The Linksys SRW2048 features support for "Jumbo Frames". Don't try it.

Hours of lost productivity across the entire office because of this one. It's relatively new hardware, so Linksys (Cisco) doesn't have the kinks worked out yet. They've been notified of the problem.

Through a series of coincidi, I was introduced to IPcop. It's a very well done, dead simple, linux distribution customized to be a firewall.

Setup is about as easy as any standard Linux install. Tell it which ethernet cards are which, the particulars of your network addressing, and you're done.

You'll probably never have to deal with Linux, or the command line. Management of the box is done through a web browser. Forwarding ports is dead easy. It supports multiple external addresses, so we can use it to handle traffic from both internet connections. The update process is painless as well.

I was listening to Doc on a recent podcast, and he mentioned this site, and the need to figure out just what to do with it. Podcasting would be interesting for one use.

I'm writing this to suggest another use as well. I belong to APCU, the Chicago based computer club. We lead our meetings with something we call "Random Access", which is a group discussion where we try to help each other out with the technical issues which we can't figure out on our own.

Even in the age of Google, Technorati, etc... there is still a need for this form of interaction. Perhaps we could do something like that here, we'd need to focus on one subject at a time to maintain the flow.

In keeping with my theme of the day...

DNS is a useful abstraction of IP address, because servers and services shouldn't be tied to a specific network location.

Web 2.0 is interesting, the idea of having services available across the net... cute, but what I really want is App 2.0. In App 2.0, we still do things in a document centric manner, or perhaps a task-centric manner. The main improvements are more along the lines of user interaction.
A good "app 2.0" application does a few things differently:

I wrote yet another rant on the train in this morning. Then a thought occured to me after publishing it on blogger... why can't we undo "close"?

Who does one contact for a Web 2.0 app gone bad?

Marcus Ranum brings a strong analytical frame of mind in his brilliant analysis The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. You need to read it!

Hmmm... turns out I have a blog in the IT garage. Maybe I can get the conversation going some more about Capabilities and how to get them out of the lab, and onto our machines.

--Mike--