The OpenBSD router machines I installed at my place and my parents’ have been failing and I’ve been doing band-aid fixes of little things as they break, but it’s annoying. My new idea is to use hardware routers, but to install one or more “slug” NSLU2 devices, unslung, inside each network to provide DNS and DHCP (more than one should easily give redundancy). At $50-60 on eBay and potentially running some variant of Linux from a small USB flash drive, it should be reasonable to set up two identically-configured “slugs” so that if one goes bad, the other can handle the load until the bad one can be replaced. My first NSLU2 for testing should arrive in the middle of this coming week. Details on the previous setup and history after the cut.
Since the point where both my parents and I had DSL, I’ve been fiddling with ideas of how to make it easier to share files across our two networks, easier for me to debug issues on their computers, and, well, just more technologically cool. About a year and a half ago, I replaced the D-Link routers at both sites with a matched pair of used Dell business machines I’d bought on eBay, outfitted with OpenBSD (by far the best OS for trying to run a secure gateway). This seemed to fit the bill, as it enabled me to more easily connect to my home network from elsewhere without opening up any of my internal machines directly to the outside world, it allowed me to similarly access my parents’ network without exposing any of their internal machines, and (at the peak of its working-ness) we had an encrypted VPN unifying the two sites so I could connect to shared drives on their machines and print to their color laser printer as if all those devices were on my own network.
But somewhere along the way, things started to go south. A few months ago, the gateway router Dell box on my end died–just wouldn’t power up anymore. I swapped in an old D-Link hardware router to keep my internet access up and I’ve been working on an Alix unit to replace it, but getting OpenBSD properly tweaked to run off a compact flash card took some time and I still haven’t quite gotten that install happy with PPPoE DSL connections, so it’s still not in place.
Now, making things worse, the machine at my parents’ place isn’t working quite right. After an extended power failure that wore through the UPS, the machine appears to start up (even sounds right when I stood there and watched it “boot”), but it never shows up on the network, much less makes the DSL connection and joins the network to the DSL. This led to a similar swap-in of a spare hardware router unit at their place. Unfortunately, things got messier for them.
These OpenBSD machines I’d been using as routers on both ends had also been running DHCP and DNS for the internal networks and while my internal network had a second OpenBSD box that was able to step in and take over the DNS (it was already serving as a secondary DNS server) and the DHCP (it had been doing DHCP before I got the other machines), my parents’ network had no such machine. Suddenly, lots of things stopped working correctly. Printing over the network didn’t work because the IP printing port in Windows was trying to use the (former) FQDN of the printer, or maybe even its old IP address. This is what got me looking at the slug.
