Over the weekend I plan on installing NFS on the server in our Dorm room. My friend expressed a desire to mount the raid on his computer for whatever reason. I personally don't have a problem with using ssh/sftp/scp, but setting up an NFS server should be fun, anyhow.

I'll be following the steps as listed on the ArchWiki since the wiki has given me the best results when learning to set up anything Arch related. I'll probably end up setting the server up to only allow nfs mounting from the 192.168.2.*/24 range since this is the hard wired connection inside of our room, rather than the wireless connection we have set up.

Which reminds me: I need to find out how to set up samba so that it sees shares on multiple networks. As of right now, it's only seeing shares on eth0. Similarly, on my laptop (which I connect to our internal LAN) can only see the samba server in our room. Ah well... all in due time, I suppose.

PS., I'm still addicted to Quarantine 2019. I decided to start up the medical profession line so that I can both self-heal and heal other citizens. As of right now, the humans are most definitely winning. I sense a strong zombie uprising in the future, though.

Finally someone made a nice looking theme out of David Lanham's work. I'd been using this guy's wallpaper for a good year until I finally figured out who had done them. David Lanham is a talented artist who creates nonsensical cartoon-ish characters as well as some nice interface design themes. Check out some of the art on his website. Some really funky stuff.

I decided to give gnome-look a cruise today and found that someone by the name of pokemonjojo2 had taken his work and created an icon theme. Since I've gone mad with doing Arch packages for icon themes that pique my interest, this had to be my next project. Check out the package here. You can find Pokemon JOJO's blog here. A very... interesting choice of username.

I'm going to try to make a habit out of adding packages to the AUR. They're very simple PKGBUILDs, but they are of themes that I like or found interesting. Why shouldn't everyone have easy access to a nice looking theme?

Also, I want to be able to contribute! This is one of the only ways I can see fit to do so.

Ultimate Gnome is a nice looking icon theme created by Newmooon, a.k.a. Marco Tessarotto. He describes his theme: "I was tired of half-good themes with some icon from the Mac OS, other from some Crystal theme. So I decided to create my own theme based on what I like. The Ultimate Gnome it's a distro indipendent [sic] theme tested on Gnome 2.20.1 . It does not include any copyright violating icon cause every icon has been drawn from the author himself with Inkscape." Kudos, Marco!

The latest installment of aur-general informed me that Midori is in the testing repo. I installed it and will give it a few run-throughs to see how it functions.

I haven't been keeping my eye on the Midori project as closely as I had been in the past. To tell the truth, I haven't really seen a reason to. Perhaps I'll find something I really like about it in my adventures.

A few things I DID notice, though. Midori did not want to load gmail or google reader, two must have services. Looks like this baby's going to the backburner for a bit longer.

Two very exciting pieces of news today. Well, tonight.

My friend, and future roommate, and I have successfully set up our file server for the up coming semester. We're using his old computer and two 750GB drives in a software Raid (RAID1). Everything works very nicely. It was extremely easy to set up under Arch Linux. All hail the mighty Arch! Here's how I did it:

1.) Format the two drives. Make sure they have the filesystem "Linux raid autodetect"

2.) Create the array. This will create a new node in /dev/ named 'md0'. This will be the mountable drive.
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sd* /dev/sd*

3.) Then we simply add this array to the mdadm.conf file so that it may be assembled on boot.
# mdadm -D --scan >>/etc/mdadm.conf

4.) Don't forget to add your raid to fstab so that it can be mounted on boot!

Freakin' DONE. Now onto the second bit of news:

I managed to get my laptop onto the 'net through my desktop PC. This was also very very easy to do on two Arch machines. It takes a tad bit longer, but only in the number of steps to complete. No thinking really required. Here's how I did it:


1.) Set up the above scenario. Wait to configure the laptop part; we'll do this last.

2.) "Computer" should have iptables installed. If it doesn't, install it.

3.) # iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
- The above will set a rule for device eth0 to Masquerade any packet leaving as its own address. I'm really not sure about the nitty gritty of this, but just stay with me.

4.) # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
-This tells the running kernel that you DO want to forward packets.

4.5) Edit /etc/sysctl.conf so that net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
-This will be set on every boot

5.) # /etc/rc.d/iptables save; /etc/rc.d/iptables start
-Saves the running configuration and starts iptables

...On to the laptop...

6.) # ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.100; route add default gw 192.168.2.1
-Sets the ip address and default gateway for the ethernet device on the laptop.

7.) Check to see if you can ping:
1. 192.168.2.1
2. www.google.com

...Back to Computer...

8.) # iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
-Sets to allow any existing connections and anything "Related" such as FTP servers connecting back to you (?)

9.) # iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! eth0 -j ACCEPT
-Allows any new connections coming from anywhere EXCEPT eth0

10.) # iptables -P INPUT DROP
-Drops everything else.

For any additional info, go to where I found all of this info:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Masquerading-Simple-HOWTO/

Thanks to a post made by Toor from Phorolinux, I've got a new favorite xcursor theme! Gruppled is an xcursor theme made by gruppler, or Craig Laparo. The white version of this theme goes very nicely with my latest theme setup (see the screenshot section to the right).

I decided to make this into an AUR package for the good of the community. Enjoy, archers!