appliance. after doing some research, i found a solution that would not only be power efficient but also cost effective. the solution is the soekris engineering net4801. ...