08/24/2003 Archived Entry: "Where's keeper?"

I've been absent from the CoG forums for the past few days because I'm having computer problems at home. After more than a decade of miraculously avoiding any lightning damage to my computer stuff, on Thursday an electrical storm blew out my Linksys router's WAN port, rendering it useless as a NAT gateway. I took the opportunity to do something that I'd been wanting to do for a long time--build a Linux firewall box.

I settled on Astaro Linux Security as my Linux firewall package of choice and installed it on my spare computer with two NICs. Setup and configuration went great--it's a very full-featured package, and free for home users. Unfortunately, after I had everything set up and ready to go, I ran into a problem--my downstream bandwidth is basicially ZERO. My internet connectivity is behaving as if I've got an MTU problem, in that pages will start to load and usually display some text, but then just sit there without loading any images and eventually time out. This affects FTP sites, as well--I can pull directory listings, but attempting to download a file yields downstream file transfer speeds of like 0.25KB/sec or worse.

I've jiggled around with MaxMTU settings with no joy so far, and I'm going to keep researching the problem. Pages that have basically no images--like my blog entry form and, fortunately, Astaro's bulletin board pages, where I've asked for help--work fine, but just about everything else times out.

Bleah. Stupid computers.

[Previous entry: "The sound of freedom"] [Return to archive...] [Next entry: "Fixed!"]