This is a sample format for a dated entry. Please substitute the actual date for “Month Day, Year”, and duplicate the level 4 heading to make additional entries.

As an aid, feel free to use the following questions to help you generate content for your entries:

• What action or concept of significance, as related to the course, did you experience on this date?
• Why was this significant?
• What concepts are you dealing with that may not make perfect sense?
• What challenges are you facing with respect to the course?

Ever used an SSH client on your mobile devices, only to have your connection cut out, and then your session goes haywire? It's frustrating and gets old really quick, and there's not much you can do to fix the problem with SSH. This, along with several other “flaws”, led to the creation of mosh, a remote shell system designed for the mobile world. Developers chose to make a new protocol at the terminal level called State Synchronization Protocol, build on top of UDP datagrams. This allowed them to have better control over how the data is handled, avoiding the complications TCP sometimes adds. Another set of issues that the shell fixes is “evil” Unicode sequences, where some UTF-8 patterns are known to either turn post-command output into hieroglyphs, or even lock up the terminal (the only way to reset the terminal is close it and open it back up). Response times are also improved. Read more here: https://mosh.mit.edu/

This week I decided to do some work on my aging home network, which relied on a Cisco/Linksys E1000 wireless router for routing all packets. It did a good job, except the fact it died on a weekly basis. And as it's known in IT - downtime is a bad, bad thing. I had to do something about it, and not having the money for enterprise hardware makes it fairly troublesome. For a while I had heard of PFSense, a FreeBSD-based router operating system with support for SSH, serial, and web controls. It has an insane amount of features in comparison to dd-wrt, the software that runs on the E1000 and WRT54G that help(ed) power my network. The only prerequisite in order to run PFSense on the Dell Optiplex GX280 I used was add a second ethernet port. Installing the OS was easy, and didn't take long at all. It consisted of:

• Setting up passwords
• Associating the ethernet ports with the WAN and LAN interfaces
• Setting up a NAT subnet
• ???
• PROFIT!

All in all, PFSense has been really stable. It runs very light, even with OpenVPN and other add-ons installed. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a cost-effective solution to enterprise products.

Most people are confused when you pose the term “IRC”, the acronym for Internet Relay Chat. However, those same people will know the term “chat room” - that term refers to an IRC channel. But why should you use it?

• It's tried and true.
• It's free.
• You can start your own server should you want one.
• Bots and helpers for it exist everywhere.
• Twitch.tv is a notable user.
• It's easy to use.

..the list goes on. It's simply a powerful messaging system that lives up to it's expectations and then some.