Ants on the Melon
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A week or so before my trip to Virginia my mom called to say that she needed a new computer. Considering that her current computer was a 450 AMD with 192MB of RAM running Windows XP, I agreed that she needed something new. I really did not want to see her with another Windows computer, so I suggested that she take a look at the Apple Mac Mini. I also offered a few incentives:

• If she chose the Apple, I would help pay for it
• If she chose another Windows computer, she could not call me for help, but if she chose the Apple she could call me when she had questions

The second incentive was not to be a jerk to my mom, but simply the truth. I have no idea how to do anything on Windows, its been about 8 years since I last used Windows as my main desktop (6.5 on Linux and 1.5 on Apple). It’s much easier for me to answer questions for my mom and guide her through problems over the phone when she and I are both looking at the same type of system.

So after arriving in Richmond I met up with mom at the Short Pump Apple Store. After confirmation that they had everything we wanted in stock, we placed our order:

• The 1.25GHz Mac Mini
• An extra 256MB of RAM (512MB total)
• The Bluetooth/Airport combo
• A Bluetooth Apple Mouse, and
• A Bluetooth Apple Keyboard

The total came out at to $806, which seemed reasonable to me. So, we headed to Blackstone with the new toy and I began thinking about the networking at her house.

Flash back 4 years.

My mom and step-dad built a new house about 4 years ago, and when they were planning everything I suggested that they have CAT5 cable run through the house and into every room along with the phone lines. Even though they live in the country, they are just inside the range where DSL is available, so we wanted to share that connection throughout the house.

When I worked at Spire Network Services in New Orleans I was introduced to a project called Coyote Linux. Coyote Linux is a real nice little distribution that runs from a 3.5 floppy and provides routing, nat, dhcpd and several other services to your local network. When I moved back home to Virginia from New Orleans in August 2002 I dug up an old 486, popped two Netgear NICS in it, connected one to the DSL and the other to a 3Com hub, and put the machine in the bottom of the kitchen closest where the DSL connection terminated. Because Coyote runs from a floppy, it makes it very easy to make a read only environment. You basically configure everything the way you want, “backup” to the floppy, flip the “read-only” tab, and pop it in the disk drive. If the power ever goes out then the machine just boots right back up. At that point in time I had to make some customizations to the Coyote disk regarding the kernel modules for the NICs, and the documentation I wrote is still online.

So when we arrived in Blackstone with the Mac Mini I tried to hook it up to the existing network, but I ran into a few issues. I am not sure why, but for some reason I had a big problem with DHCP back in the day. I had actively disabled it on the Coyote machine when I set it up, and for another reason that I can’t remember, I chose weird sizes for the network range. The network was set to 192.168.2.0/29, and the hard coded DNS servers were apparently no longer online. Sigh. So, I messed with the Coyote machine for a while until I overwrote the disk with a non-working configuration. Double Sigh. At this point (10:30pm EDT after waking up at 4:30 CDT with 3 hours of sleep and taking 2 flights) I decided it would be a good time to retire the old 486. Plan B: I hopped in mom’s car, drove to Wal-Mart and picked up a Linksys wireless router for $50+. About 30 minutes later I had everything working and the Mini was online via its Airport card, Beautiful.

Another thing that is amazing is the Bluetooth integration. When I took the Mac Mini out of the box, the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked immediately, during the initial boot even. This sort of thing really impresses me.

And the best part of all is that I now have wireless access when I travel home.