Synergy is a great program to control 2 computers with one mouse and keyboard. But it doesn’t appear to work with Windows 7. Is there any options? Well yes!

I found another program that works well with Windows 7. It’s called Input Director and works quite well – in fact I think better than Synergy does.

It certainly is much easier to configure, where you define a master and slave (in fact you can have many slaves), and can selesct what subnets (or individual hosts) you can accept connections from (on the slave of course).

I have spent the last 10-15 years working in a predominantly Cisco environment. I think their products are great, but are not cheap. I think it comes down to the old line ‘you get what you pay for’, and Cisco certainly delivers.

That’s at work….. At home I look at alternatives. So when I was looking for open source software/products I found a great open source networking product – Vyatta.

Vyatta is software that runs under a linux base and delivers routing, firewall and VPN functions to the product you have it installed on.

You can get the Vyatta software free (community Edition), but there are paid subscriptions which are for business use. Vyatta also sell networking appliances that have the software on them ready to configure and deploy on your network.

After having a bit of a play with Vyatta myself with the downloadable VMWare image, I must say it doesn’t work too bad. If you have played with a Cisco router, then you’ll find this very easy to configure.

The command set is very similar to Cisco. Viewing the config is a different story, but not too hard to understand if you just take the time to read it.

My recommendation is to try it out yourself, or at least visit the website and read the whitepapers. I’m sure you will find it a very interesting product.

I thought I’d do a little research on the Linksys WRT54G wireless router, of which I own two of. I find them to be a very stable and reliable unit.

The WRT54G, WRT54GS, WRT54GL, and WRTSL54GS are popular Wi-Fi router products from Linksys. The devices are capable of sharing Internet connections among several computers via Ethernet and wireless (802.11b/g) data links.

The WRT54G was first released in 2003. The WRT54GS is nearly identical except for additional RAM and SpeedBooster software.

Linksys released the WRT54GL in 2005 to support third-party firmware based on Linux, after the original WRT54G line was switched from Linux to VxWorks, starting with version 5. The WRTSL54GS is similar to the WRT54GS, while adding additional firmware features and a USB 2.0 port (referred to as StorageLink) which can be used for a USB hard disk or flash drive.

Continue Reading »
WRT54G history lesson

My last post I gave a quick overview of my hardware (PC, camera and capture card) that I was using on my surveillance system. This post I will explain what OS and software I use.

My operating system of choice for this ‘project’ was SUSE. The initial reason was that learning Linux is (in my opinion) a bit easier because if I got stuck with the command line, I could always fall back (ie cheat) with the GUI which I found quite comfortable to use. Other Linux distros I had difficulty using. I am currently using SUSE 10.2 – a vast improvement over 9.3 which I previously used on another one of my boxes at home.

Next was the software. As I said in my previous post, I had troubles getting windows drivers to work, and when that was sorted out, I could not find any suitable software (for my needs anyway). The PICO2000 software looks like what I was after, but as I wanted to use/learn Linux, I found a great product called Zoneminder.

First looks at Zoneminder indicated that that it was a popular (and free) piece of software, great support and very customizable for your own needs. What the hell – I’ll give it a go.

I first installed Zoneminder a couple of years back all via the CLI – not a problem if you are conversant with the file structure of Linux, TAR etc. But it was a steep learning curve for me. I worked it all out in the end, but an easier way (if you’re using SUSE) is to install the RPM using YaST. Here is the link for the SUSE RPMs. The beauty of doing it via YaST is that it can resolve your dependancies for you, so all the appropriate packages can be installed in one hit.

Anyway, I installed it without too many hassles. Next post I will show you some of the features and my setup.

How many times have you typed in the wrong command on a Cisco router, and then have to wait while the DNS lookup times out because the route is trying to resolve that ‘domain’?

Yeah me too. Easy to fix …

Simply enter global configuration mode and type

router(config)# no ip domain-lookup

And the result is no more waiting for the DNS searches to time out.