Use Tables!

And we’re done. Somewhat.

The footer is now actually inside
the sidebar. This works fine, as far as I can tell. If you discover I’ve missed some pages, please let me know.

The logo has been
added.

The numbers behind the links have been disabled. It was too much of a pain to get them to display right, and caused all kinds of funny
quirks.

I still need to clean up the css, unfortunately…

So, I’ve hacked the wordpress default theme into looking like the stuff already on my site. It’s not entirely finished, but it works well enough for normal browsing. Things to do:

• Add the logo at the top of the sidebar
• Fix the php for the footer to be stuck in the sidebar, instead of abs-positioned, so the layout won’t go haywire when the height of the window is too small
• Figure out why ‘Valid XHTML’ messes up when resizing
• Generally clean up the stylesheet so it isn’t such an abominal mess of random adjustments anymore, and make it smaller in download size.
• Attempt to make the (number) additions to the categories go behind the links, instead of on a new line. This one’s tough, as the links are set to display: block and to fill up the <li> blocks to make the hover effect look nice. Maybe I can fix it with some positioning magic, because I’m fairly sure trying to make the <li> blocks light up on hover doesn’t work in IE. Incidentally, I have no idea whether this style works in Opera or Safari. If anyone could enlighten me about that, it’d be appreciated. Feel free to comment in that case .

… I’ll type it out.

So. The page you’re currently reading is served by ‘Gauntlet’, the name of my firewall box (my main box is called ‘archer’, hence the name of the subdomain). The name was derived from Dan Brown’s book Digital Fortress, where Gauntlet is a packet filterer used by the NSA to protect their ultra-secret database. Seeing as my firewall is a little less important, it could do with lesser specs.

Gauntlet runs on the following:

ASUS P2B motherboard
Pentium 2 350Mhz
256MB SDRAM
6.4 GB Quantum Fireball harddrive
6.5 GB Maxtor harddrive
2 generic RealTek-like network cards, one connected to my ISP, one to Archer

It currently runs Debian Sarge 3.1, with apache 2, php 4 and mysql 4 powering the webserver part. It has KDE installed in case I grow tired of ssh-ing to it (only accessible from the local network for now).
The firewall is done using iptables and shorewall, a simpler way of configuring said iptables. The box also runs a dns server with a cache, to make my lookups a bit faster, and a dhcp server to provide no-brain network access from my main box. Many thanks to the author of this tutorial, it helped a lot (though it did not explain setting up all the other crap that runs on this machine, nor my trouble with the ancient sucky SiS graphics card, nor that with MySQL doing anything but what I wanted it to do at first, nor with the different flavours of Apache 2 that Debian currently ships).

Currently I’m happy with the way it runs, it all seems smooth from here (though I guess the local network is a bit of an idealized way of looking at things). We’ll see what happens when I try to use p2p software or other stuff that might not like Gauntlet as much as I do .

So from the looks of it, I just succeeded in setting up WordPress on my old (new) firewall box. Some more info on that box as soon as I can find a decent utility to compose a summary of the box by itself, for now suffice it to say that it plays firewall, cvs-server and webserver at once, and my normal desktop hangs off a second NIC on the box (with a bit of help from a crossover cable).

I have one other thing to add: thanks to Samuel Sieb, I now know of the existence of WinSCP. It’s a windows client to connect to a machine using SFTP or SCP as desired. It’s very userfriendly, installation was smooth, and I transferred files without any trouble whatsoever. Which is great, of course.