Entry 54 - True Hinkyboxes, Part One

True Hinkyboxes, Part One

True Hinkyboxes

When it comes to hobbies, I wander in and out of them with passion; I always seem to have a project here, or some unfinished paint job there. I often catch myself thinking of projects so outlandish that they will always remain idle considerations, or of things I know I should not start because I can see far ahead of time that they will never come to fruition. My mind, therefore, is quite like an enormous warehouse for ideas that run the gamut from the virtually impossible to the criminally stupid. Sort of like ol' Monty Burns and his beloved Spruce Moose.¹

I am sure there are millions of tinkerers like me in the world, and there's no question which side of the family I got this from both. My mother is an absolute genius when it comes to aesthetics, and my dad, well he has not met the 8-penny nail he could not impress into glorious structural servitude. My thing, I guess, is electronics. I have been an electro-buff ever since my great uncle Pete, when I was a mere pup, gave me a wad of foil, an old doorbell and a lantern battery to play with. He was a hero of mine; A self-taught electrical engineer who worked a lifetime with Consolidated Edison in southern New Jersey, and could fix anything that pushed electrons as if he had been working on the team that built it. In short, I get it honestly. Problem is I am an infernal un-finisher.

Well, all this posturing notwithstanding, here are a couple of things I managed to bring to life, and this being my site, I wanted to do a little show and tell, lest you think I am all talk about reviving crappy computers and squeezing the last handful of usefulness out of things bound for the landfill. Yes, I would be remiss if I did not reiterate that all of this stuff is second hand, most of which I received soon after it “fell off the truck", and though he will remain nameless, I am forever in the debt of the person who has been my major supplier, and consequently, a de facto champion of the hinkybox.

Project No-Light

One of my first projects with my new-found supply of computers was to be a customized file server, running an operating system called ClarkConnect. It was small, relatively fast, and did a lot of nice things like DNS proxy, SMB management and limited Network Address Translation. I used this particular computer, a small form factor Compaq Presario, for about 2 months, and not once did I ever have an issue. Then, in a fit of creative stupidity, decided to customize it, rather like someone would a 1967 Chevy. Good thinking, right? I had grandiose ideas of making a custom faceplate, with individual LED's (blue, of course. Green and red are so 1990) to indicate which of the 4 drives was active (yes, I stuffed four drives into this thing, which was only meant to house two). I hatched a plan to use a small program that runs under Linux called ifled; this program blinks the keyboard lock lights to indicate network activity: Tx, Rx, and link status. I was diligently (I thought) soldering a resistor on one of the components I'd added, confident that my experience would not lead me astray. Well, long story short, I fried it. After all the soldering was done and I got up the nerve to turn it on, the small chip that controlled the onboard network card went Pfisszz, and before I could reach over towards the power button, the BIOS itself was smoking. I sort of wish I had the motherboard so I could take some macro shots of the damage; it was pretty amazing. Alas, I was far too disgusted to have it sitting around for very long after it expired–some things you just need to throw away. As for the notion of a file server, well, after some re-jiggering of my network model, it ended up being a plain vanilla (since painted metallic grey and looking quite smashing) full-sized desktop machine (PII 400) that runs Fedora Core 2. It is the keeper of my 150 plus gibibytes² of crap, and I am happy to report that the only thing it has on its faceplate is an aftermarket on/off style power switch (I hate ACPI power. It reminds me of the modern human tendency towards prevarication).

Fettucine al Network

I like networks; All kinds. Ethernet has always sort of appealed . . . nay, beckoned to me, and if a computer is running in my apartment, there is a 99.999%³ chance that it trails a Cat5e cable from it's rear-end. Yes, this can get hectic—even when you are talking about 5-7 computers. They all feed into a switch, you see, and from there, tangles are almost a given. Oh, but not for long, as I set my mind to working it out. I began building this frame with some scraps of wood I had from a previous and as-yet unfinished cabinetry project. I thought it was rather clever, seeing as how the cable modem is the most god-awful rounded “ergo” shape I had ever seen and getting it to lie flat and square was a job for the chisel and the ol' eyeball. I hit upon the idea of using recessed hinges to allow the top to flip up, and voila, after about an hour at the table and miter saws and a can of flat black spray-paint I had my nifty little network rack. Flat black, and quite cool looking in the dark.

Smoothwall Inside

Every network needs protection; the day I got my broadband connection I was so incredibly excited that I set up a direct link to the internet, shunning everything I knew about Microsoft's untenable security predicament, thinking “Yes, well. . . the 2 hours I will be exposed could not possibly be harmful, right?  Turns out, I was but a nave.

I was port scanned 4 times in that period, and some malicious Chinese fellow came very close to turning my beloved XP desktop into a spam zombie. So, what to do? I set about completing a project I had thought about for awhile. When I was stuck with dialup, nothing seemed important enough to warrant a standalone firewall appliance, but now that I had broadband, I intended go all out. I knew I wanted Smoothwall as the firewall's operating system, because it is simply the coolest and most powerful open source firewall out there. I scribbled some stuff on paper, and did quite a lot of online research for this project. The hardware requirements being almost ridiculously low, I dug deep in my closet and unearthed an old Cyrix 6x86 computer out of mothballs.

I knew that the motherboard on this particular machine was square, the processor was not particularly prone to overheating, and that with a little coaxing the power supply would fit within my envisioned dimensions. I also wanted to do something unique—something uncommon. I thought of clear acrylic, but I soon remembered my foray into that material in school, and how easy it was to screw it up, especially when someone else wasn't paying for it. Metal was an option, but it seemed too common. I settled on wood, I guess because I have a death wish of sorts—but then again, I rode my bicycle to school every day for 16 years without a helmet, so I liked my chances.

I put some serious thought into this project—I gingerly reworked the casing for the power supply to provide upper clearance for the lid, fabricated a one-off motherboard bracket, and milled the wood framing to provide the best airflow possible—tested with a stick of sandalwood incense, of course. I spelunked around the local flea markets to find 3 suitable, low-profile network cards to make up the business end, and when all was said and done, i installed Smoothwall. I now have a firewall that provides me security rivaling many medium sized companies–with a whole host of features I haven't even considered implementing.

The beauty of this machine is the zoning it applies: the green interface, or the trusted interior network, the red interface, the one the big bad meanies can see, and the orange—the beloved Demilitarized Zone—a place to put servers that need access to the world, but might be compromised by an attacker. I am happy to be ablle to say that every single packet you received when loading this website traveled through that little wooden box, which I have subsequently sanded and painted a deep metallic blue—a treatment befitting the info-hotrod that it is. I did desire to post pictures of the finished product, but that would require the downing of my network, and that is just bad form. ;) ◊