Dealing with old computers after an upgrade is very a common problem. Sure, there are the obvious solutions like selling them or giving them away, but these approaches carry some problems (e.g. personal warranty, recipient not happy to receive a very outdated unit, red tape, etc.) that make them somewhat impractical.

There is another option: turn them into a firewall/router using pfsense.

Tech-savvy readers might ask what’s the difference between doing this instead of just upgrading your router’s firmware using DD-WRT or the like. Well, for starters, most of the routers sold in the Philippines are nerfed versions of those sold outside the country and don’t support custom firmwares. This simply means that it’s much easier to setup a pfsense server in this country than to setup DD-WRT.

In terms of features, pfsense and DD-WRT have features to distinguish themselves from the other. Obviously, you can’t control wireless signal strength in pfsense, and DD-WRT has some firewall features that are missing in the former. On the other hand, pfsense allows packages to be added to it like squid and nmap. It also has these funky RRD graphs:

The one feature that really caught my eye is support for load balancing. This allows you to consolidate two or more internet connections on your router, whether it’s for simple load balancing (bandwidth usage is spread between the ISPs) or for failover (when one ISP fails, the connections are routed to the other ISPs). With this, you could subscribe to two crappy DSL providers like, say, PLDT and Globe, and still have a relatively higher uptime than you would normally have.

You could buy a dedicated load balancing router, but the cost difference between that (PhP 4,000+) and an extra lan card (PhP 100-PhP 150 in surplus shops) and the thought that your old PC would probably be much more powerful than the puny chip inside that router make pfsense a more logical choice.

The biggest downside to using pfsense instead of dedicated router devices is the power usage, which can be anywhere from 5 to 20 times that of a typical router. Expect a slight increase in your power bill, especially if your “old” PC is one of those power guzzling Pentium 4s or Athlon XPs. You can try to underclock them, but I don’t expect to see much of a difference.

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With all that talk out of the way, let’s move on to the actual installation.

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What you need:

• an old PC – you only need the following: CPU/motherboard, RAM, power supply, hard drive, casing, and at least 2 ethernet sockets. For missing or defective parts, you can get replacement parts from computer surplus shops in malls (or in your neighborhood, if you’re lucky). Heck, if you buy all of this from scratch at a surplus store, you probably won’t spend more than the price of a typical wifi router.
• CD-ROM drive and keyboard from your current PC – for installing pfsense.
• download the LiveCD with Installer and burn it on a CD.
• Note that pfsense requires you to format the entire hard drive so backup files from the hard drive beforehand if you’re feeling nostalgic.
• Extra ethernet cable

Installation is pretty straightforward:

1. Setup the PC. You’ll probably add the extra LAN cards, CD-ROM drive, and keyboard at this point. Don’t forget to change the boot sequence in the BIOS to use the CD-ROM drive first.
2. Boot up the LiveCD and go to Installer when the OS prompts you.
3. Install using defaults (screenshots here). The system will reboot at the end of the installation.
4. When prompted for VLAN setup, answer no.
5. When prompted for LAN and WAN, first use autosense to list down the available interfaces. Then just guess which of the listed interfaces would be for LAN (the one you’ll eventually connect to your router) and WAN (the one you’ll eventually connect to your DSL modem). Don’t worry about guessing them wrong, you could always change them in the console and the web interface.
6. Connect your PC or laptop to the LAN socket of your new pfsense server. Open a browser and go to http://192.168.1.1/. In case you didn’t see the default credentials at the end of the installation, the username is “admin” and the password is “pfsense”.
7. Go through the wizard.
8. After finishing the initial setup, connect your DSL modem to the WAN socket. You should now be able to access the internet at this point.
9. To make your router cooperate with your new pfsense router, you’ll have to convert it to an access point (or a switch, if your router doesn’t have wifi). Normally you’ll just need to disable the DHCP server, change the router address to avoid conflict, and connect one of the LAN ports (not WAN) to the LAN of the pfsense server. Here’s how to do it with DD-WRT.

And that’s it. Assuming you already have all items at hand, this should take only 30 minutes, a far cry from the afternoons I spent installing DD-WRT on a D-Link DIR-300.

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Was Manny Villar really ever poor? – Spoiler: No.

Noynoy Supporters are Proof that The Philippines is a Wowowee Idiocracy – one of the few things I hate about having a home office is that other people in the house watch Wowowee instead of doing less inane things like, say, read shounen manga (which are pretty inane when you don’t read them with tongue firmly in cheek). This blog post sums up why I hate the said show.

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Here’s the SOS団 showing how to get to AME no Jidai’s fair venue:

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Anyway, I wrote this post is just to advertise our 6th fair, the feudal Japan themed AME no Jidai (AME’s era).

It will be held at A. Venue on November 28, 1PM – 10PM. Tickets are PhP 100. More details at the fair site.

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In the meantime, here’s the fail of the week care of our Commission on Elections.

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Celebrity Douchebaggery

Apparently some actor-politicians don’t know about those establishments called banks where people can save money so that they could do whatever they want in case they lose their only “source of income”.

Being a guy who has lived comfortably for 7 months without a stable source of income, I have this to say to those actor-politicians:

Fuck you and all of your political ambitions!

Stupid Quote for the Week

I shouldn’t be talking about the Infinity Ward / Modern Warfare 2 FUBAR anymore, but this quote is just too stupid to pass up:

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

Oh… wow. Thanks IW!

Facebook Games Leading to Scammed Customers

TechCrunch had a series of articles earlier this week exposing lead-gen scams. The issue proved controversial enough that Time picked the story up too.

I personally don’t mind the issue that much since I’m slowly losing interest in Facebook games in general.

Updated Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart

Tom’s Hardware released their updated version of the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart. The chart now marks cards as discrete, mobile, or integrated so you could now compare how your laptop’s or your motherboard’s graphic card compares with other discrete cards.

New “Just Be Friends” Video

A new video for Just Be Friends, the Nico Nico Douga music video that I posted a few months ago, was released last week:

“Just Be Friends BL Another Version” by Zebra feat. Rapbit

Random Pic of the Week

Abrahamic religions in a nutshell. Reposted from Kyameel’s re-plurk.

Random Pic of the Week Runner-up

From a random tagging pic in Facebook:

This is actually a nice starting point for a NaNoWriMo novel… but then again it is the basic plot of Chocolate Cosmos.

Proof that originality is overrated: somebody somewhere has obviously thought of your idea beforehand and has already written something about it.

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GeoCities Shutdown

Last October 26, Yahoo pulled its plug on GeoCities, the free web hosting service that defined the Internet looked like before the turn of the millennium. To mark this event, xkcd paid tribute to the dot-com boom icon by “redesigning” their website.

A mirror of this tribute as well as other tributes are mirrored over at this site.

Princess Robot Bubblegum

GTA IV was fun (except for the people calling you on your phone part). Watching TV in GTA IV was fun especially if the Saturday morning cartoon mocking Republicans was on. Unfortunately, the TV show lineup is really limited, with shows shuffled and looped randomly. Heck, Liberty City doesn’t even have anime on broadcast TV.

Until now.

(The real fun part in the article is the comments section. Seeing weeaboos in denial: priceless.)

App Store WTF

No, I’m not talking about the Apple App Store. I’m talking about plans for making a Google Wave App Store.

Let me just list the reasons why this is a WTF:

• Google Wave Gadgets are written in JavaScript (and HTML/CSS). Anyone can view and copy the source code of gadgets, making selling gadgets impractical.
• Even if you find a way to package Gadgets as binaries, they’re primarily multi-user applications. This means that every person in the wave must own the gadget before using it… a crazy lockdown scheme if you ask me.
• As for the Google Wave Robots, the only way I could think of for selling them is to charge a fee for usage, either a one-time fee or a subscription model. Again, the multi-user scheme makes this seem impractical.

But then again, this is Google. They probably have something already in the works to deal with those problems.

Facebook Whining

Facebook changed its feed view. Again.

And people are whining. Again.

The irony here is that most of the people whining are the ones that made the previous change annoying as it was, namely, the people who keep on posting quiz results.

Sorry to break it to you guys, but Facebook won’t change the feed back to what it was. All of this whining will only make you prone to falling for scams just like the last time.

I, for one, enjoy the Live Feed because it allows me to see if a person I know has entered within 2 degrees of separation from me. Given that my cliques are often obscure, it’s a good way to see if old friends have kept in touch with each other.

Holy Shit, Team Fortress 2 for $2.49!!!

To kick of their Halloween update, they practically gave the game away. Too bad it was only on for 2 hours.

Infinity Ward Shit

To summarize the things Infinity Ward / Activision has done to screw up the “most anticipated game of 2009″:

• They introduce matchmaking to the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. That would’ve been ok if they didn’t remove the option to host dedicated servers altogether.
• Modern Warfare 2 for the PC costs $60 to match it with its console counterparts. It doesn’t make sense, however, since Activision isn’t paying royalties for developing for the PC unlike when developing for XBox 360 or PS3. Australians have it worse at $90 on Steam.
• PS3 advertising is almost nonexistent. There also have been rumors that the hardcore mode has been cut out of the PS3 version.
• The “plot twist” that made MW 1 awesome has its counterpart in MW 2. This time, however, it happens at the start of the game and may be too controversial for a lot of people.

The result?

What should have been at the top of this list is now at the bottom. A lot of people have changed their mindset from “must buy!” to “hmm… let’s wait first for the reviews.”

Just look at the titles above it; with $60, you could buy 2 decent RPGs, a single player FPS, and a multiplayer cooperative FPS.

And Football Manager? WTF?!?

Random Pic of the Week

From Facebook:

According the the comments, this was taken in a UST College of Commerce and Business Administration class.

And yes, they look like horses at a racetrack.

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Japan probably got the best deals out of this launch. Not only do they get a custom theme, an official OS-tan voiced by popular voice actress Nana Mizuki, they also get a special Burger King 7-patty Whopper for only ¥777 (for the first 30 customers, ¥1,450 for the rest).

What do we Filipinos get?

A freaking SM North Edsa Launch Event and a PhP 7,777 pre-order “promo” for the stripped down Windows 7 Home Basic. If it was a Home Premium, that might have made sense, but just a PhP 223 discount for an already crippled version? Sorry, we’ll pass.

Oh, and yeah, Apple has already rolled out their Get a Mac response ads. They were fun back in the Vista days, but after the Snow Leopard screw ups and the stability of Windows 7… meh.

More random stuff from this week below the cut.

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Ice glowing red hot. Who cares if it’s fake or not, it’s still awesome!!!1!1

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If the original writer writes fanfiction on his own work, is it still considered fanfiction? What if it’s slash fiction? The mind boggles. o_O

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How to piss off the PC gaming community: take away dedicated servers in an upcoming AAA game.

Matchmaking might work with smaller multiplayer games like Starcraft II and L4D (though many are saying it isn’t working in the latter), but for a large scale latency dependent game like Modern Combat 2, it’s just plain stupid.

The online petition already has over 141k signatures, far higher than your run of the mill online petition. In contrast, a petition against a guy who disrespected the funeral of a widely respected president got only 72k signatures. Let’s see how Infinity Ward deals with this.

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Got the top spot over at NullPointer.ph, 80 reputation ahead of former co-worker Jon. (As if I care about reps… the low badge count should have given that away. )

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