By default, Squid sends HTTP headers on every request that can give away information about your internal network. Here’s an example of these headers:

HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxyserver.local (squid/3.1.16)
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR:192.168.0.123

That’s three pieces of information you may not want to give away: The host name of your proxy server, the version of Squid it’s running, and the IP address of the system that’s making the request via the proxy.

Fortunately, it’s simple (and does not apparently violate any standards) to make these headers more anonymous – just use these configuration directives in your squid.conf:

# Be more anonymous
forwarded_for off
visible_hostname proxy.local
httpd_suppress_version_string on

That will change the headers to look more like this:

HTTP_VIA:1.1 proxy.local (squid)
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR:unknown

If you have a switch, access point or other piece of network hardware that supports 802.1q VLAN tagging, and you’d like to your FreeBSD system to recognize them, it’s a pretty straight-forward configuration.  I’ll use examples from my network to illustrate.  My goal in this case, which I may write about in a separate post, was to create two segmented wifi networks – one for my main network and one for guests to connect to.  I wanted the guest network to have access to the internet, but not to any of my other systems on the network.

Read the rest of Configure VLANs on FreeBSD (341 words)

I previously discussed configuring JungleDisk on FreeBSD.  It’s not quite the easiest to install since FreeBSD isn’t officially supported.  To take that a step further, I’m now going to show what I do to back up my FreeBSD box at home.

Update, November 2009: I am no longer using JungleDisk to back up my FreeBSD box.  Jungledisk recently released version 3.0 of their software which does not include a command-line Linux version in the standard desktop edition.  I was advised to stick with the old version if I want to continue backing up.  Instead, I chose to change over to Duplicity.  I will write a post on Duplicity in the near future.

There are a couple of steps to this process.  First, we must perform the backup itself.  I’m using dump(8) for this purpose – this program is built right into FreeBSD – it’s purpose in the original UNIX was to dump a file system to a tape drive, but we’re going to use it to dump the filesystem to a file.  The second step is to have JungleDisk back the files up to S3.

Standard disclaimer:  This is not at all supported by JungleDisk and if you choose to try this, you’re doing so at your own risk.  This works fine for me, but your mileage may vary.  I am not in any way responsible for any costs this may incur to you, or any damage this may cause.

Read the rest of FreeBSD Backup Using JungleDisk and Dump (1,785 words)

There are lots of articles with tips for parents on how to keep their kids safe online.  But what about those of us who are the resident computer geeks in the family – how do we keep our parents and other family members safe from getting viruses and falling prey to phishing attacks?

We’ve all been through this – a member of our family somehow manages to get a virus or fill their computer with adware, and then we have to fix it.  Of course, nobody did anything wrong or visited any bad sites – it just “happened.”  We spend hours trying to fix it, and when we finally do, we realize that we want those hours of our life back.  Or worse yet – it’s so bad that we can’t fix it, and need to reinstall everything for them.

I’m not implying that our parents are in any way unintelligent; I think the problem is that they don’t take these threats seriously enough.

So how do you – the geek in the family – prevent this from happening?  One answer that you’ll hear from the geek community is “install Linux.”  If you can get away with that without the guilt trip, go for it, but here are some tips for Windows users – read on.

Read the rest of Online Safety – For Your Parents? (469 words)