OpenSource

There are a number of OpenSource projects that I would consider myself active in. The following is a quick list of them. I plan on redoing this page sometime soon but by that time, you won’t be reading this. :)

pfSense - Open Source Firewall Distribution

This is probably my most active one as well as my favorite. If it were to have a SPAM blocker in there somewhere it would be a 360 degree product but it does pretty well operating at 350 degrees for me :) I try to spend some time everyday responding to mailing list items if I feel I can answer them correctly.

OpenVPN - Open Source SSL Based VPN

Though this package is included in pfSense it’s a great product for just about any VPN solution you can think of. There is a great GUI based OpenVPN client available here that I use on XP, Vista and Server 2003 without any issues. The OS X client can be found here. And the Linux one can be found here. I’ve made a site to site VPN work in very little time with this product and only a little knowledge of the product.

SNORT - Open Source IDS

Snort is considered the de facto standard for IDS / IPS solutions in the open source and commercial worlds. It is 100% cross platform, is easy to install and maintain and has a very active rules generation and support community. I’ve only been doing IDS solutions for 3 years and have not done one except for my home for over 2 years. I guess you could say my work with Snort is almost dormant but I still love the product.

Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings

A friend at work gave me a 7.04 disk and I haven’t looked back. Once a proud supporter of Suse, I now tout Ubuntu over all else. I like the Debian package manager better than Yast, though Yast does so much more that just packages. I feel that the secure by default feel of Ubuntu server is superior to most of the other free open source distros on the market. The desktop version is quite easy to switch to from a Windows environment. I have been forced in using Windows for lots of different things lately but will be jumping on the bandwagon again here very soon. I also really like the logo. :)

In the future

I have not had a home phone for over a year now and would like to finally get one again. With the advancements in home VoIP technology (Trixbox and AsteriskNow) to name a few, I think I’ll choose one of those to be my Asterisk server and once again have a home phone. I have setup and account with Teliax on a pay as you go plan which seems to fit the bill quite nicely. I should have this one up and running here in the next few weeks. Done, check out my blog entry here.

FreeBSD and other BSD distros. pfSense is such a cool product, I want to see what else the BSD giant can do. I really don’t have much more on that. I have used FreeNAS in the past as well as m0n0wall but I would like to get into the FreeBSD and DesktopBSD worlds.

DD-WRT - I use it currently but am not very active with it. I would like to take this and make a managed service around it. Much like Sputnik but more for the managed IT services industry.

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