[KLUG Members] charter pipeline

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>Hey all.  I just signed up for charter pipeline service in
>>Holland, MI.  Is anybody else using this in that area?
>I have it here in Kzoo;  several friends of mine in Holland all
>have it.
>>I was just told by a "technical" person (who couldn't even give
>>me the IP addresses of their DNS servers) that I would have to
>>set up a proxy server for all my web stuff.
>You'll get DNS info through DHCP.

DHCP Rules!

>Your web proxy is forced upon you, you don't have a choice about it.
>All port-80 requests you make go through their proxy.  Which freaked
>me out at first, but for the record it hasn't caused me any problems
>in the last six months, even while I was debugging HTTP caching
>issues on a remote server.

Nothing to stop someone from SSH port forwarding their web traffic past the
proxy assuming they have an account on an SSH enabled host somewhere else.  I
did this for someone over a weekend when the "local" proxy appeared to be down,
required a little diddling but it worked fine.

My concern with this type of arrangement is privacy.  You'd better trust the
admins of that proxy,  it is the perfect way to sponge up customer information.

>Just curious, would anyone with always-on broadband be interested in
>a KLUG talk on configuring OpenBSD to be your firewall?  I've done
>it once so I'm officially an expert (grin).  It's not really a Linux

We've had Open BSD and BeOS presentations in the past,  it would seem fine by
me.  

>subject except that I imagine many people want to set up more than
>one Linux server on home networks and OpenBSD is the most secure
>solution around...

Always thought the "OpenBSD is the most secure" statement to smack of a little
religious fervor.  But maybe a little jihad every now and then is a good thing?

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505