Which OS are You?
This was actually the first version of Linux that I used back in 93/94 at Uni. I blissfully remember downloading 30 or so floppies worth of the latest Slack ware every week in the University computer lab. Then walking home to install it and fighting with XFree86 to support my graphics card.
Construction started yesterday on a new building next to my bedroom window. I have to say I’m not to pleased about that. That means lots of noise in the next year as well as we will be missing our view of the huge garden in the Egyptian embassy.
So I decided to search for info about building sin Panama City and I stumbled across this great site called Skyskrapers.com.
They have an excellent section on Panama City .
Apparently the tallest buildings in Panama are the Twin Miramar Towers that are on Avenida Balboa overlooking the Bay of Panama. They both messure 168m and have 55 floors above ground.
My favorite two skyskrapers in Panama though are Mirage and Platinum Tower which have 48 and 47 floors respectably. They are both in Paitilla an upscale residential area on a point on the Pacific. To me they are both kind of like stretched out versions of the Lloyd’s Building in London. Same general style only 3 times as tall.
I’ve recently been setting up a bunch of firewalls down here using the latest version of OpenBSD
I am so impressed with pf the included firewall. I’ve used it before as well as the earlier version ipf. But this version they have added so many new features it feals like an whole new product.
The most important new feature for me is tables . This is an internal lookup structure that can be used to store absolutely tons of addresses and ranges. These can be externally manipulated and are very fast. Before when you had a firewall rule with multiple ip’s or ranges you had to use sets which where expanded out on parsing. By changing the rules on one firewall to using tables where I used sets before, it reduced the internal amounts of rules from 500+ to less than 30.
One great new use for tables in pf is for spam filters. OpenBSD now comes with an integrated spam tarpit called spamd This can be configured in simple rule in your pf.conf file to catch smtp requests from any of the openrelay/spammer blacklists. Spamd looks and smells just like sendmail, but runs s l o w and fails after 20 minutes with an error message. This is ideal to stop spammers dead in their tracks and uses hardly any resources. I have a cron jub that downloads the latest blacklists daily and automatically updates the tables within pf. Sweet.
To configure it simply enable spamd in your rc.conf file, run spamd-setup once and add the required lines below to your pf.conf file:
table
rdr inet proto tcp from