Well the UK has been hit by severe rainfalls again, resulting in massive flooding and a few unfortunate accidents
my cosy little home normally manages to escape the raging torrents of flood water. this time i get taken out by an indirect event. Between 19:25 and 20:30 last night most of Abbeymead in gloucester has no power. My UPS stayed up for 35 mins and then gave up, my friends UPS , (where my main internet connection comes in) lasted 45 minutes and then shut everything down !
so along come the power and everything starts to boot back up, when the firewall goes, kernal panic follwed by bad sector and then just to finish it off disk I/O error, and never worked again.
Out of all the things on my rather large home network to fail, it would the box with no regular backups or hot spare
Some mild panic ensued as all my SMTP emails and a few??business associates??fallback SMTP goes via this firewall !!!!!!!!!!!!
The firewall was, note the past tense, running smoothwall corp 3, with smoothhost , rule and guardian modules
corp 3 is over 3 years old, do i still have the media, do i have the licence key, do we have a spare HDD.
Fortunatly my slight over zealous, dont delete anything nature plumped up the software images, and the licence key
My friend the fitted a new hard disk, and installed the basic firewall software and connected it to our green network,
Then comes the fun part, re-config the beast, so working between trying to get the kids ready for school this morning, i managed to re-key all of the PAT and NAT forwarding rules , phew,
??NOTE to self for future reference, ??GHOST the disk , just in case