URL Filtering and Blocking Crap with Vyatta

January 30, 2011

This week, I had a client who was having issues with his router. With years of use, he began to experience a degradation in its performance. Although the office is small with 6 computers, his only requirements were a router that can block roughly 30 domains, and manage to perform well.

I arrived at his office, and found he purchased a shiny new Cisco Linksys WRT320N router for $100 from Futureshop. It looks sleek and sexy. I disconnected his D-Link DIR-615, and proceeded to setup the new one. After getting through the setup, enabling the wireless, and specifying which systems would obtain which IP address, I found that the router can only block 4 domains.

Setting up an IP Tables Firewall in Linux

July 22, 2010

Over the past couple years, I found myself spending more time with Linux servers. I generally work with Ubuntu servers but more recently began swimming in the yum’s and rpm’s of CentOS. Although each server requires specific configurations and fine tuning, my general starting point after creating a user account was setting up a firewall.

There are various software firewalls available for each distribution. The one I’ve used most is IP Tables, and setting up is relatively straight forward.

Start by viewing your current configuration (if available)

sudo iptables -L

This command will allow you to view the current set of rules that exist. To start on a clean slate, I would recommend saving all your rules to a file. Let’s start by flushing the existing rules.

sudo iptables -F

Vyatta on the cloud (and running)

October 22, 2009

I’ve been dealing with technical issues over the past while getting my network address translations to work on the wonderful, virtual, kicking butt in the cloud, Vyatta router. Finally, it looks like this chapter is coming to a close.

Moving forward, as a choice for routing platform, Vyatta stands up to the test and lives up to its name. And with some tweaking, you’re able to build a high availability solution in the cloud at literally no cost (except for server fees). Architecture shot below;