John Luif

After purchasing two consumer grade gigabit switches, the NetGear GS108 and the Linksys SD2008, and having them both fail I really started to think if gigabit was ready for the consumer. I would have to say from my experience with consumer grade gigabit switches that it is definitely not ready for prime time.

The good news is as a consumer you can still have gigabit, you just may pay a little bit more for it. I would recommend purchasing business class switches. The switches I'm using are the Dell PowerConnect 2708 which I'm very impressed with thus far; though it does not take much to impress me at this point, staying turned on is enough:)

In a previous post I talked about how I was dd-wrt to route multiple WAN IPs. Well, ever since that post I have been screwing with it because it has not been working quite right. I finally figured it out with the help of some forums out there. Use the below script in the Firewall section under Administration->Commands to route multiple WAN IP's to internal IPs:

ip addr add [extra wan_ip]/29 dev vlan1

iptables -I FORWARD -d [internal ip] -j ACCEPT

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING 1 -p all -d [extra wan ip] -j DNAT --to [internal ip]

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING 1 -p all -s [internal ip] -j SNAT --to [extra wan ip]

The main piece I was missing was the first line which puts the extra wan ip on the same vlan as the wan ip the router is using.

Hopefully this will save someone from having to scroll through forum posts looking for an answer.

To my surprise MS Remote Desktop for Mac does exist!

So I decided to make the switch, yes I have gone over to the Mac side. Since I do all my work anyway in virtual machines my host OS just needs to be a thin layer that allows me to check email, write blog posts, surf the web, etc. Well, OS X fits the bill and it uses considerably less memory than Vista. My virtual machines running VMWare Fusion seems to run faster as well.

One of the things I love about OS X is stuff just works! Example, needed to add my network printer; OS X already found the printer and I just had to make it my default. If I want to get into the guts of things I just open a bash terminal and I'm on my way.

Many software vendors are now offering versions of their products for Macs that it has not been an issues thus far finding the software I need. I'm also starting to look at the Xcode environment and exploring how to build software for Mac's. A new year a new challenge. Now don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time on the .NET side of things and that is not going to change but every once in a while I need something different.

Live in a Mac, work in Windows!