Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Been Busy...again

Hi,

Yeah, I've been busy. Work-related stuff, really, although Summer is upon us and I also have to deal with the kids and relatives visiting (and visiting relatives). I haven't had much time to slack around with Slackware, although I did purchase a Mac Book 7 days ago.

I'll be attempting to build a dedicated box that firewalls and routes traffic. For some reason, I get a lot of latency with my current setup. I've a Netgear FVS114 FW/VPN SOHO set-top box as my router/switch and a Linksys WRT54GX4 that I use as a WAP. The Linksys is on its own subnet since I wanted to experiment with securing my WAP in the best manner. I love the Netgear's capabilities (it appears more capable than the Linksys in doing what I want to do...I've already ran into issues where I think I was asking the Linksys to do things it wasn't designed to do). I plan to configure a VPN tunnel between the Netgear and a friend's gateway, to build my VPN skills. What I don't like is the fact that the Netgear appears to lag under load:

ron@delly$ ping 10.150.1.1
PING 10.150.1.1 (10.150.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.790 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.147 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.138 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.501 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=1.136 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=1.144 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=1.185 ms
64 bytes from 10.150.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1.153 ms

I'm not seeing any packets being dropped, but look at the times! I don't remember them being like that before, although my niece (or rather my wife's niece) does do some heavy downloading, I think.

Anyways, here's the WAP's ping results:

ronald-sinclairs-computer:~ rsinclair$ ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=2.571 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.246 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=2.392 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.253 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=1.728 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=1.924 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=1.680 ms
c64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=2.368 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=2.792 ms

NASTY! Again, there is no apparent packet loss, but look at the times.

At work, when I'm shelled into home, I can barely work, as I have to wait for keystrokes to register and also will ocassionally lose my SSH connection. I will check my Snort output and logs to make sure I'm not being hammered by someone.