The all macintosh network… almost
It’s probably no secret that I’ve turned into a huge mac fanatic… The recent acquisition of a mac mini puts the household total to four machines actively in use. It also means that my low-end machine, a Power Mac G4 PCI (Yikes!) is just sitting there, looking all forlorn and wanting to be put back into service.
It occurred to me that the old box could serve quite nicely as a replacement for my aging content/proxy server. Currently I’m running Dan’s Guardian and Squid on top of Ubuntu Linux on an old Compaq PentiumII. While it does work rather well, the hard drive has suffered a couple of soft failures in the last few weeks (fixable, but annoying) so the thought occurred to me that I could swap out the old box for the G4, utilizing the BSD underpinnings of OSX to run the proxy and content software.
As I began to think about it, I imagined that I could also throw in a nice second ethernet card and then use the IPFW firewall software (that is already installed by default) to act as my primary firewall. The addition of an ethernet nic and I could also use the box as a wifi hotspot (complete w/captive portal via nocatauth) and provide a robust wifi connection to the entire house. Of course, being somewhat security minded ::grin:: I am an advocate of using WPA2 to assist in securing the wireless connection.
So I set out by installing OSX Tiger 10.4.11 (the latest version that is supported on the G4 PCI ) along with the requisite hardware. Squid and Dan’s Guardian installed quickly and effortlessly (although I’m still trying to understand the whole ‘OSX init script’ landscape to get the services to start at boot time) and went to configure the wifi nic as a hotspot. In ‘System Preferences’ is a choice labeled ‘Sharing’ that allows you to set up internet sharing and choose the interfaces. You can then set the options for your wifi connections via the ‘AirPort Options…’ button. Lo and behold, clicking on it allows you to set up WEP (a very poor security option as it can be cracked almost effortlessly nowadays) and no choice for either WPA or the more robust WPA2!
This is really a show-stopper for me at the moment. I’ll still continue to plod along and replace the proxy/content server with this G4, but how dissappointing that Apple won’t provide reasonable security for sharing out the AirPort connection, but I guess the ‘Steve’ wants me to shell out even more money for an Airport Extreme (which just isn’t going to happen since I’m saving up for the next gen iPhone!)
